Pyrrhic defeat

The Curious Case of Curt Flood

(2011)

The best big league center fielder of my youth played for the team I rooted for when the Mets no longer had a realistic chance of competing for a pennant--which in those days was usually mid-April--but when that team traded him to another, he said no, in thunder, and his reward for most of the rest of his life (he died of throat cancer at my age now) was the exacerbation of all the problems that already existed, for him and for many ballplayers: a tenuous homelife, a precarious handle on financial matters, and a deep and abiding taste for alcohol.

Curt Flood was the right man at not quite the right time, and his rebellion set the stage for the crippling of the reserve clause barely half a decade later, but though he took his case all the way to the Supreme Court (where by all accounts former Justice Arthur Goldberg presented one of the most inept oral arguments in the institution's history), his crusade was, technically, at least, a failure.

I try to remember what my baseball-crazy teenage self felt about Flood's principled stance, but that was a long time ago. I'm reasonably sure I didn't simply adopt baseball's stance that Flood's success would destroy baseball--if I had, he would have been anathema, and I'd remember that. But as good a civil rights game as I talked for a 15-year-old in a little town with no African-Americans, I'm pretty sure I lacked the vision to see the issue in those terms. In short, like most of his colleagues (even, heartbreakingly, as we see in the film, his best friend on the Cardinals, Bob Gibson), I probably just lay low and waited for the storm to pass.