MVN - Most Valuable Network

Senator Flood

Dred Scott in spikes, as George F. Will so memorably analogised Curt Flood, would have been seventy years old in January. With chemotherapy weakening him enough to lure fatal pneumonia, despite a 90 percent survival opportunity afforded him by his doctors, the man who led baseball’s reserve clause toward the quicksand died at 59.

There are two things you probably tend to forget about Curt Flood, assuming that you knew them in the first place.

1) He didn’t exactly end baseball’s reserve clause, try though he did, all the way to the Supreme Court. But Flood v. Kuhn did cut the thickets enough to show Andy Messersmith the path to travel and win the war he had begun in such isolation.

“Curt Flood stood up for us,” catcher Ted Simmons would say. “[Catfish] Hunter (who won his free agency when Oakland owner Charles Finley reneged on guaranteed insurance payments; Hunter sued on grounds it broke the contract) showed what was out there. Andy showed us the way.”

2) Flood didn’t exactly end his playing career when he refused to go to Philadelphia in the deal that made talented, troubled Dick Allen a St. Louis Cardinal. (And, a Phillie out of Tim McCarver. The other players in the deal: Relief pitcher Joe Hoerner and outfielder Byron Browne to the Phillies; second baseman Cookie Rojas and pitcher Jerry Johnson to the Cardinals, with the Redbirds sending the Phillies two minor leaguers—Willie Montanez and Bob Browning—to complete the deal.)

Curt Flood had another hurrah to play, when he returned from Europe to suit up for for the 1971 Washington Senators, the last major league team to play in the nation’s capital (”Washington—First in war, first in peace, and last in the American League”) for thirty-three years to come.

Flood became a Senator because Nats II owner Bob Short needed him as badly as Flood might have needed to be needed. Short was headline hunting already, as it was, and might have been looking to cauterise a lot of sting from a slightly more surreal deal than bringing aboard baseball’s reserve clause challenger could have done.

Three weeks before he swapped three minor leaguers to the Phillies for the right to negotiate with Flood, Short reeled in Denny McLain from the Detroit Tigers, with whom McLain had outworn his welcome at last. Speculation ran that taking McLain involved a dubious quid pro quo: Short’s financing to buy the Senators in the first place included a $2.2 million loan from Fruehauf, the Detroit-based trailer makers (Short had made his money in trucking), and rumours persisted that the Tigers themselves had helped Short swing the loan.

The loan caught the federal government’s attention, according to Senators historian Tom Deveaux, when the $2.2 million went from Fruehauf to a Short trucking concern and then to the Senators’ bank account, the Interstate Commerce Commission wanting to know if Short’s concern launched a business deal with no competitive bidding, involving a company (the Nats II) who shared officers and directors with it. Short was acquitted in due course.

He’d barely consummated the McLain deal when he got the formal rights to negotiate with Flood. (One of the three minor leaguers he sent the Phillies was Greg Goossen, a nondescript catcher, once a New York Met and also once a Seattle Pilot. Goossen, now a character actor, was immortalised by Casey Stengel: “Here’s a fella, Goossen, he’s 29 and in a few months he has a chance to be 30.”)

Flood was receptive enough to returning to baseball, especially when Short offered him $110,000 (including an offer to advance him half that salary) to play in 1971. He needed the money badly: his portraiture business (one of the main reasons he didn’t want to leave St. Louis, where one of his most lucrative commissions had been a family oil portrait of Cardinals owner Gussie Busch and his children) was struggling, and his former wife sought child support he could barely afford anymore.

But with his challenge to the reserve clause in the courts already, the question was whether Flood signing with the Senators would stand scrutiny.

Commissioner Bowie Kuhn may have rebuked Flood’s original petition to reject the reserve clause, and allow him to bid himself openly now that he’d played out his Cardinals contract, in a small masterpiece of condescension. But Kuhn now agreed that, while the clause would have to stay in the new contract, it could also include a unique condition: the deal would not prejudice anything then in dispute in the court case.

That wasn’t the only unique factor involved in Mr. Flood going to Washington. Short and Flood had a secret agreement: Not only would Short agree not to trade Flood during the 1971 season, but if the two couldn’t come to terms on a 1972 deal, Short would make Flood a free agent.

That deal never went into writing, Deveaux noted, for one good reason: under baseball’s rules of the time, it would have been deemed an illegal deal. Indeed, Short and Flood agreed that if word of the conditions ever went public, Short would deny all.

And there was Flood, on Opening Day, 1971, in RFK Stadium, suited up for the Senators and their rather fabled manager. (You may have heard of him: Ted Williams, who managed the Nats II to their only winning record, in 1969.) President Richard Nixon, customarily an Opening Day fixture in Washington, wouldn’t be there for once, thanks to being tied up on official business at his Western White House in San Clemente, California.

“You say the President wasn’t there that day?” Flood asked Washington Post columnist Thomas Boswell, telegraphing a wisecrack Boswell included in “All of Us Bear the Mark of the Lash,” a sadly sweet retrospective of the final Senators’ Opening Day lineup. “Well, if the President didn’t come, why was I there?”

Actually, Flood was there to do his new team a big favour against an Oakland Athletics sprout named Vida Blue. There was Dred Scott in spikes, in the in the bottom of the first, squeezing a walk out of Blue with another kid named Toby Harrah already aboard with a leadoff single.

Flood took second on Mike Epstein’s RBI single, third when Joe Foy (once a Flood opponent, when the Cardinals played the Boston Red Sox in that thriller of a 1967 World Series) loaded the pads thanks to Bert Campaneris’s bobble at shortstop, and came home unearned when Nats II catcher Paul Casanova sliced a single.

That was also Flood taking another walk on Blue’s dime in the bottom of the second, with two out and one on. He took second on another Campaneris error (allowing batter Frank Howard to reach first) to re-load the bases, took third when Blue walked home Senators starting pitcher Dick Bosman (he’d drawn a one-out walk), and came home unearned, again, when Jim Panther, relieving Blue and making his major league debut, wild pitched him in.

The game was two innings old, the Senators had a 4-0 lead (Bosman would finish what he started, an 8-0 season-opening shutout), and Flood scored half the first four runs. He ended up going 1-for-3 on the day—he beat out a bunt in the Washington fourth to load up the bases for Howard, who hit one of the inning’s two sacrifice flies to make it 6-0, Nats.

“We didn’t know who Vida Blue was,” Bosman would remember to Boswell. “If we’d known he was gonna go out and win his next dozen, we might not have touched him.”

It was Flood’s finest day as a Senator, alas. He would play in thirteen games but never collect more than a single hit in any of them, going 7-for-35 with four runs scored, two driven in, and five walks. He was still an impossible strikeout (he fanned only twice over those 35 at-bats) and double play catch (his lifetime average was grounding into eleven double plays per 162 games; he grounded into only one over these thirteen games). He could still cover ground enough in the outfield.

But Flood knew, if no one else wanted to know, that he’d just about had it. (As things turned out, so had Denny McLain; after opening the season a respectable 3-2 with an ERA under three, McLain went on to spend the season griping about pitching on unusual rest under Williams and to finish 10-22, the first man to become a 20-game loser two seasons after being a 20-game winner; he was finished by arm trouble a season later.)

So on 27 April 1971, at about the time his court case had taken the setback that would drive it to the Supreme Court, Flood walked away from the field for good. He left Short a terse thank you note, regretting he no longer had it, citing his ongoing financial crises, then went to Spain for awhile before tending bar for more than a year, it was said, on Majorca.

He didn’t take long to decide there was no such thing as ending his major league comeback too soon. “I’m sure I was right,” he told Boswell. “Those young kids were running all over me.” In time, he actually did a season or two as an Oakland Athletics broadcaster and, believe it or not, commissioner of the short-lived Senior Professional Baseball League.

Short’s mishandling of the Senators before moving them to Texas, in spite of public promises not to do so, made him public enemy number one in a capital never short of public enemies actual or alleged.

He’d priced Nats tickets and concessions almost out of the market after his first whiff of field success in 1969. (The Senators contended in Williams’s first season running the show; Williams won Manager of the Year for it.)

He tried to strong-arm a new stadium lease in which he’d pay no rent until the team drew a million a season. The D.C. Armory Board, which owned the stadium, eventually agreed to that term—while still demanding over $170,000 in unpaid back rent from which they refused to budge.

Meanwhile, Short’s dubious stabs at finding buyers for the team—and threats to sue American League owners who blocked him if he moved the team to Texas—only confirmed suspicions that he’d handled the club, as the Post’s irreplaceable Shirley Povich described, like a man buying a car for $9,000, abusing it into $3,000 spending on repairs, then claiming the car was worth $12,000.

Povich himself had been one of Flood’s defenders, come to think of it.

[N]ot all his fellow athletes are making common cause with Flood. They don’t want to be befriended by him and in fact all of them recently quoted on the subject, Carl Yastrzemski, Ted Williams, Harmon Killebrew and Frank Howard, say they prefer to go along with the club owners and the reserve clause, and some of them suggest Flood is being used.

The intimation is that Flood is merely lending his name to a grand gesture by Marvin Miller, the $50,000-a-year players’ consultant, to scare the owners into more concessions. Wrong, according to Miller, who would hardly dare to vow, as he does, that Flood came to him as a volunteer, out of the blue sky, and asked him for help in the courts.

The yelp of the club owners is that their whole game would come tumbling down if there were no reserve clause binding players to teams until they were sold or traded. This has been their popular defence for years . . . And their athletes have not been disposed against it all these years. Flood is the first to raise a cry and it is natural that those long uncomplaining natives of the system would wonder what kind of a radical they have in their midst.

—Shirley Povich, Washington Post, 26 January 1970.

Fan rioting in the stands on the final home day of 1971 turned a likely season-ending Senators win into a 9-0 forfeit to the Yankees. Baseball had seen no forfeit since 1954. The most prominent of anti-Short banners festooning RFK were the ones hoisting Short’s initials.

The only joy on the day was the bottom of the sixth, when Frank Howard—who admitted to pressing up to that point in the hope he’d do exactly this, for the Washington fans with whom he’d enjoyed a mutual love affair since he arrived in 1965—drove one into the upper deck, launching the ultimately pointless Nats comeback and weeping shamelessly after he tipped his cap crossing the plate.

Curt Flood’s was probably the only thank-you Bob Short got from anyone connected with Washington all season long.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008 at 1:27 am and is filed under Curt Flood, Washington Senators, Flood v. Kuhn, Catbird, RFK Stadium, Philadelphia Phillies, St. Louis Cardinals, Free Agents. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.