Baseball's Forgotten Man: Curt Flood and the Transformation of American Sport

Abstract

In October 1972, sportswriter Dick Young noted that almost none of the players on the American League champion Oakland Athletics, black or white, displayed any interest in Jackie Robinson when he entered their dugout during that year's World Series, only days before his death at the age of fiftythree. Young had covered the Brooklyn Dodgers for many years and closely observed Robinson as he broke the national pastime's color line in 1947, one of the most important civil rights achievements of the first half of the twentieth century. Yet Young was struck by the players' indifference, especially the blacks; and he commented that there seems to be a feeling among the current black players that they owe Jackie nothing.1 Thirteen years later in St. Louis, Robinson's widow threw out the first ball before game four of the World Series, to mark the fortieth anniversary of Robinson's signing a contract with the Dodgers organization. But when sportswriter Dave Anderson asked the St. Louis Cardinals' Vince Coleman, an African American, for a comment on Jackie Robinson, the rookie star snapped: I don't know nothin' about him. Why are you asking me about Jackie Robinson?2 Major league baseball players similarly failed to appreciate the enormous debt they owed to St. Louis Cardinals outfielder Curt Flood, who arguably transformed American sports more than any athlete except for Jackie Robinson. Robinson was among only three major league baseball players, all retired, willing to testify on Flood's behalf when he filed suit against baseball's reserve system, which had governed labor relations in the sport for nearly a century. Like Robinson, who repeatedly denounced baseball for its slow pace in desegregating, Flood held the club owners' plantation mentality responsible for players' excessive subordination to management and lack of bargaining power.