Curt Flood Belongs in the Hall of Fame

There was a portrait of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. that hung in the living room of his widow, Coretta Scott King. It was painted by Curt Flood. There was a proposal introduced by Rep. John Conyers Jr., the Democrat from Detroit, to remove baseball's controversial antitrust exemption. It was numbered HR 21 after the Cardinals' jersey Curt Flood wore for a dozen of his big league seasons.

So Flood, as I've pointed out before, has been remembered by the widow of a Nobel Peace Prize winner and in legislation proposed on Capitol Hill. He doesn't need the Baseball Hall of Fame to validate his contributions to greater society or the mere game.

But the Baseball Hall of Fame needs Curt Flood to maintain its validation as repository of all things of critical importance to the sport. It is the height of oversight that its gatekeepers passed up their last chance to vote in Flood on a regular ballot in 1996, a year before Flood died from throat cancer.

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It is not easy to inflate Flood's accomplishments on the baseball diamond to the size of Hall of Fame members who played his position of center field, even though he was an All-Star and Gold Glove winner many times over. His batting average and on-base percentage and other offensive numbers don't add up as high. His fielding does.

But it is impossible to find another player whose impact on his fellow players -- the men who make the game what it is -- was greater than Flood's. He staged the singular protest and filed the lawsuit that started the dismantling of baseball's more-than-a-century old policy of keeping its laborers in a sort of servitude somewhere between indentured and slavery.

Flood is the reason there is free agency in baseball and, for that matter, other pro sports. He is the reason athletes can ply their trade for the employer of their choice, pretty much like the rest of us.

Flood in sports means freedom.

It is hard to imagine nowadays, when athletes stand up for little more than their own pocketbooks, that there was someone among them once who stood up for principle. But he was Flood.

It wasn't surprising of Flood. As he once explained, baseball for him, as it was for many other black men of his era, was never just about fun and games.

"What had started as a chance to test my baseball ability in a professional setting," he wrote in his autobiography, The Way It Is, "had become an obligation to measure myself as a man."

It started in the minors in Savannah, Ga., in 1956, less than 10 years after Jackie Robinson broke the game's color barrier and just two after the Supreme Court declared segregated schools were unconstitutional. Flood suffered, and sustained, the same abuse and disrespect as black ballplayers integrating white baseball before him. He was peppered by fans with racial epithets, ostracized by his teammates and, when his team was on the road, forced to retrieve his meals from the backdoor of the restaurants his teammates dined at and take his plate back to the bus to eat in isolation.

"Of the many indignities to which I was subject," he recounted, "few angered me more than the routine in [the] bus."

Then, after a long and very successful run in The Show with the Cardinals, Flood was told he was being traded to the Phillies.

That was the way baseball had always done business. It owned its players and controlled them like heads of cattle. The only way they could get from one place to another was if the team decided so.

"If I had been a foot-shuffling porter, they might have at least given me a pocket watch," Flood said. "But all I got was a call from a middle-echelon coffee drinker in the front office."

Flood then did what every major leaguer before him only dreamed of doing but never woke up to do. He refused to recognize the game's so-called reserve clause and announced that he would not go to Philadelphia. He requested commissioner Bowie Kuhn to set him free.

"I do not believe I am a piece of property to be bought and sold irrespective of my wishes," Flood wrote in a now-famous letter that echoed the plea of black slaves in the country more than a century earlier.

In that sense, Flood stood for more than even Jackie Robinson. For Robinson's role as guinea pig in the re-integration of baseball was chosen and managed for him. Flood chose his role himself and paid for it.

Kuhn turned Flood down, and fans and media turned on Flood. How dare Flood thumb his nose at a $90,000 salary as a baseball player, they charged. As Howard Cosell asked of Flood on January 3, 1970, a little over a week after Flood wrote to Kuhn, "What's wrong with a guy making $90,000 a year being traded from one team to another? Those aren't exactly slave wages."

Flood responded: "A well-paid slave is nonetheless a slave."

That only incited fans and the media more. But Flood was unbowed. He surrendered his salary to take his stance, not unlike Muhammad Ali had done to his fabulous living in refusing to join the Vietnam War effort. Flood filed a lawsuit and pushed his case to the Supreme Court in 1971, where it lost, mostly on technicalities, 5-3.

Strapped for cash, Flood attempted a comeback with my childhood Washington Senators in 1971. He lasted 13 games before declaring he didn't have his skills anymore and walking away from the diamond for good. That was the last the game saw of him, but it should not have been.

Four years later, pitchers Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally successfully challenged the reserve clause and were unshackled from baseball's reserve clause. So too was every player after that.

"Mr. Flood ... risked his career when he challenged baseball's reserve clause," Rep. Conyers told Congress when he introduced HR 21. "We all owe a debt of gratitude for his willingness to challenge the baseball oligarchy."

The lawmaker was talking about the rest of us in this country who believe in freedom to earn a living where we desire, not just ballplayers. That's what the Hall of Fame is missing in Curt Flood.