Curt Flood

Curt Flood had a stellar baseball career, winning seven Gold Gloves for his play in the outfield and posting a .293 batting average over a 15-year career. But it was what he did off the field—in a courtroom—that changed Major League Baseball forever.

In 1969 Curt Flood was traded from the St. Louis Cardinals to the Philadelphia Phillies. At the time players belonged to their teams as if they were property. If a team wanted to keep them, they played for the same team their entire career. If a team wanted to trade them, they had to go to the other team. Until Curt Flood said no.

Early years

Curtis Charles Flood was born in 1938, the youngest of Herman and Laura Flood’s six children. The family moved from Houston to Oakland, California, when Curt was two years old. Growing up, he developed a love of baseball and art. His father bought him the art supplies that helped him refine his skills to become a talented painter. Despite his small stature, he displayed exceptional baseball talent and was signed to a minor-league contract by the Cincinnati Reds when he was still in high school.

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If his father instilled in him a love of art, his mother instilled a sense of history. Laura Flood had grown up in the South and had endured the indignities of Jim Crow laws. Her influence would help shape a civil rights activist in her son.

Major-league career and civil rights

After a brief stint with the Reds, Flood was traded to the St. Louis Cardinals after the 1957 season. He played in St. Louis until 1969. During that time the Cardinals won two World Series, and Flood was named to three All-Star teams. It was also a key moment for the American civil rights movement, and Flood found himself in the center of it.

In 1962 the 24-year-old Flood participated in NAACP-organized marches in Mississippi, joining Martin Luther King, Jr., and Jackie Robinson in protests. In 1964, when he tried to move his family into a house in the San Francisco suburbs, the landlord—who had not known the family was Black when the papers were signed—had changed the locks and was rumored to be camped out with a shotgun. Flood, a big-league baseball player whose team had just claimed the World Series, sued and won.

Flood’s Cardinals won the World Series again in 1967, made it to the series but lost the next year, and failed to make the playoffs in 1969. It was after that season that ownership traded Flood and a number of Cardinals teammates to Philadelphia. The ability of MLB teams to trade players without their consent (the so-called reserve clause) dated back to the 1870s and was upheld in 1922 and 1953 Supreme Court rulings that gave baseball an exemption from antitrust laws. The reserve clause meant that teams could “reserve” a player’s rights by offering him a new contract. It gave players no leverage in negotiating salary increases and no say in trades.

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Taking a stand

Flood refused to report to the Phillies, instead filing a suit against MLB, saying that although he was well compensated, “a well-paid slave is, nonetheless, a slave.” (Flood was making $90,000 a year in 1969, or more than $800,000 in 2026 dollars. For comparison, MLB established a minimum salary of $780,000 for the 2026 season.)

In 1969 Flood wrote a letter to baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn, saying that he believed the reserve clause violated his “basic rights as a citizen.” He asked Kuhn to make it known to all MLB teams that he was available for the 1970 season. Kuhn refused, and Flood turned to Marvin Miller, a labor leader and the first full-time executive director of the MLB Players Association, to guide him in the case known as Flood v. Kuhn.

It was an audacious act—and one that even Miller warned Flood seemed doomed to failure from the outset. Miller recalled that he thought there was little chance of winning and, even if Flood did win, he would never be allowed to play ball again. Flood’s response was to ask if Miller thought a case could benefit players in the future. When Miller said it could, Flood’s reply was “That’s good enough for me.”

What Flood was fighting for was free agency, the right for players to negotiate their own deals. Flood lost his case and appealed to the Supreme Court, where he lost again, but on a technicality. The Court said in 1972 that free agency could only be attained through a labor agreement. Meanwhile, Flood signed to play for the Washington Senators in 1971. But he left the team early in the season and never played again.

In late 1975, however, Miller, still representing the players union, argued for free agency on behalf of two pitchers. When an arbitrator declared them free agents, much of what Flood had fought for was achieved. In the next collective bargaining agreement, the reserve clause was modified to allow players with six or more years of service to make their own deals.

Flood paid a price for his actions. In the wake of his Supreme Court case, he received death threats. He had long struggled with alcoholism and moved to Spain, where he opened a bar before ultimately being hospitalized and treated. He died in 1997 of cancer. At his funeral Jesse Jackson eulogized Flood:

Because he came our way, we are better. Baseball didn’t change Curt Flood. Curt Flood changed baseball. Curt opened the floodgates.

Flood’s legacy

Jackson was not wrong.

In 1998 Congress passed, and Pres. Bill Clinton signed, the Curt Flood Act, which officially removed antitrust exemptions from Major League Baseball. The impact of the law has been minimal, but the impact of free agency on baseball players has been exponential. The average annual salary of an MLB player in 2026 was $5.3 million, more than 10 times what Flood made in his 15-year career.

When Flood died in 1997, MLB pitchers Tom Glavine and David Cone, representing all the players who benefited from his legal action, acknowledged his role, saying in a statement, “Every major league baseball player owes Curt Flood a debt of gratitude that can never be repaid. With the odds overwhelmingly against him, he was willing to take a stand for what he knew was right.”