We Ultimately Are Measured by What We Stand For

In 1958 I was a six-year-old boy hooked - like most six-year-old boys of my generation - on baseball, and my favorite team was the St. Louis Cardinals.

I grew up with the future Hall of Fame broadcasters Harry Cary and Jack Buck describing the game so vividly that my parent's couch may as well have been a box seat behind home plate.

That year the Cardinals acquired a young ballplayer named Curt Flood - Curtis Charles Flood.  Six years later, I sat in that same living room, probably on the same couch - we weren't in the habit of buying new furniture very often - listening to Cary and Buck describe the Cardinals beating the Yankees in the '64 World Series.

Patrolling center field was Curt Flood, by then one of the best outfielders in baseball and one of its most consistent hitters.  He stood alongside Bob Gibson and Lou Brock and Kenny Boyer and Bill White. Tim McCarver, too.

By the time I was sixteen the Cardinals had played in two more World Series and Flood was being celebrated as one of the greatest outfield of his era.  In fact, the August 19, l968 issue of Sports Illustrated called him baseball's best center-fielder.  He'd won seven Gold Gloves,  appeared in three All-Star games and owned two World Championship rings.  His career batting average hovered near .300.

Shortly before I turned eighteen Flood's career came to an abrupt end.  When the '69 season ended, the Cardinals traded him to Philadelphia. In January, 1970, Curt Flood - thirty-two-year-old Curt Flood - accused baseball of violating the thirteenth amendment barring slavery and involuntary servitude. He refused to report to the Phillies, a refusal that stunned the baseball world.

At the time, baseball was protected by something called the Reserve Clause, a legal exception that bound  players to the club with which they signed their first contract and allowed that club to transfer ownership at will. While it made for an orderly and predictable game for the owners, it ignored the American ideals of self-determination and freedom.

His action was met with disbelief by fans and fellow ballplayers.  He took an unpopular position. He lost his income. He lost a sure enshrinement in the Hall of Fame. He lost baseball.

If you don't know baseball or even if you do, you probably don't know much about Curt Flood, but you should.  He believed in  something more important than running down fly balls. He was willing to sacrifice his career to protect his principles; to stand for something.

The late Marvin Miller, then executive director of the player's union, said "At the time Curt Flood decided to challenge baseball's reserve system he was perhaps the sport's premier center fielder, and yet he chose to fight an injustice knowing that even if by some miracle he won, his career as a professional player would be over."

Flood's challenge made it's way to the U.S. Supreme Court where Major League Baseball won - that day.  Ultimately Flood's principled leadership led to free agency for as Miller put it "those who would come after him."

He drifted around after the Supreme Court ruling, first to a bar in Majorca, Spain where alcohol filled his days, before finally returning to his native Oakland, California where he operated a center for disadvantaged youth.

On January 20, 1997, twenty-seven years after he learned he was to be traded to Philadelphia, twenty-five years after the Supreme Court ruling and twenty-one years after free agency finally came to baseball, Curt Flood died.

At his funeral, baseball historian George Wills likened Flood's move against baseball to Rosa Parks refusing to move to the back of the bus in segregated Alabama. Curt Flood cast a shadow that covered not just baseball but America.

When I was forty two, I met Curt Flood.

I was attending a Cardinals' fantasy camp.  We were in Busch Stadium warming up. I was scheduled to play the first three innings in right field.  I looked into the dugout where I saw Flood sitting in the corner, cigarette in his right hand, his glove at his side.

I worked up the courage to ask if I could wear his glove when I went into the outfield that morning.  It was like asking Ansel Adams if you could use his camera to snap a photo of your dog or Michael Jordan if you could wear his sneakers to take the trash out.  Incredibly - to me - he said "Yes."

Flood's glove had the perfect pocket, dark from years of neatsfoot oil rubbed hard into the leather and round as the ball itself; saturated with the disappointment of hitters whose fly balls found the second stop on a round trip from the pitcher and back again.  Flood's glove was like a black hole in space.  It was where dreams of singles and doubles and triples went to die.

On that day, I was twelve-years-old again and summer was forever.  I was off the couch and in the field. Where were Cary and Buck when I needed them?

I caught one fly ball before my three innings were complete.  I slowly walked over to Flood, handed him the glove and asked if he would sign a baseball. He did. It sets on my bookcase today.

The next I heard of him was that he'd died.

Today, fifty-three years after the first time I heard Curt Flood's name, forty-seven years after listening to my first World Series on my parent's couch, forty-one years after Curt Flood refused a trade because of his principles, I am reminded that we ultimately are measured by what we stand for.