That Belongs to Me

“Something gonna happen to this man here.” When he heard that Curt Flood was going to sue baseball, says Jim Mudcat Grant, he worried about his St. Louis Cardinals teammate. “He ain’t never gonna play no more.” At the time, when Flood decided to fight a trade in 1969, no one anticipated how long the struggle would be or how painful the consequences. Still, as Flood said repeatedly in later years, he would do it again. “In slavery they shipped you from one plantation to another. In baseball, they do the same thing,” he observed. “They ship you from one franchise to another according to the whims of 24 millionaires. You say, ‘Curt Flood, you’re making money, you make $100,000 a year.’ Well, that’s not the point. The point is I don’t want anybody to own me. That belongs to me. “

Flood’s case a hard one. As he well knew, baseball owners had long since argued and won in the Supreme Court, that their business was an “amusement” and so exempt from anti-trust laws (the first time was in 1922’s Federal Baseball Club v. National League). They had also convinced the players and the public that so many employees made so much money that the Reserve Clause in every standard contract was justified, that is, the rights to players were retained by teams, even after contracts expired. As The Curious Case of Curt Flood presents his story, the decision to fight the Reserve Clause meant not only that the center fielder was giving up his career—after winning seven Gold Glove Awards and batting .300 for six seasons with the Cardinals—but also, he was in conflict, with owners and frightened fellow players.

Flood took a longer view. Though his own case was lost in the Supreme Court—for a number of reasons, not least being the inefficacy of his lawyer, former Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg—it paved the way for the Major League Baseball Players Association to strike down the clause in a 1975 case, when arbitrator Pete Seitz affirmed that players (namely, pitchers Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally) could become free agents when their contracts expired.

The documentary, which premieres on HBO 13 July, argues that Flood’s case made the arbitration possible, and moreover, that he made clear the case’s moral grounds. If, as narrator Live Schreiber puts it, “The game followed its own moral compass,” Flood took it to them—legally and, as far as he was able, in the press, emphasizing that players being “owned by a team in perpetuity” was not only a matter of money, but was, more importantly, about civil rights. In this, he took a cue from his idol, Jackie Robinson.

Even so, he was unable to really players’ public support. Marvin Miller, then the head of the baseball players union, along with his assistant Dick Moss, helped to convince the players to pay the legal costs—which would be considerable—but other players did not show “solidarity,” or even, as Judy Pace Flood notes, come to the courthouse. Flood’s former roommate, the great pitcher Bob Gibson, admits that while he backed the idea of Curt’s fight, he was worried about “making a living.” He was behind Flood, he says, “But I was about 10 steps back, in case there was some fallout.”

The sense of isolation weighed heavily on Flood. Gibson also remembers that he’d wake up some late nights in their hotel room and find Flood already awake, smoking cigarette after cigarette. “Is that a person with something on their mind?” he asks now, “Absolutely. What was it? I don’t know.” The Curious Case suggests that Flood was troubled by both big pictures—say, the Jim Crow restrictions he encountered as a minor league player in Tampa, Florida, or the legal battle he had to wage to purchase a house in Oakland, CA—as well as his personal demons. He (like his mother Laura before him, notes his daughter Shelly), was an alcoholic. And he struggled with family obligations, ever behind on alimony and child support payments (his ex-wife sued him repeatedly), as well as basic questions of honesty (for years, he passed himself off as a painter, though it’s now unclear whether he was completing the works himself).

For all his troubles—the parts of his life that make his case “curious”—Flood was resolute about the court case. And for this, all baseball players can be grateful. It’s striking that HBO is premiering the film on the occasion of this year’s All-Star Game, in particular the all-Star Game in Phoenix. Flood would have understood the meaning of that location and of Bud Selig’s and MLB’s refusal to take an official stand against Bill 1070. His legacy argues for civil rights in all forms, always.