During most of Flood’s career, the MLBPA was a toothless tiger. Players had no rights to determine the conditions of their employment. That began to change when the MLBPA hired Marvin Miller, who’d been the steelworkers union’s chief economist and negotiator, as its first full-time director in 1966.
Miller instructed ballplayers in the ABCs of trade unionism: Fight for your rights; stick together against management; work on behalf of players who will come after you; prepare yourself—professionally and financially—for life after playing ball; and don’t allow owners to divide players by race, income, or their place in the celebrity pecking order.
Two years after Miller took the union’s reins, the MLBPA negotiated the first-ever collective bargaining agreement in professional sports. Then, in 1970, the MLBPA established players’ rights to binding arbitration over salaries and grievances. From that point on, disputes would be settled by independent arbitrators rather than the MLB commissioner, who worked for the owners. That year, players also won the right to hire agents to negotiate their contracts.
Every MLB player had in his contract what was known as “the reserve clause,” which tethered players to their teams. Contracts, which were limited to one season, “reserved” the team’s right to “retain” the player for the next season. The players had no leverage to negotiate better deals. Each year, the team owners told players, “Take it, or leave it.” Even superstars went hat-in-hand to owners at the end of the season, begging for a raise. Most players had jobs during the off-season to make ends meet. When Hall of Fame pitcher Nolan Ryan broke into the major leagues in 1966, he spent the winter months working at a gas station.
After the 1969 season, the Cardinals owners decided to trade Flood to the Philadelphia Phillies, but he didn’t want to move to what he called “the nation’s northernmost Southern city.” The Phillies offered him a $100,000 salary for the 1970 season, a $10,000 boost from his Cardinals salary. But for Flood, money wasn’t the issue. It was a matter of principle. Flood said that “a well-paid slave is, nonetheless, a slave.”
Flood asked for Miller’s advice about suing Major League Baseball. Miller warned that the odds were against him. Even if he won the lawsuit, Miller said, the owners would blacklist him as a player and as a future coach or manager. In his autobiography, A Whole New Ballgame, Miller recalled: “Curt, to his everlasting credit, said, ‘But would it benefit all the other players and future players?’ And I said, ‘Yes.’ And he said, ‘That’s good enough for me.’”