Curt Flood

"I was told by the general manager that a white player had received a higher raise than me. Because white people required more money to live than black people. That is why I wasn't going to get a raise."

Curt Flood, the All-Star center fielder for the St. Louis Cardinals in the 1960's became a pioneering figure in the legal attack on baseball's reserve clause that foreshadowed the era of free agents.

At bat and especially on the field, Flood was an outstanding player for a dozen years, a center fielder who won the Gold Glove for fielding excellence seven years in a row and batted over .300 six times.

But it was his stiff resolve in challenging the unfairness and the perpetuation of a baseball system that kept players tied to their teams year after year unless traded or sold that carried Flood beyond the game.

It all crystallized when the Cardinals traded Flood to the Philadelphia Phillies after the 1969 season and Flood refused to go. Represented by Arthur J. Goldberg, a former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court and United States Ambassador to the United Nations, Flood triggered a legal war that shook baseball.

Flood actually lost the battle in Federal District Court in New York when the judge suggested that the players and club owners negotiate the issue. But almost six years later, he won the war when other baseball players successfully sued and broke from the reserve system, which for almost a century had bound a player to his team year after year.

As a result, before another generation had passed, salaries in all sports soared, teams sought salary caps to contain their payrolls and large cities were required to pay small cities millions in compensation.

The solitary figure who prompted this revolution, Curtis Charles Flood, was born in Houston on January 18, 1938, but was raised in Oakland, California. He was short and skinny, but he signed his first professional contract while still a senior at Oakland Technical High School.

After two years in the minor leagues and briefly with the Cincinnati Reds, he was traded in 1958 to St. Louis, where he played for the next 12 seasons and three times played in the World Series -- against the New York Yankees in 1964, the Boston Red Sox in 1967 and the Detroit Tigers in 1968.

His talents were unquestioned. During a career that lasted from 1956 to 1971, he batted .293 and reigned in center field for the Cardinals.

During one span, he played in 226 consecutive games without committing an error and in 1966 went the entire season without making a misplay. He even became a portrait artist of some talent who was commissioned to paint August A. Busch Jr., the owner of the Cardinals, and his children in oil.

At the peak of his career, though, the man with the flawless glove misjudged a line drive and supplied a regrettable footnote to the 1968 World Series against Detroit.

The Tigers and Cardinals were tied at three games apiece with Bob Gibson facing Mickey Lolich in Game 7. They were scoreless for six innings. Then in the Tiger seventh, Gibson retired the first two batters. But after two singles, Jim Northrup followed with a hard drive to center.

Flood lost sight of the ball momentarily, took a couple of steps in toward home plate, reversed direction and slipped while the ball carried over his head for a triple and two runs. The Tigers won, 4-1, and captured the Series.

A year later, the Cardinals slid into fourth place and Busch cleaned house. In one blockbuster trade, he sent Flood, Tim McCarver and Joe Hoerner to Philadelphia for Richie Allen, Cookie Rojas and Jerry Johnson. But Flood sued for his freedom from a system that ''reserved'' players to their teams and that had won exemption from the antitrust laws as far back as 1922.

The trial opened May 19, 1970, before Judge Irving Ben Cooper in the United States Court House in lower Manhattan. The defendants included Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, the presidents of the National and American Leagues and the chief executives of all 24 teams then in the big leagues. They were being challenged by a 32-year-old outfielder who was making $90,000 a year but was determined not to be traded without his consent. When he was asked which team he wanted to play for, he testified, ''The team that makes me the best offer.''

The reserve clause in contracts was not toppled during the trial, but it came under sustained attack. The trial consumed 10 weeks, 2,000 pages of transcript and 56 exhibits. Judge Cooper suggested that ''reasonable men'' could find a solution outside court and ruled, ''We are convinced that the reserve clause can be fashioned so as to find acceptance by player and club.''

Flood, who sat out the 1970 season, did not think so. He signed with the Washington Senators in 1971 for $110,000, but after two months suddenly quit and flew to Europe.

When the case was appealed to the Supreme Court, the justices -- in a 5-3 ruling in 1972 -- supported the District Court and the Court of Appeals and left the reserve clause undisturbed. But Curt Flood had set the stage for the revolution that followed in 1976, and generations of free agents poured through.

''Every major league baseball player owes Curt Flood a debt of gratitude that can never be repaid,'' pitchers David Cone and Tom Glavine -- the current A.L. and N.L. player representatives -- said in a joint statement yesterday. ''With the odds overwhelmingly against him, he was willing to take a stand for what he knew was right.''

Flood never was voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. But to Marvin Miller, who served as executive director of the players union during Flood's legal fight, it hardly matters.

''There is no Hall of Fame for people like Curt,'' Miller said.

He died yesterday in Los Angeles on January 20, 1997. He was 59. Flood died at the U.C.L.A. Medical Center, where he had been a patient after developing pneumonia. He had been suffering from throat cancer.

Flood is survived by a wife, Judy, and a son from a previous marriage.

Sources: Topps Curt Flood (1968) #180; The New York Times (Jan.. 21, 1997), Joseph Durso