![]() ![]() The story turns tragic in the wake of Flood’s lawsuit, a stretch the doc chronicles a bit excessively, if understandably so. The average salary of an MLB player in 2016 was 4.4 million - nearly 10 times the amount Flood made over his entire 15-year career. ![]() In addition to Gibson, the producers interview other Flood contemporaries (among them Tim McCarver) Flood’s widow, actress Judy Pace Flood and attorney Marvin Miller, who led the charge to gain free agency. Baseball economics were forever transformed by Floods fight. As former teammate and roommate Bob Gibson notes, most admired Flood but were afraid to endanger their own careers. Nor did other players rally around him, even as his case made its way to the Supreme Court. Finally, Part VI will offer that Major League Baseball should be subject to antitrust law, just like any other professional sports league is. I am pleased that God made my skin black - but I wish He had made it thicker. In the 1960s, to have an African-American man making what was then big money openly talk about being a “slave” didn’t sit well with many whites, who were still uncomfortable with civil-rights advances made during the Johnson administration. A well-paid slave is nonetheless a slave. Yet the outfielder saw and couched the struggle in civil-rights terms, describing the owners’ ability to buy and sell players as “a master and slave relationship.”įlood’s message was clouded both by the messenger and the era. On the other hand, these themes worked parasitically as Flood struggled to make his. Curt Flood Made Free Agency Possible for Other Pro Athletes. Moreover, Flood knew challenging the system would likely bring an end to his career, since even in victory no owner would want to touch him. The reserve clause, in North American professional sports, was part of a player contract which stated that the rights to players were retained by the team upon the contracts expiration.Players under these contracts were not free to enter into another contract with another team. When the Cardinals traded Curt Flood to the Phillies in 1969. Curt Flood Made Free Agency Possible for Other Pro Athletes. “It was at the time an outlandish notion: That a ballplayer should have the right to choose the team for which he played,” notes narrator Liev Schreiber, channeling writer Aaron Cohen. At that point, thanks to what was known as “the reserve clause,” baseball teams essentially owned the rights to players in perpetuity. Having played on two World Series championship teams, Flood was near the peak of his on-field prowess at age 31, when the St. ![]()
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