Chapter 1: Who was Curt Flood and why is he significant in baseball history?
On NPR's Wildcard podcast, Julio Torres says he doesn't need to prove himself to anyone.
When someone makes me feel like I have to prove something to them, I just walk away.
Really?
I'm like, seek help.
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At 4 a.m. on October 8th, 1969, Kurt Flood got woken up by a phone call. Flood was 31 years old at the time, and he'd spent the last 12 years, almost his entire adult life, playing center field for the St. Louis Cardinals. He was an all-star.
He'd led the Cardinals to the World Series three times, Sports Illustrated called him the best center fielder in baseball, and he planned to finish out his career in St. Louis.
But when he rolled over and picked up the phone at 4 a.m., a middle manager from the Cardinals front office told Kurt Flood he had just been traded to the Philadelphia Phillies.
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Chapter 2: What led to Curt Flood's trade to the Philadelphia Phillies?
I mean, highest-paid players in baseball?
It must be like $2 billion. Close. It's $800,000.
I mean, it's a lot. Well, so is it a lot or a little? It's a lot of money relative to somebody with a normal job today, but it's like, I don't know, 30 times less than a star baseball player would make today. And so let's think about why. Why were top players in baseball making so much less in 1969? Well, part of it is baseball was just a smaller game then. It's a more lucrative game today.
There is more money overall. The pie is bigger. Broadcasting, merchandising, everything, advertising. But there's another reason, a reason that's, you know— the center of today's show, and that is the players didn't have very much leverage because of the reserve clause, because they couldn't go play for other teams.
So as a result, they were getting a smaller share of the money that was coming into the game, a smaller share of the pie.
And we're used to thinking of sports as different, but think about it for a moment how wild this is. Imagine if every year Google and Apple drafted the computer science graduates coming out of Stanford and Carnegie Mellon and MIT. And when you got drafted, you had to go work for that company.
Even if you didn't like Apple, like you had a contract and you had to work for them forever until they fired you or traded you to another tech company, in which case you had to work for that company or not be a computer engineer. The employees would have no bargaining power. They would absolutely be underpaid, not what they're paid now, right? It would be flagrantly, wildly illegal.
And in fact, this is not a hypothetical.
It was somewhere back around 2010. There was, in fact, this scandal where Google and Apple and a few other companies had these secret deals not to recruit each other's employees. It wasn't quite as stringent as the reserve clause, but it was definitely illegal. And they had to pay hundreds of millions of dollars because you can't do that.
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Chapter 3: How did the reserve clause affect players' rights in baseball?
And the head of the union tells Flood that there have been a couple of similar court cases in past decades and that the players always lost.
And to be fair, there is something to the owner's stance here because professional sports do require at least a little bit of collusion. Some light collusion. Well, you have to show up in the same place at the same time, right? Obviously. But also because you want the teams to be competitive, right? You want to have exciting games. The fans want that. The owners want this.
This is how you make money. So if you had a truly free market where anyone could just start a new team, pay any amount for the best talent, one really rich guy, and you know this would happen, would just start a team, buy up all the best players, and then win every game, and nobody would watch. It would ruin the entire league.
Chapter 4: What motivated Curt Flood to sue Major League Baseball?
And baseball fans right now are probably thinking of the Dodgers, who have the highest paid team in baseball, who've won the last two World Series. And we will talk more about that at the end of the show. They are fun to watch. OK, so back to Kurt Flood trying to think about whether to sue baseball. There's one other thing that is stacked against him, and that is this.
When you look back at the cases that came before Curt Flood, you really get the sense that the judges just kind of didn't want to mess with baseball. Like baseball, it's like apple pie. It's this special game. It's not a normal business. And you see this in their decisions. So remember, Curt Flood had gone to the head of the union for advice.
And the bottom line, the head of the union tells Flood, is your case is like a million to one shot. And even if you happen to win, you're not going to get damages because you're already making this huge, you know, huge for the time salary.
Oh, and also, by the way, if you bring this case, your career as a player is over because nobody's going to want to hire the guy who sued baseball, even as a manager, as whatever. You're done with baseball if you bring this case.
So it's scary. I mean, he's being told, like, you could throw your whole career away if you make this move.
And importantly, I think, Kurt Flood has already been through a lot in his life up to this point. When he was coming up in professional baseball in the 1950s, he played on minor league teams in North Carolina and Georgia, where there was just constant racist heckling from the fans. One time, he even got yelled at by his team's own trainer for
because he put his dirty uniform in the laundry with his white teammates' uniforms. And in fact, the trainer pulled Flood's uniform out with a stick and sent it to a black laundry 10 miles away.
And as Flood is thinking about swing baseball, race is clearly part of the dynamic in his mind. All of the owners are white. More and more of the players are black.
And after the union head tells Flood how he'll probably lose his case and be ostracized from baseball, Flood says, OK, but if I do win, will it help other players in the future? And the union head says, yeah, it will. And Flood says, that's good enough for me. Let's do it. He decides to sue Major League Baseball.
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Chapter 5: What challenges did Curt Flood face during his legal battle?
Now, we can step back here and ask kind of a fundamental economic question. What has this shift in sports meant for the way that the pie is split between capital and labor, between the owners and the players? And there's a pretty clear answer. In the early 70s, when Curt Flood brought his case, less than a quarter of the revenue going to the teams went to the players.
Today, it's around half, half the revenue. So the share of the pie going to players, to labor, has basically doubled.
That's amazing in economics. Now, it is worth pointing out that in the last couple of years, the potential downsides of free agencies, in fact, the same ones that the owners had warned about at the very beginning, have kind of come to pass. The Los Angeles Dodgers, may they forever win, have far and away the highest payroll in baseball. Famously, they are paying Shohei Ohtani $70 million a year.
Asterisk, most of that is deferred. Yes, still a lot of money. And they've won the World Series two years in a row, dynasty. You know, there's an argument to be made that they are just buying their way to championships.
That is a reasonable argument, but I think it's clear that it doesn't have to be that way. I mean, just look at the NFL and the NBA. In those leagues, about half of all the revenues go to player salaries, similar to, you know, the way the pie is divided in baseball. But the NFL and NBA players' unions have agreed to a salary cap, basically a total amount that each team can pay all of its players.
There are some wrinkles, but that's basically the way it works. Which means it's possible for players to get a bigger piece of the pie without letting one team buy its way to victory. And by the way, the current contract for the Baseball Players Union is coming up for renewal at the end of this year. And you know what the owners want? They want a salary cap. They want a salary cap. Yeah, sure.
Cap my downside.
I guess, but it doesn't necessarily mean more of the pie goes to the owners. But anyways, the players don't want the salary cap. And so we'll see what happens with that.
So that's basically the end of the story for now in the news. But we need to finish Kurt Flood's personal story.
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