May 6, 2025 • 9 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, for decades, Major League Baseball’s reserve clause bound players to their teams indefinitely, denying them the freedom to negotiate salaries or choose where to play. Curt Flood, a three-time All-Star and two-time World Series champion, decided to challenge that system, risking his career to fight for fairness. Despite facing racial discrimination and industry backlash, Flood’s stand reshaped the business of sports and helped usher in modern free agency. Columnist George Will tells the story.
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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're 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 Demaggio
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 his
(02:10):
what turned out to be late in 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
(02:32):
or release you, and there was no third option. Kirk
Flood said, there's something wrong with this because it denies
to a category of Americans of 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
(02:56):
from the Courthouse. 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
(03:18):
lived in a free state, he should be declared free.
The Supreme Court 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
(03:40):
shall have any rights that a white person is obligated
to respect. 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 field, which means he played
(04:02):
the biggest part of the outfield, which means as you
grow old, 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
(04:24):
it was nineteen twenty four, had a singularly bad day.
Oliver Wendell 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 Connors, which was preposterous.
(04:46):
The great sports writer Jim Murray of the Los Angeles
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 lost in nineteen seventy In nineteen seventy six,
there was a challenge mounted to the reserve clause. Who
(05:07):
was submitted to an arbiter. The arbiter says, yeah, the
reserve clause is 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,
(05:28):
who never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity, proved
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
one hundred and eighty degrees wrong. Competitive balance immediately began
to improve for lots of reasons. What kurt Flood did
(05:52):
was give players leverage. If you have no leverage, you
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
(06:13):
here about the labor theory of value, but even allowing
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
(06:37):
dread Scott Kurt Flood decision did was give the Major
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
(07:00):
with cable television and superstations such as TBS, Ted Turner
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
(07:22):
new television audiences, baseball became invaluable programming. You know, it
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.
(07:46):
They just do it in court cases, particularly in Supreme
Court cases. You want to look at American political philosophy,
look at a wall covered with Supreme Court reports. And
just as a political and governmental philosophy was contained in
the dread Scott decision, so was one contained in the
(08:06):
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
use a phrase coined by the late great Robert Nozick,
Harvard political philosopher. And so the national pastime was suddenly,
(08:30):
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,
even if it's called Major League Baseball.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
And a terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling
by her 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 in 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're 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 Demaggio
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 his
(02:10):
what turned out to be late in 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
(02:32):
or release you, and there was no third option. Kirk
Flood said, there's something wrong with this because it denies
to a category of Americans of 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
(02:56):
from the Courthouse. 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
(03:18):
lived in a free state, he should be declared free.
The Supreme Court 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
(03:40):
shall have any rights that a white person is obligated
to respect. 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 field, which means he played
(04:02):
the biggest part of the outfield, which means as you
grow old, 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
(04:24):
it was nineteen twenty four, had a singularly bad day.
Oliver Wendell 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 Connors, which was preposterous.
(04:46):
The great sports writer Jim Murray of the Los Angeles
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 lost in nineteen seventy In nineteen seventy six,
there was a challenge mounted to the reserve clause. Who
(05:07):
was submitted to an arbiter. The arbiter says, yeah, the
reserve clause is 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,
(05:28):
who never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity, proved
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
one hundred and eighty degrees wrong. Competitive balance immediately began
to improve for lots of reasons. What kurt Flood did
(05:52):
was give players leverage. If you have no leverage, you
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
(06:13):
here about the labor theory of value, but even allowing
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
(06:37):
dread Scott Kurt Flood decision did was give the Major
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
(07:00):
with cable television and superstations such as TBS, Ted Turner
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
(07:22):
new television audiences, baseball became invaluable programming. You know, it
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.
(07:46):
They just do it in court cases, particularly in Supreme
Court cases. You want to look at American political philosophy,
look at a wall covered with Supreme Court reports. And
just as a political and governmental philosophy was contained in
the dread Scott decision, so was one contained in the
(08:06):
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
use a phrase coined by the late great Robert Nozick,
Harvard political philosopher. And so the national pastime was suddenly,
(08:30):
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,
even if it's called Major League Baseball.
Speaker 1 (08:45):
And a terrific job on the production, editing and storytelling
by her 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 in Spikes, Kurt Flood Here
on our American Stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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