HE ALMOST HAD IT MADE
A Look at Curt Flood
I.
Looking at the list of players up for election by the Veterans Committee, no one interests me more than Curt Flood. Minnie Minoso is appealing for reasons greater than his game as well. Minoso was the first dark-skinned Latino to play in the majors, the first black ballplayer to play for either Chicago team. Further, Minoso was 28 before he got regular time in the bigs. Think about if Vladimir Guerrero or Alex Rodriguez hadn’t even played a full season yet.
While Minoso had a warm and gregarious personality, Curt Flood was a more striking, sardonic figure. “Curt Flood, [is] the brooding Othello his sport,” wrote Tom Boswell. Flood’s baseball accomplishments may not merit his selection, but his act of defiance against the owners and the reserve clause, have put him in the running. If not the Hall of Fame, then at least, the Hall of Chutzpah.
“Very few guys have ever had an appreciation for who he was,” said Frank Robinson. “A guy with a whole load of guts.”
Flood may not be a Hall of Famer, but he may be one of the most fascinating characters it has seen in the last 50 years. His importance can’t be denied, yet it has also been misconstrued. Flood has been immortalized by some, but more often ignored, and officially unrecognized.
Rob Neyer addressed the Flood issue last week:
“Flood is on the Veterans Committee ballot this year … and as a player Flood doesn’t have much of a case.
“In his New Historical Baseball Abstract Bill James rates Flood the 36th-greatest center fielder of all time. And Bill is a big Curt Flood fan. Curt Flood was about as good as Andy Van Slyke, and Clyde Milan, and Kenny Lofton.
“Yes, I know that Flood challenged the reserve clause, and he certainly deserves credit, along with a large measure of fame, for taking that risk (a risk that essentially killed his career). But it seems to me that Flood has gotten the credit and the fame that he deserves. If you don’t know who Curt Flood was now, you’re not going to know who he was even if he’s in the Hall.
“Curt Flood was one hell of a ballplayer, and one hell of a courageous man. But I wouldn’t put him in the Hall of Fame.”
For another opinion on Flood, here is what Bill James wrote about him in the updated “Historical Abstract”:
“By the Win Shares method, Flood rates as the best defensive outfielder in baseball history, per innings played. This claim comes with several caveats. Andruw Jones rates as far better than Flood, but that’s just on a few years worth of data, and he’ll look different with time…
“Flood, of course, rates higher than he probably ought to because he skipped the decline phase of his career. There are other guys who rate even with him in his prime years, like [Greg] Maddox and [Paul] Blair and the DiMaggios, but as they aged, their per-inning productivity naturally dropped. Flood was a great defensive outfielder; I don’t know that I would especially want to argue that he was the best who ever played.
“Did Curt Flood sacrifice his career to enable today’s baseball players to make millions of dollars a season? Read literally, absolutely not. A lot of people seem to forget: Curt Flood’s case ended, for the players, in a solid defeat. Curt Flood carried the banner for baseball players as they marched down the hallway to a doorway that never opened. In a literal sense, all Flood gave to baseball players was the certain knowledge that that door wouldn’t open.
“Of course, all nations honor patriots whose death do not lead directly to victory, and it is traditional for unions to honor the sacrifices of those who fight the good fight, regardless of their won-lost record. I just always notice this, that a lot of people actually seem to think that the Curt Flood case led directly to free agency. It’s a confusion of history, vaguely equivalent to thinking that Frederick Douglass wrote the Emancipation Proclamation or that the Axis Sally bombed Pearl Harbor.”
I’m not exactly sure why James is such a hard-ass Reactionary here. It’s not exactly Flood he’s objecting to but the perception of The Flood legacy; still, I think James’ objections are over-stated. Literally speaking, Flood’s case against baseball did not lead to free agency. Marvin Miller wrote, “Curt Flood didn’t actually change the game, though he was a positive force and an example for others who did.” But James is pissed that there is a popular notion that Flood did initiate free agency. He’s angry at the public’s need for manufactured (Liberal) heroes, at the expense of the facts.
I can appreciate that, but isn’t it more compelling to look at Flood as one of the more complicated and fascinating cases of the modern era?
James says that Flood carried the banner for ball players down a hallway that never opened, but what does that mean? That literally speaking the reserve clause was not overturned on the grounds that Flood argued?
Marvin Miller, in his caustic, and often bitter autobiography, “A Whole Different Ballgame” describes the reaction of Flood v. Kuhn.
“I must also point out that Justice Thurgood Marshall, in a separate dissenting opinion, correctly pointed out that if the Supreme Court had decided to overrule the 1922 and Toolson decisions (and thus subject baseball to antitrust regulation), that wouldn’t automatically mean that Flood would win his case. Flood was suing on the basis that his treatment by baseball was a violation of antitrust laws, so first he had to establish that baseball was covered by antitrust laws, and only then would it become necessary to establish how baseball violated those laws. To show that what baseball did to Flood was in violation of the law would have been the easy part.”
Neyer contends that James is a big fan of Flood’s, so maybe he doth protest too much because Flood is one of his favorites; we always rip the ones we love. Ultimately of course, the reserve system was eradicated, though it had much more to do with Miller’s ability to win binding arbitration with Major League Baseball, than with Flood’s court case. The players achieved free agency, even if it didn’t co-inside with a victory for Curt Flood.
Flood’s defeat wasn’t as black and white as James suggests. The Supreme Court ruled against Flood 5-3 on June 6, 1972. But, according to Marvin Miller:
“Chief Justice Warren Burger recognized the error of baseball’s exemption, but wrote that the lives of too many people would be affected by a reversal of the error. I don’t think I’ve ever read such criticism of a majority decision of the court by the very justices who formed the majority. The majority described their decision as an ‘aberration’ and an ‘anomaly.’ Their criticism was correct, but their decision was, unfortunately wrong…The Washington Post described the decision aptly when it noted that ‘tradition had once more won out over logic.’
“I think it is worth taking a look at the dissenters on that Supreme Court. Two of the justices, William O. Douglas and William Brennan, felt that baseball’s judicial exemption from antitrust laws was wrong. In perhaps the most strongly worded statement connected with the case, they wrote, ‘Were we considering the question of baseball for the first time on a “clean slate,” we would hold it to be subject to federal antitrust regulations….’ They added that the ‘unbroken silence of Congress should not prevent us from correcting our own mistakes.’
“The efforts of Curt Flood and the Players Association were not wholly lost. First of all, we presented a good case in the trial court. The arguments against the reserve clause had never before been made so lucidly or so forcefully. Much more important—what Flood v. Kuhn really accomplished—was, in the much-used phrase of the 1960’s, raising the consciousness of everyone involved with baseball: the writers, the fans, the players—and perhaps even some of the owners…
“Many outside of the immediate power structure of baseball did begin to understand that the reserve system was wrong and that baseball as we know it might not vanish if it were abolished or drastically reformed…
“What did we do wrong? For one thing, the players themselves could have taken a more visible and active part in the trail…It was foolish to overlook the media appeal of big-name athletes. They could have been seen attending the trail, going in and out of the courthouse. That, I think, would have given the Players Association more of a human look to the public and shown that ballplayers were capable of demonstrating courage and solidarity off the field as well as on.”
“If I had 600 players behind me there would be no reserve clause,” Flood told the Associated Press in 1973.
Miller continued, “Why didn’t I encourage it? Well, for one thing the trail was held during the season, and I was reluctant to urge players to do anything that would distract them their jobs. For another, it was in the back of my mind that a great many marginal players might be the targets of owner revenge if Flood lost: A utility infielder who was active in the union and made a public show of support for Flood might find himself losing a job to a utility infielder who wasn’t active in the union. Union reps had a tough time as it was; they tended to be traded more often than players who were less active in the union.
“But there was little element of risk to the major stars, and they were the ones we needed most. To my knowledge, not one of them attended a single session of the trail. This was as much my fault as the players’…To be honest, I wasn’t as certain of the unity and solidarity of the Association then as I became a few years later. By the time Flood v. Kuhn came to trail in 1970 I had been executive director only four years, and we had not been tested by our first strike. We had been unified to an extent by the players’ refusal to sign contracts in the winter of 1968-69, and the players had remained firm through successful negotiations on both the pension plan and the first collective bargaining agreement. But we were still feeling our way as an organization; for instance, I think it would have been different in 1973, after the players had stuck together during the 1972 strike.
“That was undoubtedly a failure of leadership—my leadership. And it was yet another example demonstrating that players, like other people without leadership, always seem to fail to act in their own best interests. Fear aside, it must be remembered that players are profoundly affected by the press, and one can’t minimize the impact of the media working in conjunction with the owners, hammering away on the theme that without the reserve clause, baseball will fall. Flood’s suit was painted as an attempt to undermine the entire sport.
“It was also true that many players simply didn’t care. They may have wanted Flood to win, but they felt that they had their careers to be concerned with, and that was that.”
II.
Tom Boswell offered a poignant look at Flood in an article he wrote about the 1971 Washington Senators (from “How Life Imitates the World Series”):
“For Curt Flood, nothing is more painful than thinking back to April 1971. It is like asking the survivor of a shipwreck to recount his weeks adrift in a lifeboat.
‘Pressure,’ he said softly. ‘Pressure and tension…that’s what I remember. It was tough. I had been out of the game for over a year because of my lawsuit against baseball and the reserve clause. That spring was a big year for me, the first chance I’d had to play.
‘I knew all along that those few weeks were the time that was going to decide whatever was going to happen to me right down to this moment, actually,’ said Flood.
“Flood, dressed in black that spring, was a solitary Hamlet-like figure–one slender, rusty, center fielder standing against a century of baseball tradition. Not one other player in baseball took his side. Like a leper, he was not vilified, simply avoided.
“Flood only returned to baseball from Denmark because owner Robert Short’s contract offer of $110,000—half of it in advance–offered some hope of keeping his head above water financially.
“But, two weeks after that Opening Day, Flood had given up hope. His court case had suffered another defeat and would have to be appealed to the Supreme Court–more expense. His wife was seeking support for their five children—an expense he could no longer meet. And his batting average had sunk below .200. His spirits were far lower.
“Flood fled to Madrid, later tended bar for more than a year on the island of Majorca.
‘After I went back to Europe, I had plenty of time over the years to think about whether I gave up on my comeback too soon, ‘ Flood says now. ‘I’m sure I was right. Those young kids were running all over me.’
“Now, Flood, born in 1938, looks older than his years. He is frequently on the defensive, as though questioners were trying to catch him in some innocent mistake to make him look like a fool.
“During the 1979 season, he returned to the baseball scene briefly as a radio color announcer for the Oakland A’s—a bizarre connection since Charlie Finely is the No. 1 victim of the free-agent system that Flood helped create.
‘You seldom see a man’s basic character change, especially a strong character like Flood, a genuinely thoughtful rebel,’ said [Mike] Epstein. ‘But when you see Curt Flood today, you see a man who has been tied to the mast and has taken one lash too many.’
“That is as close to a candid comment on Flood as anyone on the baseball scene is likely to make. His continued financial precariousness, in an age of free-agent millionaires, is a bitter irony that cuts several ways.
“Despite all his suffering for his convictions, Flood at least has the solace of seeing that his ideal of justice triumphed–although he speaks very softly on that subject, too.
‘I believe that free agents have helped the game,’ he said. ‘It was the only equitable thing, that everyone get a fair share. Someplace along the line in baseball history, the people on the field, the actual entertainers, had to be included in the picture on a fair basis.'”
III.
The lawsuit against the baseball is the pinnacle of Flood’s career and his life, but it isn’t the only thing that contributed to Flood being a tortured soul. To view him as a mere victim would be shallow, and belittling. He had a dark, messy complicated life. Flood was a husband with 5 children, but a playboy, jock too. In his autobiography, “The Way It Is” (written with Dick Carter) Flood gives much more lip service to the playboy lifestyle than his wife or his experience as a father. I can only imagine he paid a price for that. He was a ladies man, smoked, drank and lived life hard; he eventually lost his marriage and family.
But he was also thoughtful, intelligent, creative, and willful. The youngest of six kids, Flood was raised in the tough section of Oakland during the post war years. “We were not poor, but we had nothing,” Flood wrote. “That is, we ate at regular intervals, but not much. We were not ragged. Both parents lived at home. In the conventially squalid West Oakland ghetto where I grew up, most other households seemed worse off.
“To achieve these triumphs of stability, my parents held no fewer than four underpaid jobs at a time,” continued Flood. “By day, my father was a hospital menial. At night, he moonlighted at the same employment. My mother was also a full-time hospital worker. In the evenings she attended to her own cooking and sewing and cleaning and frugal shopping, and tried to make sense of her children’s conflicting reports about the accomplishments, accidents, broken promises, arguments and threats of the day.”
The Flood children all showed an aptitude for drawing. Flood explained that his father “spent more on sketchpads than on Christmas trees. All the kids could draw. Carl and I even seemed to have the makings of artists. It rewarded the parents in their comings and goings, their interminable labors, to see three or four of us sprawled on the living room floor, engrossed in a pastime so remote from the meanness of the streets.”
If Curt’s talent set him apart, his age worked against him. Sometimes the baby of the family is pampered and gets all the love, and other times they are ignored and have to fight extra hard to get noticed at all.
“Because we were without direct parental supervision most of the time, our affairs were governed by a pecking order in which size and seniority ruled. As undisputed occupant of the lowest position on the totem pole, I amassed a huge inventory of grievances at an early age.
Everybody else came first. Not only that, but they seemed to get more. Fury availed me nothing. I was les than convinced that anyone loved me…I am a young thirty-two,” wrote Flood in 1971, “but I was an old, old eight.”
The young Flood also proved to be a gifted athlete. “When I was nine, I became the catcher for Junior’s Sweet Shop, in a police-sponsored midget league. Carl was the pitcher. The coach was George Powles, a white man who later became famous for having developed a phenomenal number of outstanding athletes, most of them black. Among the major-league baseball players coached and encouraged by George at McCylymonds High School or on his various sandlot and semiprofessional teams were Frank Robinson, Vada Pinson, Billy Martin, Joe Morgan…He also helped the basketball super star Bill Russell…
“If I now see whites as human beings of variable worth rather than as stereotypes, it is because of a process than began with George Powles…The beauty of George was that you did not have to adulterate your blackness to win his confidence and approval. He neither preached nor patronized. He emitted none of the smog of the do-gooder embarked on a salvage operation. After the games, he would bring the whole gang of ragamuffins to his pleasant home (a palace!) to plunder his wife’s refrigerator. He recently expressed astonishment when somebody told him that I remembered those visits as high points of my childhood. He protested that I had just been one of a crowd of kids and that there had been nothing extraordinary about the doings and that no fuss had been made over me because of my special talents. On reflection, he allowed that ice cream, cookies and comfortable furniture might have made an impression of me. But this had not been noticeable at the time. I was a cool cat.”
But nothing Flood experienced growing up in the relatively benign racial climate of Northern California* prepared him for the humiliation and degradation he was to experience playing in the South. Flood’s minor league experience in the mid 1950’s was atypical: brutal, unforgiving, and lonely.
Frank Robinson told Mark Kram last summer, “You really had to endure and overcome. What I remember is that it was a hard, hard grind, and you had to have the strength to handle it or you would not survive. I know it was prepared Flood to stand up for himself because I know how it prepared me.”
Flood wrote, “What had started as a chance to test my baseball ability in a professional setting had become an obligation to measure myself as a man. As such, it was a matter of life and death. These brutes were trying to destroy me. If they could make me collapse and quit, it would verify their preconceptions. And it would wreck my life.
During the early weeks of the season, I used to break into tears as soon as I reached the safety of my room. I felt too young for the ordeal. I wanted to be home. I wanted to talk to someone. I wanted to be free of these animals whose fifty-cent bleacher ticket was a license to curse my color and deny my humanity. I wanted to be free of the imbeciles on the ball team…
My teammates despised and rejected me as subhuman. I gladly would have sent them all to hell. More than once during that horrible season (1956, North Carolina), I was tempted to strike out so that our cracker pitcher would lose another game. More than once, I almost threw the ball away or dropped a fly ball for the same vengeful purpose.
If I did not sabotage the team (and I never did), it was only because I had been playing baseball too long and too well to discredit myself. And I was too black. Pride was my resource. I solved my problem by playing my guts out. I ran myself down to less than 135 pounds in the blistering heat. I completely wiped out that peckerwood league. I led it in everything but home runs—although I hit 29…The better I did, the tougher I got. I no longer wept in my room.
Toward midseason, when I had established myself as a star, I attended to another matter of importance. During the pregame practice one evening, a little black kid jumped onto the field, grabbed a loose ball, and climbed back into the stands. One of our lint-head pitchers screamed, ‘Hey you black nigger, come back with that ball!’ Then he jumped into the stands, took the ball from the child and returned to the field, flushed with triumph. I was waiting for him
‘Don’t use that word around me,’ I said. ‘You owe me more respect than that. White kids steal baseballs all the time without interference, you wool-hat son-of-a-bitch. If you ever come near me again you’ll be sorry.’
IV.
Flood was sharp and cool. He embodied the sense of cool that is associated with Miles Davis, and the jazz musicians of an earlier generation. Expressing his rage and contempt through a detached, calculated cool. Flood was part of the 60’s generation, and as his success grew, so did his willingness to speak his mind. He was not alone of course, playing alongside Bill White, and Bob Gibson and Lou Brock on the great Cardinal teams of that era. I don’t think he was especially political until the decade drew to a close, and well, it would have been tough for an introspective and aware guy like Flood to resist becoming politicized.
Flood was greatly influenced by an older white couple he was introduced to by his high school art teacher in 1962. Jim and Marian Jorgensen were warmly disposed, dusty-old radicals who took had an instant rapport with the young ballplayer.
Flood wrote, “I was a cool customer of twenty-four, mentally quick, passably articulate, culturally and politically underdeveloped, veneered with a brittle gloss of big-league savvy. My attitudes inclined to the gutter-tough and the dugout-cynical. An inner confidence had propelled me over many obstacles to a highly perishable success. I had no idea where this confidence might take me next, or even whether it would remain serviceable. I had begun to realize that it derived from a delicately balanced, ruthlessly controlled arrangement of raw nerves, the vulnerability of which was becoming more evident under the stress of a discordant marriage. That the Jorgensen’s found me likable moved me, as it should have. I needed them more than I knew. I needed new dimensions more than I knew. On that evening, these needs may have expressed themselves as an open-minded, open-hearted eagerness. Marian remembers eagerness as part of it.
“John Jorgensen was thirty-five years older than I,” and had the “directness of a man who had discovered years earlier that he could face the world without fear and, therefore, without guile,” wrote Flood. “Johnny Jorgensen was a master craftsman, owner of an industrial engraving plant. He was an indifferent businessman, unwilling to waste energy on the techniques of management. And acknowledged genius in the painstaking art of designing and engraving industrial stamping dies, he made an ample living that way and then rushed home to Marian, where the meaning was.”
Flood would eventually go into business with Jorgensen; he learned how to make engravings himself. “Johnny and Marian and I were closer than friends, freer and easier than family…My mother and father and sisters and brothers often joined us there and so did numerous ballplayers. The place was a sanctuary of warm fellowship, a joy and comfort beyond description.”
In late 1966, Jorgensen was horrifically murdered in his plant one night. Flood, in Los Angeles at the time, was briefly considered a suspect. “After bugging our phones and following us around for two weeks, the police finally caught the murderer. He was a black adolescent who had gone on a psychotic rampage after being dismissed from a job. He had never seen Johnny until the moment he stumbled into the plant and lashed out in mindless fury. Then sent him to an institution for the criminally insane.”
Flood, who had lived with the Jorgensen’s when he left his marriage fell apart, persuaded Marion to move to St. Louis with him, and she became his defacto secretary, business manager, care-taker.
Though Flood doesn’t discuss his wife and children much at all, he does write about his older brother, Carl. Carl, a more talented artist, and a better jock, than his younger brother, had taken the wrong path in life. He couldn’t resist the street life, hanging with thugs, or falling prey to the clutches of heroin. Carl ended up in prison for armed robbery.
Carl Flood is the ideal coulda-been-a-contender character. In prison he taught himself 4 languages, won chess tournaments, and awards for his abstract painting. Marion Jorgensen didn’t have enough of challenge taking care of Curt Flood, so she became Carl Flood’s guardian angel too, devoting tireless energy to reducing his sentence, trying to save him too.
V.
What makes Flood appealing to Romantics and Liberals alike is the simple fact that he fought the Law and the Law won. Sometimes, we can look back over the events of a man’s life and project or fantasize that everything led to one crucial event. This is easy with Flood, and his fight against the reserve clause, regardless of whether he did it consciously or not.
Flood was the right man at the right time. Or the right man at the wrong time, whichever you’d prefer. In Ken Burns’ “Baseball”, Flood said, “I am a child of the sixties.” Flood was aware that by taking on MLB his career was all but over. I also think he understood that he was the most prominent baseball player to ever challenge the reserve system, and that it was his duty to act accordingly.
The themes of anger and isolation are conveyed so powerfully with Flood. Having to live with consequences of his righteous stand, and dealing with the anger the results must have stoked is ripe with dramatic potential. No wonder he evokes allusions to Shakespeare.
In an excellent profile in the Philadelphia Daily News last August, Mark Kram interviewed Flood’s second-wife, Judy Pace-Flood, who said he did not die a bitter man.
“‘This is not Greek tragedy,’ she says. ‘Although some people would like to portray it as such. He had a giving heart.’
“Europe was a place where Flood always found a certain degree of tranquility. He had gone to Denmark instead of playing for the Phillies in 1970. When he was done with the Senators, he settled down on the Spanish island of Majorca in the sunny Mediterranean. There, Flood worked at his easel, played classical guitar and began writing a second part of his autobiography. [He apparently never finished it, either.]
According to Pace-Flood, ‘He loved it in Europe because it was so far removed from the problems that existed for a black man then in America. He was at peace there.”
I don’t know that Curt Flood truly belongs in the Hall of Fame, even though his decision to sacrifice an all-star career for a collective good is one of the Hall of Fame acts in baseball history. It is a true shame that Flood is virtually ignored by the Players Union, and too-often misconstrued, or flat-out ignored by the general public.
I do feel strongly about this: Curt Flood is one of the few ballplayers who is more compelling off the field than on it. His life would make a great movie.
*
“We saw few whites. None was a bearer of joy. The landlord, storekeeper, cop, teacher, meter reader and the various bill collectors were all enforcers. We accepted their presence, much as a Seminole accepts alligators. They were hazards too familiar for urgent comment. We were so accustomed to things as they were that we seldom speculated about how things out to have been. When a teacher announced from his remote eminence that the United States was the champion of liberty and the benefactor world mankind, we scarcely reacted. Such prattle was simply part of the usual distant done.
“Politically sophisticated blacks were trying during the late forties and early fifties to organize the ghetto’s paralyzed indignation, but their activities did not penetrate to our level. That sort of thing came much later. I recall little discussion and no excitement in 1954, when the Supreme Court supposedly outlawed the segregation of schools. By then I was sixteen. I think that I would have been aware of local reaction, had there been much. Just as the ghetto warps its victims, it also insulates and lulls them.”
Curt Flood, from “The Way It Is”
