by Brad Snyder
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Acknowledgements
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
A PLUME BOOK A WELL-PAID SLAVE
BRAD SNYDER’s previous book, Beyond the Shadow of the Senators, won the Robert Peterson Recognition Award from the Society of American Baseball Research (SABR) and was named one of Booklist’s Top Ten African American Nonfiction Titles of 2003. Both Beyond the Shadow of the Senators and A Well-Paid Slave were finalists for SABR’s Seymour Medal, Spitball magazine’s Casey Award, and Elysian Fields Quarterly’s Dave Moore Award. A graduate of Duke University and Yale Law School, Snyder has written for numerous publications, including the Baltimore Sun, the Washington Post, the St. Petersburg Times, and the Yale Law Journal. He is a lawyer and a full-time writer living in Washington, D.C. Visit www.wellpaidslave.com.
Praise for A Well-Paid Slave The Washington Post Best Non-Fiction Books of 2006 Selection The New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
“Much as Flood sacrificed money for principle, Snyder left a legal career to undertake this project without a publisher. Anyone with a sociological interest in American sport should be glad he did. Writing with dispatch and grace, he places Flood’s challenge to baseball squarely where it belongs, as the final radical act of the 1960s civil rights movement.” —The Washington Post
“In A Well-Paid Slave, Brad Snyder weaves together a sympathetic biography of Flood and a lucid, meticulously detailed analysis of his lawsuit.”
—The Baltimore Sun
“A Well-Paid Slave is . . . a deeply researched and revealing portrait of Flood the man. . . . Further studies of Flood and his legacy may come along, but this one will very likely stand as definitive, the standard against which others must be measured. Snyder has wrought something worthy of the daunting convolution of his subject matter. Vastly more substantial than ordinary jock fare, this book should appeal to the serious reader of legal and/or general American history who has little knowledge or interest in baseball per se. It’s that good.”
—The Hardball Times
“An extraordinarily rich tale of a conflicted man who made a difference in the world. Flood is the man who took on the baseball structure and shook it to its core. He did for ballplayers’ economic rights what Jackie Robinson did for their human rights.” —Ventura County Star
“Why would a man give away a career that is the dream of millions of men? To change the game that he loved. Brad Snyder shows how and why Curt Flood had a greater impact on baseball than any other player of our time. It’s a wonderful tale.” —Richard Ben Cramer, author of Joe DiMaggio
ALSO BY BRAD SNYDER
Beyond the Shadow of the Senators: The Untold Story of the Homestead Grays and the Integration of Baseball
PLUME
Published by Penguin Group
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Published by Plume, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Previously published in a Viking edition.
First Plume Printing, October 2007
Copyright © Brad Snyder, 2006
All rights reserved
Illustration credits: p. 1 top, p. 6 top, p. 7 top, p. 11 top: National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, NY; p. 1 bottom, p. 2 top and bottom, p. 4 bottom, p. 11 bottom, p. 12 top and bottom, p. 13 bottom: The Sporting News/ZUMA; p. 3 top: Herb Scharfman/Sports Illustrated; p. 3 bottom: courtesy Marian Jorgensen; p. 4 top, p. 7 bottom, p. 9 top, p. 10 bottom, p. 13 top, p. 14 top, p. 15 bottom, p. 16 top: AP/Wide World Photos; p. 5 top: courtesy John Engels; p. 5 middle: courtesy Marge Brans; p. 5 bottom: courtesy Buddy Gilbert; p. 6 bottom, p. 8 bottom, p. 10 top: Corbis; p. 8 top, p. 15 top: Library of Congress; p. 9 bottom: courtesy Allan Zerman; p. 14 bottom: Fred Kaplan/Sports Illustrated; p. 16 bottom: William J. Clinton Presidential Library.
REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA
The Library of Congress has catalogued the Viking edition as follows:
Snyder, Brad.
A well-paid slave : Curt Flood’s fight for free agency in professional sports / Brad Snyder.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
eISBN : 978-1-4406-1901-4
1. Flood, Curt, 1938- 2. Baseball players—United States—Biography. 3. African American baseball
players—Biography. 4. Free agents (Sports)—United States. I. Title.
GV865.F45S69 2006
796.357092—dc22
[B] 2006046139
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To John Thompson and Ray Gavins
CHAPTER ONE
The phone in Curt Flood’s 19th-floor apartment rang at 4 a.m. on October 8, 1969. A sportswriter broke the news to him. A few hours later, another phone call made it official. The second conversation lasted no more than two minutes. The voice on the other end of the phone was so emotionless that it sounded almost like a prerecorded message.
“Hello, Curt?”
“Yes.”
“Jim Toomey, Curt. Curt, you’ve been traded to Philadelphia. You, McCarver, Hoerner, and Byron Browne. For Richie Allen, Cookie Rojas, and Jerry Johnson. Good luck, Curt.”
“Thanks. Thanks a lot.”
Flood was polite but thought he des
erved better. After 12 seasons of playing center field for the St. Louis Cardinals, he did not find out about the trade from the team’s owner or general manager. He heard about it from a sportswriter and then from Toomey, a man Flood later described as a “middle-echelon coffee drinker from the front office.” This was no way to treat Flood—the team’s co-captain, a three-time All-Star, a seven-time Gold Glove winner, and a major cog in the Cardinals’ World Series teams of 1964, 1967, and 1968.
It struck Flood as unfair that, like every professional baseball player at that time, he had no right to sign with another team or to test his value on the open market. In 1969, free agency was a foreign concept. The Cardinals could ship him off to Philadelphia because players belonged to their teams for life.
For 90 years, baseball players had been bought, sold, and traded like property. In 1879, the eight National League teams agreed to allow each team to “reserve” five players. This agreement forbade other National League teams from signing the reserved players and therefore prevented those players from changing teams based on their own free will. By the time the National League made peace with the upstart American League in 1903, reserving players was standard practice. Under the major league rules in 1969, each team reserved 40 players (25 on the major league roster plus 15 minor leaguers), all of whom were unable to sign with other teams.
The owners foisted the reserve system on the players by including in the standard player contract a provision referred to as the reserve clause. Paragraph 10(a) of the Uniform Player Contract said, “[T]he Club shall have the right . . . to renew this contract for a period of one year.” Under this clause, a team could automatically renew a player’s contract for another season at as little as 80 percent of the previous season’s salary. Read literally, the Uniform Player Contract was a one-year agreement plus a one-year option on a player’s services. But the players knew that they were not free to negotiate with other teams and their salaries could automatically be reduced by 20 percent for the following year. Before each season, therefore, they had no choice but to accept their teams’ final salary offers and to sign new contracts containing the same one-year option provision. A contract for one year became, in effect, a contract for life.
Flood’s trade from St. Louis to Philadelphia reawakened latent feelings of unfairness about the reserve system. His eventual decision to act on those feelings led to the first in a series of fights for free agency that altered the landscape of professional sports. Like his hero, Jackie Robinson, Flood had the courage to take on the baseball establishment. In 1947, Robinson started a racial revolution in sports by joining the Brooklyn Dodgers as the 20th century’s first African-American major leaguer. Nearly 25 years later, Flood started an economic revolution by refusing to join the Philadelphia Phillies. The 31-year-old Flood sacrificed his own career to change the system and to benefit future generations of professional athletes. Today’s athletes have some control over where they play in part because in 1969 Flood refused to continue being treated like hired help. But while Robinson’s jersey has been retired in every major league ballpark, few current players today know the name Curt Flood, and even fewer know about the sacrifices he made for them.
The morning of Toomey’s phone call, Flood woke up his two roommates—his oldest brother, Herman, and his friend and business manager, Marian Jorgensen—and swore to them that he was not going to Philadelphia. Like most proud ballplayers traded at the height of their careers, he threatened to retire.
Flood, however, was not like most ballplayers. He would joke around with his teammates one minute and stick his head in a book the next. He spoke in a soft, soothing voice and sounded like a college professor. He liked to draw, played classical piano by ear, and taught his best friend and road roommate, pitcher Bob Gibson, how to play the ukulele. Both Gibson and former Cardinals first baseman Bill White, Flood’s closest friends in baseball, had attended college. Flood, however, had missed out on the college experience and engaged in constant self-education. “When Bob and I were reading the Sporting News, Curt was reading novels,” White said. “We were listening to rock and blues, Curt was listening to classical music. We tried to play the harmonica, Curt had mastered the guitar.”
Flood’s quiet, artistic side obscured his lifelong battle against injustice. He had survived a childhood in a West Oakland ghetto, two minor league seasons in the Jim Crow South, and the racist attitudes of major league management. He persevered because of the courage Jackie Robinson had shown in 1947 and throughout his 10-year career with the Dodgers. After his playing days, Robinson inspired Flood to get involved in the civil rights movement. In 1961, Flood spoke out against segregated spring training camps in Florida. The next year, he spoke with Robinson at an NAACP rally in Mississippi. Flood integrated a white Bay Area neighborhood after the 1964 season with a court order and armed police protection. In 1969, he served as the president of Aunts and Uncles, a St. Louis organization that provided shoes and clothing to underprivileged children.
One of Flood’s favorite authors was James Baldwin, the bard of the black freedom struggle. In November 1962, Baldwin shocked readers of The New Yorker with his essay about race in America, The Fire Next Time. He wrote not about Martin Luther King’s nonviolent protest marches, but about Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam, not about southern segregation, but of northern racial discontent. He awakened people to the changing face of the civil rights movement. Baldwin’s prescient essay challenged “the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks . . . to end the racial nightmare . . . and change the history of the world.” He concluded by quoting an old slave song: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!”
Inspired by the civil rights movement, Flood, too, was thinking about the future and was not making idle threats. The reserve clause gave him two choices—play for Philadelphia or retire. Flood knew one thing: He was not going to Philadelphia.
A few hours after his phone call from Toomey, Flood called Cardinals general manager Bing Devine. Devine was in the middle of a press conference, so Flood left a message for Devine to call him.
At 9:30 a.m., Devine explained to the media why he had traded his two co-captains, Flood and McCarver. Flood was a $90,000-a-year singles hitter showing signs of decline. In 1969, his batting average had fallen 15 points to .285, and his throwing arm, never strong, had not fully recovered from an injury two years earlier. McCarver had a sore arm and could be replaced by rookie catcher Ted Simmons or Joe Torre, an All-Star and former catcher acquired the previous season. The press conference lasted an hour and a half. As soon as it was over, Devine called Flood.
Devine had wanted all the players notified of the trade before the press conference, but it was odd that he had not called Flood himself. Toomey was one of the least respected members of the Cardinals organization. Perhaps Devine could have softened the blow. Vaughan Palmore “Bing” Devine was as respected by the Cardinals players as Toomey was disrespected. Best known for his shrewd trades, Devine had dealt pitchers for many of the cornerstones of the Cardinals’ World Series teams of the 1960s: Sam Jones for Bill White; Vinegar Bend Mizell for second baseman Julian Javier; Don Cardwell (and shortstop Julio Gotay) for shortstop Dick Groat; Ernie Broglio for future Hall of Fame outfielder Lou Brock; and Willard Schmidt, Marty Kutyna, and Ted Wieand for a small but highly touted minor leaguer named Curtis Flood.
Devine had a soft spot in his heart for Flood, who was his first acquisition as general manager. On the last night of the 1957 winter meetingsin Colorado Springs, Devine and Cardinals manager Fred Hutchinson skipped the annual minor league dinner and talked late into the night with their Cincinnati Reds (or Redlegs, as they were officially known from 1953 to 1958) counterparts, Gabe Paul and Birdie Tebbetts. Hutchinson and Tebbetts had been battery mates and roommates with the 1940s-era Detroit Tigers. Hutchinson knew that Tebbetts and the Reds needed pitching and that Flood might be able to fill the Cardinals’ void in center field. The Cardinals’ manage
r had seen Flood play in a B game in spring training two years earlier and was impressed that a kid right out of high school could play with such confidence. Devine and Hutchinson recessed for 30 minutes and at 3 a.m. made the deal.
At the time, the Reds were forcing Flood to play winter ball in Venezuela. They wanted him to learn second base, his third position in three years. He had played center field and third base during two minor league seasons in the Jim Crow South. In Venezuela, his body was racked for a month by dysentery and sore from taking hundreds of ground balls off his chest. He was sitting on a stool in the Pastora Milkers clubhouse in Maracaibo when a long telegram arrived from Gabe Paul announcing that he had been traded. For 30 minutes, Flood stared at the telegram in shock. He vowed that he would not allow himself to suffer the indignity of being traded ever again.
Twelve years later, during a lengthy phone conversation with Devine, Flood made good on his promise. He told Devine that he was not going to report to Philadelphia. At age 31, he was going to retire. He was physically and mentally exhausted. He had spent the first 14 years of his adult life playing baseball. There had to be more to life than playing center field. Besides, he wanted to focus on his St. Louis-based photography and portrait-painting business.
Flood had also threatened to retire before the 1969 season when Toomey had insulted him by offering a $5,000 raise from $72,500 to $77,500. In 1968, Flood was one of six major leaguers to bat .300 or better and helped lead the Cardinals to their second consecutive World Series appearance. A Sports Illustrated cover that season proclaimed him “Baseball’s Best Centerfielder.” For years, he had been making leaping catches over outfield walls in ways no one had ever seen before. From 1965 to 1967, he set a National League record by handling 555 chances in 226 consecutive games without an error. The press predicted that he would be baseball’s first $100,000-a-year singles hitter, ahead of the Cincinnati Reds’ Pete Rose. In those days, $100,000 was the salary barrier that separated All-Stars from superstars. Flood believed that this was his last best chance to achieve his salary goal. “If you don’t pay me $100,000 to play baseball,” he told Devine before the 1969 season, “then I am going to retire.” He put it even more strongly in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat : “At this moment, I wouldn’t consider taking even $99,999.”
