It happened last week, 52-years ago, Christmas week of 1969, when two of the most consequential letters in the history of North American sports were exchanged. So much of what has followed in the history of sport, in the ongoing struggle for athletes to have a say in their career, their lives, and their labor as professionals, can be read into and flowed of out what was said directly, what was implied, and what was left unsaid, in the exchange of letters between All-Star Outfield Curt Flood and then Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn.
Flood wrote Kuhn on Christmas Eve, December 24. In the first paragraph of just two in his letter, he lays out precisely what was at the heart of his grievance- that he had been traded- or rather his contractual rights had been traded from the St. Louis Cardinals to the Philadelphia Phillies after the 1969 season.
“After twelve years in the major leagues, I do not feel I am a piece of property to be bought and sold irrespective of my wishes. I believe that any system which produces that result violates my basic rights as a citizen and is inconsistent with the laws of the United States and of the several States.”
Going from St. Louis which had been World Champions twice in the prior five seasons and was coming off another appearance in the World Series in 1968, a seven-game defeat by the Detroit Tigers, was the equivalent of a baseball exile.
The Cardinals were an early and well-integrated organization, a championship-level team, and played in as sophisticated a baseball city as there was or is and were owned by a well-funded owner. In contrast the Phillies were a moribund franchise that had finished 33 games under .500 in the 1969 season, played in a deteriorating stadium, in a city that had a reputation of not being kind to African American players and had finished above fourth place in the National League only once in the prior decade.
In 1968, Flood batted .335 and was selected for his third All-Star team and finished fourth in MVP voting during that season. However, Flood lost his footing in that crucial game seven chasing a run-scoring triple that may have swayed the series. Flood was upset he was initially offered only a $5000 dollar a year raise after his stellar 1968 season, and not the $90,000 he believed he deserved from Cardinals owner brewing magnate, Gussie Busch.
Busch ultimately relented and gave Flood the contract he believed he deserved. The 1969 season was a tense one for the Cardinals and labor relations in baseball. Flood’s batting average dropped, to a still respectable .285 and he earned his eighth consecutive Gold Glove for his fielding prowess, but Busch publicly criticized his team after a labor boycott of spring training. Flood’s brother was arrested during the season.
Ultimately the Cardinals, after back-to-back National League pennants, slipped back to fourth place. Flood’s contention was that the one-year contract which he signed after the 1968 season had come to an end when the Cardinals assigned his rights, in a seven-player deal, to the Phillies on October 7, 1969. But baseball had what was called a “reserve clause,” that gave teams a unilateral right to renew and extend a player’s rights under a prior contract under similar terms in perpetuity, so Flood was not viewed as free from his prior contract. The player’s only choice was to retire. Negotiating with other teams was not an option. And so, after 12 years of building his life and his career in St. Louis, Flood, a man of Color in the time of the Civil Rights Movement who had already experienced racism in his playing career, found himself traded to Philadelphia and his only options under the rules were reporting or retirement.
Flood’s second and concluding paragraph to Kuhn, sometimes the most powerful statements are the briefest, is where he states he believed it was his right to entertain offers from other teams. He goes on to request that Kuhn make his desires known to all other clubs. Flood didn’t use the word free agency, that concept was shaped later based on Flood’s courageous stand first made in this letter.
Kuhn’s response, dated December 30, 1969, interestingly addresses Flood by his first name, Curt, rather than the more formal salutation Flood had used in writing to Kuhn, can be viewed either as a patronizing “oh come now,” response to a person of lower rank or significance, or a one that recognized Flood’s basic humanity as it expressly states that Flood is not a piece of property “to be bought and sold.” It may be a bit of both, my initial reading as exclusively dismissive may be unfair. But Kuhn’s separation of the relevance of trading, (selling, or assigning) a player whose contract had ended- an adult man- showed how much of the coming conflict over the reserve clause Kuhn, and the lords of baseball who paid his salary, either missed or willfully failed to see.
Kuhn took four paragraphs, twice as many as Flood, to say less about the core conflict- indeed core of all sports conflicts to come- who has the final say over the basic rights of any athlete, under what circumstances may they play or decline to play or seek other options for their play. We see the same question asked again and again in the 52 years since Flood asked it last week.
At Culture in Sports, the expansion of the athlete’s ability to determine their own course as intrinsic to both the culture of sports and being on the right side of history.
Flood wasn’t asking for free agency, an agreed upon structure by which athletes may exercise control over where they play, he was asking for a more basic freedom. In his case to play and live where he chose as human being with a family. Today across all of sports athletes are asking for freedom in various contexts: to be free from sexual abuse and predation; to be free from abusive and discriminatory practices; to be able to express and be their truest selves; to be free to control and use their name, image, and likeness. These freedoms aren’t without rules and limitations, athletes aren’t anarchists by nature, but rules that derive from an evenhanded process and reflect a core concern for those whose play is at the center of sports, the athlete.
I’d even suggest that the Great Resignation of 2020-21 is a part of this same trend, as people are reassessing the relationship of their jobs to their lives, having faced down a pandemic and are reordering their priorities.
Ultimately, Flood paid for his stand with the remainder of his career. He played only a part of one more season. But his stand, unsuccessful for himself as it was, led to greater autonomy for athletes everywhere, began last week in an exchange of letters.
It Happened This Week: Curt Flood & Bowie Kuhn and the Battle for Freedom
Written by Robert Boland in Articles on