December 1, 2023 • 9 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, discrimination in all the basics of life could not deter Curt Flood from excellence in professional baseball - and ultimately bringing justice to the business of sports.
Support the show (https://www.ouramericanstories.com/donate)
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
And we returned to our American stories. Up next, an
unusual story about baseball and a baseball player you likely
haven't heard of named Kurt Flood. He was a three
time All Star back in the seventies, seven time Golden
Glove winner, but perhaps his most important contribution to professional
(00:30):
baseball had to do with sports contracts, how athletes are paid,
and how Major League Baseball is run. You were to
tell the story is author and commentator and one of
the best baseball writers of all time, George Will with
a story, Take it away, George.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Kurt Flood was for many, many seasons a premier outfielder,
most of the years of the Saint Louis Cardinals. He
grew up in Oakland in the Bay Area. We should say,
really with Frank Robinson and Ricky Henderson and Joe DiMaggio
and all kinds of great baseball players. Came out of
the rich baseball culture of the San Francisco Oakland Bay area,
(01:27):
and in the fifties he became a minor league player,
largely in the South, which is where most minor league
teams were, because most major league teams were in the North,
and he experienced the segregated South This was the South
before the public Accommodation section of the nineteen sixty four
Civil Rights Actress passed. He would travel with his teammates
(01:49):
on the team bus. They would go in the front
door of the restaurant to get food. He would be
handed food out the back door. He would believe himself
on the side of the road because he couldn't use
the restrooms. The Cardinals that he joined. Late in what
(02:10):
turned out to be leading his career with the Cardinals,
they decided to trade him to Philadelphia, and he said, no, actually,
I don't want to go to Philadelphia, and I'm going
to challenge the reserve clause, which had been integral to
baseball since time immemorial. All it said was that when
once you signed with the team, you were that team's
property until they decided to trade you or release you,
(02:32):
and there was no third option. Kurk Flood said, there's
something wrong with this because it denies to a category
of Americans of who I am a part what should
be the basic American right to negotiate the terms of
employment with the employer of your choice. It's rather nice
that he played in Saint Louis, not far from the Courthouse.
(03:00):
You can see it today right over the outfield fence
from the New Bush Stadium where the original dread Scott
case was settled. Dread Scott, of course, was the slave
who had lived for a while in a free state
and said that by virtue of having lived in a
free state, he should be declared free. The Supreme Court
(03:24):
in eighteen fifty seven tried to resolve America's racial dilemma
and again made an awful hash of it, brought on
the Civil War, and catalyzed the career of Abraham Lincoln
by saying, no African American has or ever shall have
any rights that a white person is obligated to respect.
(03:44):
Which is why when I wrote about Kurt Flood years
ago I referred to him as dread Scott. In Spikes,
he said, I won't go to Philadelphia, interrupted a lucrative
career at the peak of his prowess. He was such
a good center for you, which means he played the
biggest part of the outfield, which means as you grow old,
(04:05):
your capacity declined. So he was taking a risk with
the perishable asset of baseball talent. Anyway, he challenged the
reserve clause and took it all the way to the
Supreme Court, where he lost in part because, in large
part because Oliver Wendell Holmes and I think it was
nineteen twenty four, had a singularly bad day. Oliver Wendell
(04:28):
Holmes in a suit arising from a conflict between the
major leagues and the Federal League, which had grown up
to challenge the major leagues. Oliver Wendell Holmes said, well,
baseball is not a business in interstate commers, which was preposterous.
The great sports writer Jim Murray of the Los Angeles
(04:49):
Times once said, if baseball is not a business, than
Microsoft or General Motors is a sport. Anyway, he lost,
and a good bit of his career perished with his
legal case. He lost in nineteen seventy. In nineteen seventy six,
there was a challenge mounted to the reserve clause. It
was submitted to an arbiter. The arbiter says, yeah, the
(05:10):
reserve clause is uh illegal, and baseball changed instantly. As
soon as they struck down the reserve clause. The cassandras
came out of the woodwork, and there were loud lamentations
and rending of garments. Across the land as the baseball owners,
who never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity, proved
(05:32):
themselves wrong again. They said, this will mean that all
the good players will go to the rich teams, and
it will be the end of competitive balance. They were
a hundred and eighty degrees wrong. Competitive balance immediately began
to improve for lots of reasons. What kurt Flood did
was give players leverage. If you have no leverage, you
(05:56):
have no power to compel owners to share a larger
portion of the value that the players create. No one
that I know of has ever bought a ticket to
a ballpark to see an owner. They go to see
the players. Now, I don't want to sound too Marxist
here about the labor theory of value, but even allowing
(06:18):
for the fact that the entrepreneurship and the scouting and
all the rest and the marketing that comes into the
management side of baseball does create value, still most of
the values created by the players in collaboration with the
other apparatus of Major League baseball. And therefore, what the
dread Scott Kurt Flood decision did was give the Major
(06:41):
League baseball players leverage, just at a time, No one
could have seen this when something else was going to
happen that was going to make an enormous difference to salaries,
and that is the explosive growth of local broadcast revenues.
The era of baseball prosperity was just around the corner,
with cable television and superstations such as TBS, Ted Turner
(07:05):
broadcasting his Braves, the WGN broadcasting the Cubs, which WGN
for a while owned through the Tribune Company. So, through serendipity,
the explosive growth of money pouring into baseball because of
new television audiences, baseball became invaluable programming. You know, it
(07:32):
sometimes said that Americans don't do political philosophy because we've
never created the equivalent of Locke's Second Treatise on Government
or Hobbes Leviathan. Actually, Americans do political philosophy all the time.
They just do it in court cases, particularly in Supreme
Court cases. You want to look at American political philosophy,
look at the wall covered with Supreme Court reports. And
(07:57):
just as a political and governmental philosophy was contained in
the dread Scott decision, so was one contained in the
Kurt flood outcome, not in Holmes's decision, but in the outcome,
which was that we are a market society. We believe
in the freedom for capitalist acts between consenting adults, to
(08:20):
use a phrase coined by the late great Robert Nozick,
Harvard political philosopher. And so the national pastime was suddenly,
and to its great discomfort, but its ultimate prosperity was
made congruent with the national premise, which is that people
should be free to contract with one another in cooperative ventures,
(08:43):
even if it's called Major League Baseball.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling
by our own Monty Montgomery. Any special thanks to George
Will Again he's a political commentator, but we don't do
politics here on this show. But he is the author
of Men at Work, The Craft of base It may
be one of the best sports books you've ever read.
The story of free agency, the story of litigation and
(09:08):
are a great modern legal system, and so much more,
the story of Dred Scott and Spikes Kurt Flood. Here
on our American Stories
And we returned to our American stories. Up next, an
unusual story about baseball and a baseball player you likely
haven't heard of named Kurt Flood. He was a three
time All Star back in the seventies, seven time Golden
Glove winner, but perhaps his most important contribution to professional
(00:30):
baseball had to do with sports contracts, how athletes are paid,
and how Major League Baseball is run. You were to
tell the story is author and commentator and one of
the best baseball writers of all time, George Will with
a story, Take it away, George.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Kurt Flood was for many, many seasons a premier outfielder,
most of the years of the Saint Louis Cardinals. He
grew up in Oakland in the Bay Area. We should say,
really with Frank Robinson and Ricky Henderson and Joe DiMaggio
and all kinds of great baseball players. Came out of
the rich baseball culture of the San Francisco Oakland Bay area,
(01:27):
and in the fifties he became a minor league player,
largely in the South, which is where most minor league
teams were, because most major league teams were in the North,
and he experienced the segregated South This was the South
before the public Accommodation section of the nineteen sixty four
Civil Rights Actress passed. He would travel with his teammates
(01:49):
on the team bus. They would go in the front
door of the restaurant to get food. He would be
handed food out the back door. He would believe himself
on the side of the road because he couldn't use
the restrooms. The Cardinals that he joined. Late in what
(02:10):
turned out to be leading his career with the Cardinals,
they decided to trade him to Philadelphia, and he said, no, actually,
I don't want to go to Philadelphia, and I'm going
to challenge the reserve clause, which had been integral to
baseball since time immemorial. All it said was that when
once you signed with the team, you were that team's
property until they decided to trade you or release you,
(02:32):
and there was no third option. Kurk Flood said, there's
something wrong with this because it denies to a category
of Americans of who I am a part what should
be the basic American right to negotiate the terms of
employment with the employer of your choice. It's rather nice
that he played in Saint Louis, not far from the Courthouse.
(03:00):
You can see it today right over the outfield fence
from the New Bush Stadium where the original dread Scott
case was settled. Dread Scott, of course, was the slave
who had lived for a while in a free state
and said that by virtue of having lived in a
free state, he should be declared free. The Supreme Court
(03:24):
in eighteen fifty seven tried to resolve America's racial dilemma
and again made an awful hash of it, brought on
the Civil War, and catalyzed the career of Abraham Lincoln
by saying, no African American has or ever shall have
any rights that a white person is obligated to respect.
(03:44):
Which is why when I wrote about Kurt Flood years
ago I referred to him as dread Scott. In Spikes,
he said, I won't go to Philadelphia, interrupted a lucrative
career at the peak of his prowess. He was such
a good center for you, which means he played the
biggest part of the outfield, which means as you grow old,
(04:05):
your capacity declined. So he was taking a risk with
the perishable asset of baseball talent. Anyway, he challenged the
reserve clause and took it all the way to the
Supreme Court, where he lost in part because, in large
part because Oliver Wendell Holmes and I think it was
nineteen twenty four, had a singularly bad day. Oliver Wendell
(04:28):
Holmes in a suit arising from a conflict between the
major leagues and the Federal League, which had grown up
to challenge the major leagues. Oliver Wendell Holmes said, well,
baseball is not a business in interstate commers, which was preposterous.
The great sports writer Jim Murray of the Los Angeles
(04:49):
Times once said, if baseball is not a business, than
Microsoft or General Motors is a sport. Anyway, he lost,
and a good bit of his career perished with his
legal case. He lost in nineteen seventy. In nineteen seventy six,
there was a challenge mounted to the reserve clause. It
was submitted to an arbiter. The arbiter says, yeah, the
(05:10):
reserve clause is uh illegal, and baseball changed instantly. As
soon as they struck down the reserve clause. The cassandras
came out of the woodwork, and there were loud lamentations
and rending of garments. Across the land as the baseball owners,
who never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity, proved
(05:32):
themselves wrong again. They said, this will mean that all
the good players will go to the rich teams, and
it will be the end of competitive balance. They were
a hundred and eighty degrees wrong. Competitive balance immediately began
to improve for lots of reasons. What kurt Flood did
was give players leverage. If you have no leverage, you
(05:56):
have no power to compel owners to share a larger
portion of the value that the players create. No one
that I know of has ever bought a ticket to
a ballpark to see an owner. They go to see
the players. Now, I don't want to sound too Marxist
here about the labor theory of value, but even allowing
(06:18):
for the fact that the entrepreneurship and the scouting and
all the rest and the marketing that comes into the
management side of baseball does create value, still most of
the values created by the players in collaboration with the
other apparatus of Major League baseball. And therefore, what the
dread Scott Kurt Flood decision did was give the Major
(06:41):
League baseball players leverage, just at a time, No one
could have seen this when something else was going to
happen that was going to make an enormous difference to salaries,
and that is the explosive growth of local broadcast revenues.
The era of baseball prosperity was just around the corner,
with cable television and superstations such as TBS, Ted Turner
(07:05):
broadcasting his Braves, the WGN broadcasting the Cubs, which WGN
for a while owned through the Tribune Company. So, through serendipity,
the explosive growth of money pouring into baseball because of
new television audiences, baseball became invaluable programming. You know, it
(07:32):
sometimes said that Americans don't do political philosophy because we've
never created the equivalent of Locke's Second Treatise on Government
or Hobbes Leviathan. Actually, Americans do political philosophy all the time.
They just do it in court cases, particularly in Supreme
Court cases. You want to look at American political philosophy,
look at the wall covered with Supreme Court reports. And
(07:57):
just as a political and governmental philosophy was contained in
the dread Scott decision, so was one contained in the
Kurt flood outcome, not in Holmes's decision, but in the outcome,
which was that we are a market society. We believe
in the freedom for capitalist acts between consenting adults, to
(08:20):
use a phrase coined by the late great Robert Nozick,
Harvard political philosopher. And so the national pastime was suddenly,
and to its great discomfort, but its ultimate prosperity was
made congruent with the national premise, which is that people
should be free to contract with one another in cooperative ventures,
(08:43):
even if it's called Major League Baseball.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling
by our own Monty Montgomery. Any special thanks to George
Will Again he's a political commentator, but we don't do
politics here on this show. But he is the author
of Men at Work, The Craft of base It may
be one of the best sports books you've ever read.
The story of free agency, the story of litigation and
(09:08):
are a great modern legal system, and so much more,
the story of Dred Scott and Spikes Kurt Flood. Here
on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!