Curt Flood

Curtis Charles Flood was born on the eighteenth of January 1938 at Houston, Texas, the youngest of Herman and Laura Flood's six children. While Curt was still a toddler, around 1940, the family moved west to Oakland, California, where his parents worked long hours in low-paying jobs — Herman in wartime defense industries and later at Fairmont Hospital, Laura in a small café and mending parachutes — to keep the household out of poverty and to nurture their son's early gift for the game.

Signed out of Oakland by the Cincinnati Redlegs, Flood debuted in the majors in 1956. Traded to the St. Louis Cardinals, he patrolled center field from 1958 through 1969, becoming one of the finest defensive outfielders of his era: a three-time All-Star, a winner of seven consecutive Gold Gloves, and a .293 lifetime hitter who batted over .300 in six seasons and anchored Cardinals pennant and World Series clubs.

In October 1969 the Cardinals traded Flood to Philadelphia. He refused to report, writing to Commissioner Bowie Kuhn that he did not regard himself "as a piece of property to be bought and sold." Backed by the Players Association, he sued baseball over its reserve clause. Though the Supreme Court ruled against him in Flood v. Kuhn in 1972, his stand catalyzed the coming of free agency and reshaped the economics of American sport; in 1998 Congress passed the Curt Flood Act.

His challenge cost him his career, yet it enlarged the freedom of every player who followed. Diagnosed with cancer, he died in Los Angeles on the twentieth of January 1997, two days after his fifty-ninth birthday. Curt Flood is honored as the man who traded his own livelihood for the dignity of those who came after him.