Two weeks shy of the All-Star break, all over baseball, teams are deciding if it is time to start buying or selling. With baseball's July 31 nonwaiver trade deadline a little more than a month away, if you are in the thick of a division race, or have reasonable expectations on the postseason, you are trying to determine whether you should leap into the market like a frenzied shopper at a close-out sale.
If you're a team on the fringes of playoff irrelevance, or in an ugly season-long swoon that has left you on the side of the road like totaled baseball wreckage, you're thinking about that trade deadline, too. But you're on the dark side of the marketplace, a potential seller trying to figure out if there's anything worth saving. Do you sell off your best players like so many spare parts? Can you get some sort of early foothold on the future by ditching your most valuable assets?
These are things we take for granted in baseball these days. We regard the business of trading players from team to team as a simple and inoffensive part of American sports.
History tells us a different story. History tells us that there was a man who decided that the act of trading a professional athlete from one team to another should carry with it a simple act of human dignity.
Curt Flood decided no man should be traded without his consent.
That does not sound so revolutionary today. But in 1969 before anyone had heard of the phrase "free agency," when baseball's restrictive reserve clause gave baseball owners complete control of a player for his entire professional career, it was beyond revolutionary. Nearly 42 years ago, the former three-time All-Star outfielder for the Cardinals shook up the baseball establishment by the simple act of refusing to recognize the team's right to trade him without his approval.
It was Oct. 7, 1969 and Flood was part of a six-player deal that sent him and catcher Tim McCarver to Philadelphia for All-Star outfielder Dick Allen. But when Flood refused to go to the Phillies and met with Marvin Miller, the head of the players' association and told him he wanted to fight baseball's reserve clause in the federal courts, Miller thought he was crazy.
"I told him a case like this will take years," said Miller in an HBO documentary called "The Curious Case of Curt Flood." "I wanted Curt to understand that a) this was no simple matter, and b) it was a million-to-one shot in my opinion."
Flood didn't care what the odds were. All he knew was there was something morally wrong with baseball's rules that prevented a man from his own professional freedom to choose where he wanted to live, work and play. A few months later, he filed a federal lawsuit to challenge baseball's reserve clause, appealing it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Flood ultimately lost the case, ruined his career and destroyed his personal life, but his courageous sacrifice led to an eventual upheaval of baseball's indentured servitude, and five years later the reserve clause was eliminated and the age of free agency in baseball was born.
Tonight at the Missouri History Museum, HBO premieres "The Curious Case of Curt Flood" before a local audience; its network premiere will be July 13. It seems so perfect that we in St. Louis get to see the film before the rest of the world since another Cardinals star, Albert Pujols, is on the verge of enjoying the fruits of Flood's ultimate career sacrifice.
When Flood left the game in 1971, he was making the princely sum of $110,000 a year. Forty years later, Pujols will go on the free agent marketplace this winter with expectations of collecting one of the richest contracts in baseball history. Even though he is currently on the disabled list with a broken wrist, the three-time National League most valuable player will probably command an annual salary expected to top $20 million.
"Injury or no injury, I don't think there's anything for Albert to worry about," baseball's true all-time home run king, Hank Aaron, told me a few days ago. "He's going to get his money no matter what. I know a lot of people say, 'Oh boy, these guys are getting a lot of money.' But I don't know of one person who thinks they're going to the ballpark to see the owner. Everybody goes out there to see Pujols play. So why shouldn't he get paid? If an actor can get that much money, why not a ballplayer? I'm not taking anything away from the actors. But they get stand-ins to do their stunts for them. No one is standing in for Albert."
But there was someone who stood up for Pujols and generations of the millionaires who were created as a result of Curt Flood's courage. He played on two Cardinals World Series championship teams (1964 and '67), won seven Gold Glove Awards, batted over .300 six times and finished with a career .293 average. Yet at 31 years old and in his career prime, he essentially gave it all away to fight the baseball establishment.
The HBO documentary does a thorough job of detailing the sort of personal and professional ruin Flood suffered as a result of challenging baseball's reserve system. Regardless of how you might feel today about the sort of salaries that modern professional athletes command, that should not detract from the significant role that Curt Flood played in tilting the economic balance of power from the feudal advantage the owners had in the late 1960s to the more even distribution today.
In my mind, baseball has never done nearly enough to give Flood his historical due. At the 2009 All-Star Game here, when the league could have easily honored him as part of the Cardinal-centric festivities, the one player whose contributions to the game were noticeably absent was Flood. In the sixth inning of the game, the big scoreboard in center field at Busch Stadium kept rolling the slow-motion highlights of so many past and present Cardinals heroes. There was nothing that hailed what Flood meant to this franchise or baseball as a whole.
They didn't recognize his contributions as the best center fielder in franchise history, which was sad. But the failure to acknowledge his contribution as one of the game's ultimate pioneers was and still is downright shameful.
"Every player in every sport owes a debt of gratitude to Curt Flood," said HBO Sports president and executive producer Ross Greenburg. "His life story is a very complex character study.... He is one of the giants in the history of sports, but has largely been forgotten."
