A Well-Paid Slave

by Brad Snyder

  In Baltimore, Flood downplayed the news of the Second Circuit’s decision. “We knew nothing would get resolved in the lower courts,” he said. “The Supreme Court chooses the cases it wants to hear. I just hope that ours will be one of them.” He sounded more like a lawyer and played less like a ballplayer.

  After a 2-for-8 start, Flood managed only a bunt single in three home games against the Yankees. His bat had slowed so much, Detroit Tigers chief scout Rick Ferrell noted, that the Yankees were “not even bothering to curve him.” Williams, who noticed that Flood hit only five balls in the air during his first 20 at-bats, thought that he had lost the snap in his swing.

  Flood’s fielding also betrayed him during the first game of a doubleheader against the Yankees on April 11. In the second inning, he failed to pick up Curt Blefary’s sinking line drive off Senators ace Dick Bosman. As the ball sliced to Flood’s right, he dived instead of getting in front of it, missing the ball by three feet. It rolled all the way to the 410-foot sign on the RFK Stadium wall for an inside-the-park home run. The Senators lost, 1-0.

  Williams did not yell at Flood; he humiliated him. At the end of the eighth inning, Flood grounded out for the fourth time that day. He trotted past first base, removed his batting helmet, and peered into the dugout for a teammate to bring him his cap, glove, and sunglasses. Williams sent Richie Scheinblum, a pinch hitter in the eighth, into right field and shifted Unser into center. He let Flood die out there on the field.

  Few players noticed the tension between Williams and Flood, but the way Williams pulled Flood for a defensive replacement was hard to miss. “You can’t handle a seven-time Gold Glove winner like Curt Flood like you handle a Tom McCraw,” Senators first baseman-outfielder Tom McCraw said. “You’ve got to give him a certain amount of respect, too.”

  Williams again said all the right things to the press after the game but privately seethed about being stuck with a no-hit, no-field center fielder. “Syphilitic Jesus Christ,” Williams told Shelby Whitfield, “that guy can’t play a lick.”

  Williams benched Flood only five games into the season. Flood’s fielding gaffe and 3-for-20 start (two of the three hits being bunt singles) gave him just cause. Flood sat out the second game of the doubleheader against the Yankees as well as the first of three home games against Boston. He made a pinch-running and a pinch-hitting appearance during the last two games. “I told him the way we were going we just couldn’t afford to carry him unless he gave us more hits,” Williams told the Boston Herald Traveler. Flood accepted the manager’s decision like a professional, cheering on his teammates from the dugout, but he refused to talk with members of the Boston press corps about his lack of playing time.

  As badly as he had played, Flood was a 12-year veteran and one of the team’s highest-paid players. He could have received more than five games to play his way back into shape. “I’m not sure Flood ever got a real square deal with Ted,” Whitfield said. “Williams felt all along that Flood was finished. . . . I knew that Flood wasn’t going to get a fair shake with Ted.”

  “Ted fucked him,” McLain said. No Senators player hated Williams more than McLain. The 1968 and 1969 American League Cy Young Award winner constantly clashed with Williams, challenging his manager’s authority. McLain insisted that Williams never wanted Flood on the team in the first place and never showed Flood the proper respect. “Ted’s main goal in life that season was to see Curt Flood fail and to see Denny McLain fail,” McLain said. “I told him that to his face in ’72.”

  According to McLain, Short was “sideways livid” that Flood was not in the lineup. The owner, however, was at a loss about what to do about the tension between Williams and Flood. “All Bob Short kept saying was, ‘I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do,’ ” McLain said. Short asked McLain: “Do you have any solutions to this problem?” McLain never offered any but knew it was not just going to go away. “There was a terrible strain,” McLain said.

  The benching gave Flood more time to think about his off-field problems. He had bigger things to worry about than Ted Williams pulling him for a defensive replacement and benching him. “That was the knife going in,” Maddox said. “You knew he wasn’t going to last much longer. That was the final nail in the coffin.”

  On the team’s first extended road trip, Flood roomed with Maddox during the first two games in Cleveland. Maddox tried to get Flood to join him for breakfast. Flood said he preferred room service. He refused to leave the room except for games. He drank all night after games, slept it off all morning and afternoon, and then got dressed just in time to get to the ballpark. After the games, he returned to his room and started the whole cycle again.

  One night in Cleveland, Richie Scheinblum saw Flood standing in the lobby of the hotel by himself. He saw how sad Flood looked and asked if there was anything he could do to help. They talked for five to ten minutes. “He felt like he had let a lot of people down,” Scheinblum said.

  Flood finally returned to the starting lineup April 17 against the Indians and responded after the four-game layoff with two nice catches and an infield single that scored the winning run. He also started the first game of the next day’s doubleheader.

  After those first two nights in Cleveland, Flood told Maddox: “I’m going to get a room for myself, just keep it quiet.” Flood roomed by himself when the team traveled to New York for two games at Yankee Stadium.

  Upon arriving in New York, he placed a courtesy phone call to Marvin Miller. Miller had heard reports from other players that Flood could not hit anymore. At one point in the conversation, Miller asked Flood how things were going. “Let’s talk about something else,” Flood said. Miller was not surprised that Flood was struggling to come back from a one-year layoff at age 33. At the time, Flood kept his off-field problems to himself. “He said he was fine,” Miller told the New York Daily News. “He always said that.” Flood said he would call Miller before he left New York but never did.

  Flood was beginning to come mentally unglued. Hate mail about the lawsuit had been pouring in with his return to the game. He recoiled at “freaky letters” like the one that began, “Dear Nigger . . . You’re a dead nigger.” He tried to ignore the threats in the mail, on the phone, and to his children.

  An incident in New York sent Flood over the edge. Arriving at his locker at Yankee Stadium for the team’s April 20 afternoon game, Flood discovered a black funeral wreath. This symbol of death was hanging where his uniform was supposed to be. Flood’s mind began to race. If someone could get to his locker, then someone could get to him. “Who- ever it was had to have some clout to drag this funeral wreath in and put it in my locker,” Flood said. “Scared the shit out of me.”

  How the wreath got there remains a mystery. Flood’s teammates insisted that they respected him too much to pull a stunt like that. McLain blamed the person he blamed for everything—Williams—or a member of his coaching staff. It could have been the same person who had written “Fuck you” on Maddox’s Angela Davis sticker. Flood kept the news of the black funeral wreath from the rest of his teammates, including the person he was supposed to room with in New York, Tom McCraw.

  As a veteran black player, McCraw could relate to Flood better than the 23-year-old Maddox. Like Maddox, McCraw admired Flood’s courage for standing up to the baseball establishment. On March 29, the Senators had acquired McCraw in a trade with the White Sox. An eight-year veteran, McCraw had been demanding a trade for several seasons so that he could prove that he was more than a part-time player. “My case bears out what Curt Flood is fighting about,” he said after coming over from Chicago.

  McCraw could see that the stress of Flood’s lawsuit was getting to him. “It’s hard to focus and concentrate when you’ve got such a big burden on your shoulders, that you’ve jumped out in the deep water here and everybody’s shooting at you,” he said, “especially the media, feeding off what the owners are telling them, that he was the culprit in this whole mess. He was like a man on an island
out there by himself. Everybody’s taking potshots.”

  By choosing to room by himself in New York, Flood was able to hide his drinking from his teammates, including McCraw. “I don’t remember ever seeing Curt Flood take a drink of anything,” McCraw said. “He was by himself.”

  Most of Flood’s teammates believed that he was unhappy only about his poor and sporadic play. That’s the impression he gave Frank Howard. Before a home game against the Milwaukee Brewers, Flood approached Howard in the tunnel at RFK Stadium leading from the clubhouse to the dugout.

  “Frank,” Flood said in a serious tone of voice, “I’ve lost it.”

  Howard told Flood that his skills were not going to come back right away and encouraged him to stick with it. But that was not really what Flood meant. He was losing his mind.

  That April 24 night Flood’s pinch-hit single scored the game-tying run. The 6,597 fans at RFK Stadium gave him a standing ovation. The next day, he sat on the bench until a ninth-inning pinch-hitting appearance. He walked. Williams had relegated him to being a $110,000 pinch hitter and platoon player who hit only against left-handed pitchers.

  Larry Whiteside of the Milwaukee Journal, the only black baseball beat writer at the time, landed a rare interview with Flood. “You know, I never thought I’d be back to play baseball again,” Flood told Whiteside. “I was away for a year and a half and did nothing. I was up to about 175 pounds. Now I’m back and it’s hard.” Flood looked like a young player the way he wore his hair in a bushy Afro that poked out of the sides of his cap. He just didn’t feel like a young player. He confessed that it felt as if he had been playing baseball for 40 years. He was philosophical about his part-time status and about his lawsuit. “I try not to think about the lawsuit anymore,” he said. “It’s something that is out of my hands.”

  Whiteside asked if Flood planned to retire after the season. “I don’t know about after this year,” Flood said. “It’s something I haven’t really considered. In fact, the thought frightens me a little. And I’ve got enough to worry about this year.”

  Around the batting cage that weekend, Flood could barely keep his emotions in check. He exploded at William Gildea, the Washington Post sportswriter who had written some of the earliest articles about Flood’s possible move to the Senators and then interviewed Flood in St. Petersburg during his instructional league stint. After the incident around the batting cage, Gildea was so angry and embarrassed that he retreated to the Senators’ dugout. A few minutes later, Flood came over and sat at the other end of the dugout. Neither man said a word. It was Flood’s way of apologizing. To this day, Gildea regrets not asking Flood what was on his mind.

  Flood revealed some of his feelings to one of the team’s biggest malcontents, first baseman Mike Epstein. Epstein was one of the few young players with the courage to buck the reserve clause. A former football fullback and baseball star at the University of California at Berkeley, he signed with the Baltimore Orioles in 1964 and found himself stuck behind Boog Powell at first base. In 1966, Epstein was voted the minor league player of the year in Triple-A Rochester. The Orioles had just won their first World Series. Before the 1967 season, they sent Epstein back to Rochester. He refused to report. He went home for a month to Stockton, California, and threatened to hire an attorney. Soon after he said that, Orioles general manager Harry Dalton traded him from the best team in the league to one of the worst, the Senators. “They were trying to say, ‘You’re not bigger than baseball,’ ” Epstein said. “I wasn’t trying to be bigger than baseball. I was just trying to play.”

  Williams had given up on Epstein because he believed that the young slugger could not hit left-handed pitching. Epstein had campaigned all spring to be traded. Epstein and Flood bonded over their antipathy for the reserve clause and as outsiders. Epstein never admired another player more than he admired Flood. Flood explained to Epstein that his lawsuit challenged more than the reserve clause and the baseball establishment.

  “My problem is I’m black,” Flood said.

  “How do you think I feel?” Epstein replied. “I’m Jewish.”

  “We had the common identity,” Epstein said. “We both felt persecuted, and it just wasn’t going to come out the way it was supposed to.”

  Flood approached Epstein as they shagged fly balls before Sunday’s game against Milwaukee. “Things are closing in on me,” Flood said. He was not having any fun playing baseball and his life outside the game was a mess. “Life is like baseball,” Epstein told Flood. “You have a slump and you get out of it.”

  The previous day, Flood had paid the team’s clubhouse manager, Fred Baxter, for the extra services Baxter and his assistants provided the players. Baxter thought it was a little strange—players did not usually settle up with the clubhouse guys until they received their paychecks on the 15th or 30th of the month.

  On Monday against Minnesota, Flood spent the entire game sitting on the bench wearing big, dark sunglasses. Williams had noticed that the circles under Flood’s eyes were even more pronounced. It looked as if he hadn’t slept the previous night.

  A Minneapolis reporter asked Flood how things were going. “Not too good,” he said. Flood limited his answers to the rest of the reporter’s questions to “yes” or “no.” He elaborated only when asked why he was not playing. “That’s up to Ted,” Flood replied. “He’s the boss.”

  After the game, Epstein and Flood exchanged what Epstein thought were normal good-byes.

  “Take care,” Flood said.

  “Yeah, I’ll see you tomorrow,” Epstein said.

  Pitcher Denny Riddleberger, whose locker was next to Flood’s, knew better. Flood intimated that he was having off-field problems and was going to have to find something else to do. Flood kept a photograph of himself in his locker from a recent issue of Sports Illustrated. The photo showed Flood, his brow furrowed and his arms wrapped around a pole in the dugout, deep in thought. To Riddleberger, the photograph captured Flood’s state of mind: contemplative, tortured, and hanging on for dear life.

  After Monday night’s game, Flood said good-bye to Riddleberger.

  “Take care,” Flood said. “I don’t think I’ll be seeing you for a while.” He left the photograph, his uniform, his cap, and all his other baseball clothes behind.

  Flood ate dinner after that night’s game with pitcher Casey Cox. Since they both lived at the Anthony House, they often ate meals and rode to the ballpark together. At dinner, Flood complained about the media hounding him about his lawsuit and talked about “some things going wrong” but did not elaborate.

  Later that night at Fran O’Brien’s, Flood met up with catcher Paul Casanova. “He said everything was good,” Casanova recalled. Casanova even asked if Flood wanted to rent an apartment on Rhode Island Avenue. “Cassie,” Flood said, “we’ll talk about it.”

  Cox and Flood had agreed to meet the next day in front of the Anthony House at 3:30 p.m. to go to the ballpark. Flood never showed.

  Tim Cullen, the team’s player representative, discovered just before batting practice that something was amiss. Between 4:30 p.m. and 5 p.m., Fred Baxter called Cullen off the field and into the clubhouse. Bob Short was on the phone.

  “Tim,” Short said, “do me a favor. Look in Curt’s locker and see if his street clothes are in there.”

  There was nothing in Flood’s locker except his baseball gear.

  “Thanks,” Short said. “That’s all I needed to know.”

  A few moments later, Short came down on the field and sat in the Senators’ dugout. One of the coaches waved Cox in from shagging fly balls in the outfield.

  “Where’s Curt?” Short asked Cox.

  “I don’t know,” Cox said. “We were supposed to meet at 3:30. I thought he was already at the ballpark.”

  Short called the Anthony House; Flood had checked out.

  He then spoke with McLain. “You’ve got to know where Curt is,” Short said.

  McLain did not know. He lamely suggested that Flood had
changed hotels.

  Maddox was worried that Flood had overslept. The Senators’ batting practice came and went. As the Twins began to take their batting practice,Maddox went into the clubhouse and checked Flood’s locker. He thought that Flood might miss the game.

  A New York Daily News photographer found Flood first. Wearing sunglasses, a tan leather jacket, and beige bell-bottoms, Flood had purchased a one-way first-class ticket on an 8 p.m. Pan Am flight from New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport to Barcelona, Spain.

  “I’ll throw you and your blinking camera out that window,” Flood reportedly snapped at the Daily News photographer who tried to take his picture.

  Someone at the Daily News tipped Short off that Flood was at JFK and had purchased a one-way ticket to Barcelona. Short hastily called a press conference and alerted the media that Flood had left the team. He was trying to catch up with Flood in New York.

  At 4:55 p.m., Flood sent Short a telegram from JFK Airport:

  I TRIED A YEAR AND A HALF IS TOO MUCH VERY

  SERIOUS PERSONAL PROBLEMS MOUNTING EVERYDAY

  THANKS FOR YOUR CONFIDENCE AND UNDERSTANDING

  FLOOD

  Short posted the telegram on the clubhouse wall. Almost all of Flood’s teammates and coaches were shocked. Only Maddox, McCraw, McLain, and Riddleberger were not surprised. They knew that Flood’s problems went beyond baseball and that his heart was no longer in the game.

  Maddox felt guilty as he started the next night in center field in Flood’s place, but he was relieved to see his troubled friend go. He would not have tried to talk him into coming back. He was sorry that he never had the chance to say good-bye.

  Short, however, was not giving up so easily. He first tried, unsuccessfully, to reach Arthur Goldberg. He learned the next day that Goldberg was vacationing in Hawaii. Then, between 6:15 and 6:30 on the night of Flood’s departure, Short called Joe Reichler, the assistant to commissioner Bowie Kuhn. A longtime AP reporter, Reichler had printed Bill White’s remarks in 1961 about the St. Petersburg Chamber of Commerce breakfast and the Cardinals’ segregated spring training facilities. Short asked Reichler to go to Kennedy Airport to talk Flood out of leaving.