Last week Alex Belth was generous enough to spend a good portion of his Thursday evening chatting with me about his recent book, Stepping Up: The Story of All-Star Curt Flood and His Fight For Baseball Players' Rights. (In case you missed my review of the book, here it is.) We spoke extensively about the writing process, Flood's career as a ballplayer, his struggle against baseball's reserve clause, and finally his ultimate legacy. There's something for everyone -- enjoy!
BrokenCowboy
After reading this book, it’s clear that Curt Flood was a great player and a great man, but probably one that most baseball fans know very little about. What was it that first drew you to him as a subject for your first book?
Alex Belth
The first time I really became aware of him was when I was working on the Ken Burns baseball documentary. Still even now in my mind’s eye thinking about it, in those talking head interviews with him, there was something just very... I don’t know if arresting is too strong a word, but immediately compelling about him. There was clearly a sensitivity to him, even in the way he phrased things. He was a thoughtful guy, what an interesting guy. And obviously in the Burns movie he was telling his story, so it became even more interesting. But there was also something about looking at him where you could just tell, I don’t know what really happened, but this guy’s been through a lot. His eyes were a little glassy. It didn’t look like he was drunk or stoned, but it looked like he’d been shellshocked or something like that.
That was I guess the spring of ‘94 that I first became acquainted with his story, and over the following years my interest in baseball, which had been really strong as a kid but was kind of dormant during my college years, just continued to grow and grow and grow. I probably started getting into reading baseball books again pretty seriously by like ‘99 or 2000, and I found Flood’s autobiography and gobbled it up. And by the time I started writing the blog, Flood was just one of those stories that continued to be of interest to me, and one of the reasons was because I felt like there was something mysterious about it because it just wasn’t talked about that much. And if you did hear people talk about it, they would talk about it in these kind of vague generalities: Curt Flood, he was the first free agent; Curt Flood, his case led to free agency; he was a great guy, he was a very important person to remember.
But what was his case? Antitrust legislation and all these legalities. And he lost his case. What bearings did his case have on the Peter Seitz, Messersmith-McNally decision, and how could you really quantify his influence. So there were all these kind of things that were really kind of unknown to me about him, and that made him even more interesting, and there was just tremendously little written about him. His autobiography is an interesting portrait of a ballplayer in the 1960s, and it gives you an idea of his life, but it’s very sketchy. It’s a very impressionistic view of his life, and it ended in 1970. His case hadn’t even made it to the Supreme Court yet. Then he leaves the country for five years. Jeez, what happened there?
So there was this whole combination of things. This is one of those pet guys that you end up getting, that you really get interested in. And after I had started writing the blog, BronxBanter, in the fall of 2002, by the spring of ‘03 I was approached by Persea Books who at the time was going to start doing some young adult books, nonfiction young adult books. And I was approached by them, and they said, “Could you think of a sports figure that would be good for high school kids?” You and I spoke about that a couple years ago. Flood would be the perfect choice. For the first year and a half of the project, the book was going to be for high school kids. Ultimately what happened, WW Norton is the distributor of Persea, and it sort of dawned on all of us that because there aren’t any books out on Flood, why necessarily limit ourselves to a YA audience? At which point the book became geared towards just a general sports audience. Even though it’s not strictly for kids any longer, I think it’s one of these books that we intended to make it readable for anyone seventh grade and up, and that includes maybe a middle aged woman who’s a casual fan.
But as you know it’s a lot leaner than a lot of baseball biographies would be, it’s just a little over 200 pages. Part of what can make baseball books so great are the digressions, but we really shied away from that. If we had three pages introducing Bob Gibson, we tried to cut it down to two paragraphs because we really wanted to make the story as accessible to as wide an audience as possible. And quite frankly, it’s also my first book so I didn’t really want to bite off more than I could chew, just in the breadth of something. You know what I mean? And my editor and I both agreed in the philosophy that if we’re gonna err on the side of anything, we’re gonna leave the reader wanting more rather than someone saying it was good, but it was about fifteen or twenty pages too long, or he’s losing me here. But it was the Ken Burns experience that first got me interested in Flood.
BC:
So you started in 2003?
Alex
We put together a proposal in 2003, and by that summer I started doing research for the project.
BC:
And what was that like? I assume you were doing an awful lot of reading and interviewing some people. How did that go?
Alex
It was the first time that I had ever done anything like this, so I didn’t really have a roadmap. What do you do, do you spend eight months doing research and then start writing? So what I ended up doing -- having learned what I did the first time around, I would have a better sense of how to organize myself the second time around, but I essentially did research and started writing at the same time. Part of the research was trying to contact former players, which I did primarily through the Player’s Association, talking to baseball historians and writers, trying to get in touch with family and friends of Flood. I wrote this book essentially in and around a nine to five job in addition to writing the blog. So I got to work early in the morning, stayed late at night, wrote on the weekends, but it wasn’t like I was making a lot of money doing it, so it wasn’t a situation where I could afford to fly to Oakland and spend a week there or go to St. Louis and look people up, so I didn’t have that kind of accessibility.
And also because it was my first book, it wasn’t as if I could just say, “Hey, this is David Halberstam, I’m writing such and such book,” and people are generally gonna want to speak to you. There were some of Flood’s teammates who responded to my letter immediately. Orlando Cepeda called me, and Dick Groat called me immediately, and Tim McCarver responded, and they were all very cordial and helpful. And there were other people like Lou Brock and Gibson and Bill White who didn’t want to participate at all. Flood is survived by five children from his first marriage and then also a wife from a third marriage, Judy Pace. Judy Pace Flood was an actress. I think she was in Ironside, and she was in Brian’s Song actually. But Judy Pace and Flood’s children don’t get along very well, and I think there’s been a lot of bad blood between them. Apparently, at least the word that I heard, was that some of Flood’s old teammates are very loyal to Judy Pace, and if she didn’t sanction the project, they wouldn’t necessarily participate. And she didn’t. She wasn’t particularly willing to get involved, which again I’m respectful of. She has a project of her own that she wants to work on, and that’s fair enough.
But that presented, I guess, both sort of an obstacle and maybe created a sense of freedom at the same time. It was an obstacle because the primary source material for Flood’s childhood was his autobiography, which was very, as I said before, impressionistic. So I had to really try to create what it was like for Flood growing up in Oakland when he did, having spoken to some friends who grew up with him, which was very helpful. So there was that sort of telling detail that I missed, that his family could’ve provided. At the same time, I was free from having to serve anyone’s agenda within the family. I did speak to Flood’s eldest daughter, Debbie Flood, and she was as helpful as she could be, and she was a nice person. From what she told me, he was at times a troubled guy, and it wasn’t such a happy family situation.
And when I did learn the details of that kind of stuff, yeah, I suppose there was part of me that was titillated because I was learning about the dirt, so to speak. But simultaneously another part of me was really sort of nauseous, because this family’s been through a tough time. They’ve been through enough pain. My intention here isn’t to drag them through the mud. The most critical things that I learned about Flood, to be general about it, were things that you could probably find in a lot of ballplayers -- that he was self-centered, that he liked to party and chase skirts, and that he wasn’t a particularly attentive father or responsible husband. Well, that doesn’t really make him much different than a lot of other entertainers. So that as an angle didn’t seem like something that was really worth pursuing when the whole point of my book... I couldn’t ignore it, I couldn’t just gloss over it, I had to mention that, because I don’t think you’re being fair looking at him as a human being otherwise, but that certainly wasn’t the point of the book.
BC:
I think that you did that well, and like you say, it humanizes him a little bit. He’s not just Curt Flood, this hero who fought for baseball players’ rights, but he also had all these other issues. I think it maybe even makes it easier for people to relate to.
Alex:
Well, I think that was a really important thing for me because one of the things that made me very leery about Flood when I first started the project was a kind of generalization of what he had done, sort of looking back in a real romantic way at what he did as somebody who was a real martyr, so to speak. I come from a left-wing sensibility, I come from a liberal family, so it’s not like I would be against Curt Flood’s politics, do you know what I mean? At the same time, whether you’re conservative or liberal, creatively I’ve always reacted against glorifying people in an overly simplistic way. With Flood, when you learn about his vulnerabilities and frailties as a person, I think that helps really kind of balance painting him in a broad stroke in heroic terms. As it turns out, that was really one of my main questions doing the book. Why did he do this? Did he really do it as a selfless act? Is that really true? Is that myth-making actually accurate? And ultimately I think it was. I think he really did do what he did for very personal reasons, you could say selfish reasons. He did it for himself, he did it because...
BC:
Well, but I don’t think he did it for financial gain, necessarily.
Alex:
But he didn’t do it for his own personal, cynical gain. It wasn’t like a lot of the sportswriters of the moment thought, oh he’s just trying to hold out for more money or something like that. I think when you put Flood’s story in a larger context, Flood was one of a lot of people of his generation that were acting for the better of the community or for people other than just themselves. You know, it’s funny, in the Clemente book there’s something that Maraniss brings up that Clemente said all the time. I forget the exact phrasing, but Clemente would say, “Your life is only as valuable as the impact it has on other people’s lives.” And Clemente was true to that, I think, and so was Flood. Flood was of that same time. He did something very similar to that. But I think what makes Flood, when you’re looking at him more as a person, I think what makes his story, gives it depth and complexity, is when you look at it and say, this guy did a noble thing. He did the right thing and he got raked over the coals for it. But at the same time, Flood knew going into it how tough his chances were going to be to win. Flood went into this knowingly.
So there are these other questions that you ask yourself all the sudden. Okay, he did do the noble thing. But in the process, he sacrificed his livelihood. He sacrificed his ability to support his family in the way he had become accustomed to. And you can understand why other ballplayers wouldn’t have been willing to do that, and not as a knock against them. That’s a really legitimate reason, a guy had a family to feed. Given the realities of what life was like for ballplayers at that time with the reserve clause, the fears that they could be sent down to the minors or blackballed were very real. So I think that’s one of the things that ended up becoming really fascinating about Flood’s story because in a way, I think, intellectually he really understood what he was getting into. This is just what I sort of gathered, I can’t read his mind, I didn’t speak with him about it. But I think on some level he probably was mentally up to the task, but I don’t know if emotionally he had the constitution to handle the repercussions of what he did. He was a sensitive guy. He was a sensitive guy who didn’t have a lot of emotional support. And he was really taking on... the David and Goliath thing. And he was really all out there by himself. Yes, the Players’ Association supported him financially, which is something that shouldn’t be overlooked or discounted, nevertheless he was out there by himself. Here was a guy who was an excellent player, and had a terrific reputation as a team player, as an artist, as a good guy, who suddenly when from team player, great guy to uppity so-and-so. A guy who’s trying to ruin America’s pastime. And I think that was something that was really tough for him to get over.
Flood himself called himself a child of the sixties, a man of the sixties, but even more than that, I think that his taking on baseball... it’s not only a sixties move, I mean, it’s a late sixties move. You have to look at what he did in the context of okay, ‘67, ‘68, ‘69. Even start in ‘66, when things start to become very tumultuous, every summer becoming more and more volatile around the country. The civil rights movement breaking down into the Black Power movement and Black Nationalism. As a result this sort of reaction of the silent majority and conservatism that starts to rise with Nixon coming in ‘68. I think in some ways Flood was at this moment in his life where he had really achieved everything that he could’ve hoped for in baseball. He had made it. He had been an all-star, he had won World Series, he was successful outside of it. He was making a lot of money. He really reaped the benefit of playing on that great St. Louis team. His salary jumped almost forty thousand dollars from ‘65 to ‘69. He’s making thirty-five or something like that, and all the sudden by ‘69 he’s making $90,000 a year. So I think in a strange way for him, he had really reached the pinnacle of everything that he could’ve achieved. I wouldn’t say that he was played out or bored, but I think all of the sudden having really accomplished certain goals that you would want to as a ballplayer made him more aware of what was going on with Marvin Miller and the relationship between the players and the owners. He was this conscientious guy who became much more aware of the inequities of what was actually going on in the game. McCarver told me at one point that he thought Flood would’ve done the same thing had he been traded in ‘67 or ‘68. Not that he was waiting to get traded like it was a premeditated act -- okay, I’m gonna take baseball to court -- I don’t think it was like that for him.
But I think that considering everything that had happened in his life, considering that also by ‘69 he was on the outs with Cardinal management to a certain extent, he had been separated from his wife, he’s not with his kids, he’s living a bachelor lifestyle. Someone who I had interviewed said maybe he felt like things were kind of awry in his life, and this was something that he could do, and he could do the right thing, you know what I mean? Again, I can’t read Flood’s mind, but he certainly expressed some ambivalence by ‘69 about the rest of his career. I mean, certainly at the age of 31, you would’ve figured he could’ve played four or five more years had he stayed healthy. He had some good money, even if he had only played one or two more years. Just on his reputation, he was gonna get paid. At the same time, I think he was probably a very old 31, given how old ballplayers in general, but Black and Spanish players were particularly driven during that time to play through injuries, and Flood was such a small guy. He played through injuries constantly, so he might’ve been getting tired. He’d been to Denmark, he was a painter, he really could’ve seen life beyond baseball. I think that the rub for it, for him, was how does he walk away from that money? But ultimately when he does get traded, he gets traded to Philadelphia, which is initially the slap in the face. Philadelphia had such a bad reputation as a town for black ballplayers.
BC:
He’s getting sold down the river.
Alex:
Yeah, exactly. What if he had been traded to the Dodgers? Hey, you can’t answer that question. That’s a what if. If Flood were given a hundred thousand dollars to play for the Dodgers, it could’ve been a very different story. Maybe he wouldn’t have done what he did. At the same time, very quickly after his trade to Philadelphia, it did become less about being traded to Philadelphia, and it became more about what a terrible system the reserve system was. So in a way getting traded to Philadelphia made it easier for him, whereas if he had been traded to someplace favorable like Los Angeles, it might’ve made it a lot tougher to walk away from that money. But I really think that for him at least, at that moment, in 1969, there was really no other logical thing for him to do. That was the logical thing for him to do. He said in the Ken Burns documentary, he couldn’t see what was happening to his brothers in the civil rights movement, and his brothers fighting, and I don’t mean just black, but black and white, fighting in Vietnam, and not think that that kind of spirit didn’t apply to his own industry. So I just think he was somebody who took that seriously at a time when not everybody did. He certainly didn’t act in a vacuum, particularly amongst black athletes. This was already after Ali...
BC:
One thing that struck me was that here you had this man fighting all alone against America’s pastime. What can’t be overlooked, though, is that Flood was a black man essentially fighting against twenty-four white owners.
Alex:
Oh, yeah.
BC:
How significant was that aspect of it?
Alex:
In terms of the outcome of the case?
BC:
Not in terms of the outcome, just in terms of the fight. Tell me if you agree with this or not. From reading it, it seemed like it still would’ve been a huge deal if this had been a white player fighting this same fight. The owners still would’ve been in an uproar, they still would’ve thought it was ruining the game, etc., etc. But this was just something extra.
Alex:
Yeah, look at the grief Bouton caught in 1970 when he came out with Ball Four, and he was a white ballplayer. I don’t think... on the one hand, it’s hard to fathom a white ballplayer doing what Flood did at that time. At the same time, heck, you had pioneering black ballplayers -- Frank Robinson, Aaron, Clemente, Bob Gibson -- who didn’t do what Flood did. So it wasn’t only because he was black, I think it was because he was a remarkable guy in a way.
One of the things that sort of occurred to me after thinking about it more, is that Flood really possessed a real nice combination of toughness and vulnerability. His toughness was evident in what he had to put up with, and the fact that he achieved, but the vulnerability enabled him to act on his conscience. I think the rub of it for Flood was it was also this vulnerability, this sensitivity as a person that made dealing with the fallout of it so damaging to him. And I also think that, even if, let’s say, Carl Yastrzemski -- which is really hard to believe -- if he had done what Flood had done, I still don’t think a white player would’ve won, however the reception amongst the public, the perception in the media might’ve been different. Flood did have enough sports writers who were supportive of him. However, I think that without characterizing Flood as a radical, Flood was probably perceived as a radical. We’re talking about the late sixties, where Black Power is becoming Black Panthers with shotguns, so this is an alarming thing to white middle class baseball fans.
So this is going on when Flood does what he does, and I think that that burgeoning silent majority was probably very prominent amongst your average sports fans, particularly because the union had started to assert itself, so in the winters in the late sixties you started hearing about labor as much as you start hearing about the hot stove league. The gap between what common guys are earning and what ballplayers are earning is starting to grow, and the idea of Flood giving up $90,000 a year and considering himself a well-paid slave was just something that some people could not get around. Joe Early wrote a presentation about Flood, an African-American history professor, and he says at the time that he remembers people in the black community people not understanding what Flood was doing, and also thinking he was a damn fool for giving up $90,000 a year for doing what he was doing. When Flood was asked by Tom Haller, the Dodgers player rep, when Flood sought the financial support and get the approval of the players’ association, Tom Haller asked him if it was a Black Power move on Flood’s part. And Flood made it quite clear that what he was doing was for the benefit of all players, but he also said that his being black made him extremely sensitive to those matters, perhaps more so than most. So I think the racial part of it is very interesting in the way Flood was embraced or not embraced by the black community.
When you look at what happens with Ali, you can say, okay, the United States government is reclassifying this guy because he’s the heavyweight champion of the world, and he is a black Muslim. He is a clear political threat, so what happened to Ali happened because of the color of his skin, but you can’t say that implicitly about Flood, because it was happening to any ballplayer, no matter who you are. And Flood’s case is not something that you can easily surmise in a tidy sound bite. It’s complicated. And believe me, one of the things that I found in researching the book and reading a lot of legal documents. Shit, that was really complicated for me.
BC:
I was wondering about that. Did you read through all the rulings and everything?
Alex:
Yes, I certainly read the Supreme Court ruling and the court of appeals ruling, and I read through most of the transcripts from the trial, and it was really tedious stuff. It was tedious stuff, and I was able to speak to a couple of Flood’s lawyers. A fella named Jay Topkiss, who was one of his trial lawyers and is a professor at Columbia, was particularly gracious with me and helpful. There was a guy who actually reads BronxBanter who is the librarian at Fordham Law School who was very helpful to me in explaining antitrust and the language that they used in legalese. When I was writing that portion of the book I tried to make it understandable and accessible to somebody who might not know that much about the law, and because of that I didn’t go into a lot of digressions about certain aspects of the legal rulings. Flood’s legal story is a book onto itself, and as a matter of fact there are two books that I know that are coming out later this year that focus on the legalities of Flood’s case, which I think is great. Because reading this stuff, it merits a book of its own.
But for my purposes, it was a challenge to try to read through all that stuff and sift out what is really important and what isn’t. That’s why I just feel fortunate that I had a good editor who helped guide me, because there would be certain times when I would get almost lost in reading so much information I didn’t know how to really properly digest it. But when we had a solid framework for our story and a philosophy of how to tell the story -- get out of the way and let the story tell itself and really keep it lean. Then it just became easier at certain points. You read the book -- when I described either the George Toolson ruling, or the previous stories, or the Federal Baseball 1922 Supreme Court decision, I didn’t spend five or six pages on each one of those things. I tried to keep it short and sweet without making it frivolous or trivial, but keeping a consistent tone throughout the book, I suppose. But yeah, that stuff was a little daunting, because the trial stuff is not particularly dramatic. Without having a lot of specifics about what the scene looked like, it was hard to recreate a dramatic scene. Even in Flood’s autobiography he claims that it was pretty boring and he spending a lot of time drinking and chasing skirts while the trial was going on.
BC:
As I’m reading the book I’m wondering if modern ballplayers even know who they should be thanking. I think you mentioned this story in your book about when Jackie Robinson was honored in Cincinnati that day, speaking on the field. I guess it was probably the 25th anniversary of his arrival in the major leagues, and he was honored on the field in Cincinnati, and I guess he walked into the clubhouse afterwards and none of the black players had anything to say to him. It was this really sad moment. He was towards the end of his life, and he didn’t really get that recognition. There was an anecdote that you included in the book from, I don’t think it was the ‘94 strike...
Alex:
Yeah!
BC:
It was the ‘94 strike? When Flood came in and spoke to the players? Who did you speak to on that?
Alex:
I had read about it, but I also spoke to Gene Orza about it, who was the general counsel of the players’ association, and I think that Marvin Miller had certainly made it a point to remind his constituency of the importance of Curt Flood, certainly while he was on the job. And afterwards, too. Gene Orza said to me that he thinks a lot of the current players are familiar with who Flood is, and whether you agree with that or not, I think there at least a lot of people in the union who probably do. And certainly that was probably even more true in 1994 when Flood was obviously still alive, but just when there was a lot more connection. Now, when you think about the connections to Flood, and you’re thinking about Torre and Dusty Baker, guys who are like the older guys in the game now. Remember that story in the 80s, talking about Jackie Robinson, and Vince Coleman didn’t know who Jackie Robinson was?
BC:
Yeah, I remember that.
Alex:
If people don’t remember who Jackie Robinson was, they sure ain’t gonna remember who Curt Flood is. But I think his name is significant enough in the history of the union that the union has always been acknowledging of him. Could they be more so? Sure, that would be great. It would be great to see a Curt Flood statue someplace, or even better yet, it would be great to see a Curt Flood scholarship, something that would be really useful, in Curt Flood’s name. One question that I’ve been asked a bunch recently as I’ve been doing interviews is, how much do you think modern ballplayers are aware of who Curt Flood is? I don’t think that Curt Flood is as well-remembered as he should be, but I don’t know if baseball players are any worse at remembering the past than the average person.
BC:
I think the problem is, you know we talked about writers having a love of baseball. I think that the people who are judging baseball players are the people who love baseball so much that they can tell you how many home runs Mickey Mantle hit, and all this minutiae, so to hear a player say, “I don’t know anything about Mickey Mantle, or I don’t know what kind of a player Jackie Robinson was, or did Joe Torre ever play?” These kinds of questions, most Americans don’t know the answers to, but it’s the people who are reporting on baseball and buying the tickets by and large, that’s what we live and breathe.
Alex:
Yeah, exactly, much more so than most players. It’s probably the exception when you have a Mike Piazza, who is a great player, or Clemens or Schilling, who are great fans as well. They love the history. But that was probably always the case. There was probably a lot more baseball talk. When you talk about how things have changed, now guys are on planes on their iPods and DVDs and stuff like that. That’s changed from fifty years ago, but how many players of Torre’s generation were readily familiar with what Frankie Frisch had done? So for me it’s hard to go out and just blast the ballplayers for not having remembered Flood.
And look, Hank, the bottom line is Flood lost. We don’t tend to remember the “losers.” We don’t tend to remember the guys who come in second. My father, who will humbly say that he is second to none as an admirer of Jackie Robinson, one of his pet rants for years has been, what about Larry Doby? You really just don’t hear about Doby in the same... obviously Doby’s story was slightly different from Robinson’s, but Doby has really been undervalued in comparison. But Doby came second, and not just by a couple of months. People knew about Jackie Robinson and the Great Experiment the year before when he was playing in Montreal. But I think that’s just the nature of our culture.
One of the quotes in the book that I loved was from Dick Young. Dick Young is someone that I remember as a kid as just being one of these real old cranks, “Ah, you young punks, making all this money...” There’s much about Dick Young that I don’t like, but he certainly was very influential, and when he wrote about Flood’s case, he said if Flood wins this case, he’ll be more famous than anyone in the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. But if he loses, well, when was the last time anyone heard of George Toolson? George Toolson was the minor leaguer in the Yankee system who had challenged baseball’s antitrust exemption.
Yeah, the analogy is a little exaggerated, but it does hold some weight. Like you mentioned, other than hardcore baseball fans, your average sports fan isn’t gonna remember who Flood was. And like I said earlier on, a lot of fans that I talked too would say, “Oh, yeah, Curt Flood, sure. He was the first free agent... He started it all... His case led to free agency.” Which is really inaccurate. Literally speaking, his case didn’t lead to anything but a legal dead-end for himself. But the one thing I think that you can say indisputably about Flood’s case, was that he was the most prominent player to ever challenge the reserve system, and by doing that, even though he lost his case, he put the inequities of that system onto page one. He took it from the back page, he put it on the front page. He got baseball back into the Supreme Court. So it wasn’t all for naught.
But it was, I suppose, if you want to be literal about it, it’s almost like the numbers, right? When you look at baseball numbers, you talk about a guy’s intangibles. Well, Flood’s legacy is all the intangibles. It’s like raising people’s awareness about it. Well how do you quantify that? Well, you can’t really. You just have to believe that he helped educate people and open a lot of people’s eyes up by throwing himself on the tracks for what he felt was the right thing to do. When I was first doing the book I really wanted to find that literal thing, I wanted to find the numbers that would work to prove it, that it’s not just this ethereal, “Oh, well, he just did a lot.” But ultimately, that’s what you’re left with, and if that’s not satisfying to the stats part of you as a baseball fan or as a person, it makes it strangely more compelling and powerful that you have to say that Flood’s greatest contribution was educational. I think at one point I would’ve been disappointed with that. Is that it? As if that’s a bad thing. And now I look on it much more admiringly. He didn’t gain financially, he just lost. Even Miller said, after the case lost in the Supreme Court, all of these sort of things getting more attention was moving the players closer to being able to get something that was fairer to them, and he said, “Yeah, everyone’s gonna gain in this. The players will gain in this. The only one who will lose is Flood.” Which makes him more sympathetic in a way. Mike Epstein, who played with him on the Senators, said he saw him later and he described Flood as somebody who had been tied to the mast and taken one lash too many.
I don’t want to be overly nostalgic or romantic about a guy who’s noble and gets crushed because of it. I don’t mean to celebrate that in a disrespectful way, I more want to look at in a sympathetic way and say, this is what happened. It’s upsetting...
BC:
I think you can’t ignore that. One thing I liked was one of the writers that you quoted after the decision had come down said something to the effect that, yes, Flood had struck out...
Alex:
Yes! Larry Merchant said that. He fouled off so many pitches that he got the pitcher tired, or something like that.
BC:
Right, and probably if it were today maybe they would talk about it being a productive out or something like that.
Alex:
Yeah, you know the funny thing, it almost sounds a little corny or trite to say something like that, but for me personally in real life, if I don’t understand something and you use a baseball analogy or sports analogy, I’ll get it. That’s just me. When I read that, it not only makes sense, but it’s so in line with Flood’s sensibilities as a player. I mean, here was a guy who was known as the ultimate team guy, batting behind Lou Brock all those years, having been mentored particularly by Dick Groat on how to hit the other way, how to sacrifice yourself for the good of the team.
That was his personality on the field, so the fact that he ended up doing that off the field really makes a lot of sense. I think that one of the really wonderful things about baseball is that it’s this team game, and yet it’s such a lonely, isolating game. And that’s one of the major themes of Flood’s life, alienation and anxiety. Those experiences playing in the South, I can’t imagine how lonely that must’ve been for him, how isolating that must’ve been. And think of the position he played. He played center field. He was farthest away from everyone, and he’s 5’8”. Especially when you think about it in the context of the time, there’s no padded walls. There’s that one picture in the book when he had Jackie Robinson’s number and he’s in Sportsman’s Park and he’s leaping up to catch a ball, and the fence is huge. You get the sense of this small little guy against all this space, and that theme played itself out in what he did. In everything in baseball, whether you’re making a play in the field or you’re up at bat, yeah, you have teammates who are rooting for you, but you’re all on your own. And I think that’s what happened to Flood in court, too.
BC:
Yeah, that’s interesting.
Alex:
He was all on his own. These guys were behind him, but Bob Gibson said, “Yeah, I told Curt I’ll support him, but I’m gonna be about a hundred yards away from him because I don’t want any of the fallout to hit me.” I think it’s easy to be backward looking and criticize players for not coming out publicly in support of Flood, and Marvin Miller himself has taken responsibility for not encouraging the players to support him publicly, but I think the reality of the time was that even if you were a superstar you were afraid that if you were too mouthy that your career could be put in jeopardy. Baseball players had not been tested by a strike yet, so their solidarity wasn’t proven, so I think you really have to be understanding of their position at the time. And okay, if you play the fantasy out -- say Gibson and Willie Stargell and Joe Morgan and Hank Aaron and half a dozen or a dozen of the great ballplayers had showed up in court with Flood, would that have changed things? I think it would’ve definitely brought more attention and notoriety to Flood’s suit, but I don’t think it would’ve changed the ruling of it. Look at the way history played itself out. The owners didn’t budge until Seitz rules against him. They didn’t budge until they were legally forced to, and I don’t think that would’ve changed no matter what. I mean, shit, he goes to the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court agrees to hear the case, which gave Flood’s lawyers a pretty good feeling that, hey, why would they hear the case unless they were going to plan to overturn it. And the ruling itself, it’s a narrow loss, he loses 5-3, and even in the decision you have them saying, look, baseball’s antitrust exemption is an anomaly, it’s a complete aberration, but we’re not gonna get our hands dirty, we’re gonna pass the buck to congress. So even in losing, Flood wasn’t discredited. So I just think that there was a great reluctance on the part of the legal establishment to overturn a decision by someone as venerated as Oliver Wendell Holmes. And just as Holmes’s decision was really tinged with nostalgia and romance for the game, I think that was also the case in the Court’s Flood decision, too. Flood probably to his dying day believed that on some level it was racial, that there was no way that the powers that be, the establishment, so to speak, was gonna let a little black guy overturn their way, their system. And you can’t blame him for coming from that perspective. At the same time, I also think that legally he was just fighting an uphill battle that was too hard to overcome.
BC:
Let me ask you one more question.
Alex:
Sure.
BC:
This is something that just occurred to me today as I was getting ready for this. The NHL, in their Hall of Fame they have a Builders category -- I’m not a hockey fan, so I might be remembering wrong -- just guys who have contributed to the game that they’ll induct into the Hall of Fame. What do you think about something like that for Curt Flood? Do you think his impact on the game is that great? Does he deserve to be in the Hall of Fame just for fighting this fight?
Alex:
Personally, I think so, because he was a creditable player. He wasn’t just a scrub.
BC:
Right, that’s something that we really didn’t even get a chance to talk about.
Alex:
You’re talking about a very good player. You’re not talking about a superstar, but you’re talking about a star player. You look at his years, I would say ‘62 to ‘65, but you could even say the second half of ‘61. Here’s a guy that’s hitting .300 plus and getting roughly 200 hits every year. He’s a good offensive player, one of the five or ten best defensive players ever at his position, arguably the most important defensive position on the field. So you’re not talking about a lightweight. You’re not talking about Frank Robinson, on one hand, but you’re not talking about someone who’s insignificant. And certainly I think that just the fact that he made the kind of money he did makes him very significant as well. Makes the sacrifice that much more significant. When you realize the guy did give up a hundred thousand dollars a year. In 1970 there were ten guys in the league that made a hundred thousand dollars or more. And Flood, kind of ironically, was probably overpaid getting a hundred thousand dollars a year as a singles hitter who was a fine defensive player.
But nevertheless, that’s the position that he found himself in. That’s what he was willing to give up to change something that was patently wrong, patently wrong. I’ve also had a question where people say, well, players are making all this money now, sort of implying that baseball is horrible and sports and everything is ruined. You see the grips of that old myth that the owners spieled out that the game would be ruined without the reserve clause still exists, and it applies to baseball particularly, but to sports in a way that it doesn’t apply to, say, the entertainment industry. So you’ll hear people saying, well, is what Flood did right when it just led to the current situation today which is deemed as somehow inappropriate or awful. The answer to that has to be, of course what he did was right. Because even if getting rid of the reserve clause did ruin baseball, it still would’ve been the right thing , because the reserve clause was just patently wrong. And another thing I want to add about the kind of irony of that late sixties moment when things are getting more radical. You have guys in SDS who are either totally burned out, or they’re in Weatherman throwing bombs, you know what I mean? It’s not about reforming American ideals anymore, it’s just far more intense than that. But I think what Flood did, and this is what might’ve made him a radical in sporting circles but certainly not as a person, what Flood did, he did because he believed in the American Dream. He believed in American principles of having the right to choose your own employer. Those are very basic American ideals that he was acting upon, that he strongly believed in. And here was a guy who really had lived out the American Dream, right Hank?
BC:
Right, from where he started, certainly.
Alex:
From where he started, he believed that hard work and determination would lead to success. And Hank, if Flood had been Pete Rose, if he had been Richie Ashburn, if he had been white, he would’ve been considered the all-American hero. And he was considered a good guy, until...
BC:
He bit the hand.
Alex:
He bit the hand that fed him, so to speak. And then no one had any use for him anymore. And that was an era when black athletes acutely felt that after their playing days were over, they were gonna get kicked to the curb, that no one gave a shit about them. You didn’t have black coaches or assistant-head coaches or assistant to the assistant-head coaches at the time. It wasn’t like these guys were thinking, oh yeah, there’s a career for me after this in the game. So Flood, even when he had achieved a degree of success in the major leagues when his team won the World Series in 1964, okay, boom, he tries to get a house in a white suburb and has to run into a whole bunch of racist crap. When he starts becoming much more of a celebrity around St. Louis, he and the other black ballplayers are all the sudden being treated like heroes, whereas two or three years earlier they wouldn’t have been able to get in the place. Or even when they are being hailed by everyone in the place, the only other black people working there are bussers. He lived the American Dream, but he also lived the underside of the American Dream. He believed in it, I think, idealistically, but he also suffered the realities of it. And I think that’s why he was angry. When you read his autobiography, that’s why it comes off as angry. He probably wasn’t in the most coherent state of mind when he had that book written. It was a very particular time in his life, but for me, I can be sympathetic to why he would be pissed off.
BC:
As far as his impact, I didn’t get the sense that he fought this fight so that one day a kid from Miami could sign a contract for $250 million.
Alex:
No, that was probably the furthest...
BC:
He’s thinking about, basically, I’d like to be able to buy house and not worry that I’m gonna be traded next week. Or, if I’m tired of playing in St. Louis, I could have a choice.
Alex:
Now if the Cardinals had come to him and said, “Okay, this is what we’re thinking about. What do you think of this, this, or this?” that would’ve been different, I think, to him. But the fact that it was just, “Okay, you’re going here because we said so, and we said so now. Get going.” He’s just, “I can’t abide by this, this is just ridiculous.” And he was just at that perfect -- I don’t know if perfect is the right word -- but he was at that moment in his career where he had accomplished enough that he was willing to sacrifice it. Who know, maybe five years earlier, maybe he wouldn’t have been ready, but there were all these events that were happening. Like I said, Miller coming along and making them all aware of this stuff. I don’t want to sound too trite about this, but you know when you think of like, dramatically, this was the defining moment in his life, at least what he’s most remembered for, and it’s almost as if everything in his life led up to that moment. Everything he had gone through informed him making that decision. So there’s no other way to imagine him doing anything differently. His experiences completely informed what he did. I think what happens is that, as you mentioned, one of the things that gets obscured is what a wonderful ballplayer he was. And I think for him, because it took him so long to get over it, and because he didn’t really have a huge public life, and was never really embraced officially back into the game. He went to old timers days later on, and things like this, but he never got a real job working for a team again. I think he probably moved on from it and felt, jeez, this is the only thing I’m known for? His kids would go and get financial aid at college, and they’d be like, “Your dad’s Curt Flood? You’re rich!” And they’d be like, no, not really... So I think the legacy because he lost, and because he was so hurt by it, I think that he really felt like, gosh, people really think I tried to screw something up that I loved. And what’s lost in it is how much he did love baseball, how great he was at it. But at the same time, one of the things -- I don’t know if you caught it in the book -- but one of the things that really struck me was that from a pretty young age, Flood was pretty clear-eyed about baseball being a vocation.
BC:
Yeah, that was interesting to me actually, that he talked about “going to work.”
Alex:
And I think that that was very true for him, because he had talent in other areas, maybe, but also because he saw the situation for what it was. He was not a dummy. He made a comment when he came back to play for the Senators, that he was in a tough spot. He didn’t want to look like a hypocrite, at the same time he needed the dough. Someone asked him, do you play because you love the game, or because you need the money? And says, “Well, both, but this is work for me. I don’t think I’d play for free. I wouldn’t play for fun.” As intense a competitor as Flood was, he wasn’t Pete Rose who was gonna run through hell in the proverbial gasoline suit to play the game. This was the way he made a living, and that was it.
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