Curt Flood’s fight paved the way
My biography of Dave McNally would be incomplete without describing the crucial role that Curt Flood played in the battle to gain workplace fairness for baseball players.
Flood, a star player for the St. Louis Cardinals in the 1960s and a major contributor to their three World Series teams in that decade, learned in October 1969 that the Cards had traded him to Philadelphia. This came without his permission. In fact, he was so opposed to being shipped off like a piece of property that he hired a lawyer and took his case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
As Brad Snyder, author of the 2008 book, A Well-Paid Slave: Curt Flood’s Fight for Free Agency in Professional Sports, put it, the trade “reawakened latent feelings of unfairness about the reserve system. His eventual decision to act on those feelings led to the first in a series of fights for free agency that altered the landscape of professional sports.”
Snyder’s book explains how baseball’s reserve clause came to be. It started in 1879 when the National League, then made up of nine teams, agreed to allowed each team to reserve five players. Other NL teams were not allowed to sign the reserved players, who thus couldn’t decide to change teams.
By 1903, when the National League and the newer American League came to an agreement that ushered in major-league baseball as we know it, with the season-ending World Series, the reserve system was entrenched. By 1969, major-league rules allowed each team to reserve forty players (twenty-five on each major-league roster as well as fifteen minor leaguers) and block them from signing with other teams, according to Snyder.
Team owners accomplished this by including what was known as the reserve clause in the standard player contract, detailed in Paragraph 10(a) of the Uniform Player Contract. It said: “(T)he Club shall have the right … to renew the contract for a period of one year.”
A team could automatically renews a player’s contract for another season with as much as a twenty percent pay cut from his previous season’s salary. Someone might think the player contract was a one-year agreement with a one-year option on a player’s services. Players, however, knew the reality of how team owners worked, that they couldn’t negotiate with other teams and could have their pay for the following year automatically cut by twenty percent.
Players had no choice but to accept their teams’ final salary offers and sign deals each year with the same same one-year option provision.
“A contract for one year became, in effect, a contract for life,” Snyder wrote.
Flood refused to play for the Phillies and thereby “sacrificed his own career to change the system and to benefit” future players, after the McNally-Messersmith ruling was handed down and upheld in federal court. Nowadays, players are free to shop their services to other teams after their sixth year in the major leagues.
Catfish Hunter, who became known as baseball’s first big-money free agent, won an arbitration case against the Oakland Athletics in November 1974. He had agreed with the A’s on a two-year, $200,000 contract that stipulated the team would make $50,000 payments to the life insurance annuity of his choice during the first two seasons.
A’s owner Charlie Finley, however, reneged on making the annuity payments after he learned that he would have to pay $25,000 in taxes, due immediately. That prompted Hunter to file a breach-of-contract claim that went to arbitration before Peter Seitz.
Two weeks after he won his arbitration case, Hunter signed a five-year contract with the New York Yankees worth $3.35 million, making him the highest-paid pitcher in history at the time.
Marvin Miller, head of the baseball players union, said the benefits from the Hunter and McNally-Messersmith decisions would not have been possible without Flood’s struggle and sacrifice.
As Snyder wrote, quoting Miller, “I can’t help but think both Hunter and Messersmith/McNally had to, at the appropriate time, have been influenced by the courage of a Curt Flood. As in any case of an advance that had to be fought for, the struggle of those who came before, including those who didn’t succeed, had to have have an impact on those who later proved successful.”
Snyder wrote that Flood didn’t begrudge the million-dollar contracts awarded to Hunter and Messersmith. It was “cool” that “other people have benefited” from his lawsuit.
“Those guys are making more money and deservedly so. They’re the show. They’re it. They’re making money because they work hard. Don’t you tell me one minute that Catfish Hunter doesn’t work his butt off. I know he does and he’s the show.”
Flood, however, expressed bitter feelings about the McNally-Messersmith decision because it brought back his feelings of unfairness about his own Supreme Court case.
“(T)here was no way a black man was going to win that suit,” he wrote in 1977, in a quote Snyder used. “Listen, it eventually took two white guys–Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally–to destroy the reserve clause. Their battles were appreciably the same as mine.”