The decade’s winds of change swept even into the staid ranks of professional baseball. He fought a personal battle with racism two years later when he and his wife, Beverly, overcame opposition in integrating a northern California suburb, Alamo, where the Floods wanted to live in the off-season. With other black athletes, he spoke at an NAACP civil rights conference in Mississippi in 1962. Louis finish ahead of other talented teams that were less cohesive.įlood’s civic conscience grew alongside his career during the turbulent 1960s. Flood, they said, was one of the players who did the most to ensure a unified clubhouse characterized by interracial harmony, which may have helped St. Other Cardinals credited him with being a consummate teammate, and he was named a team co-captain in 1966. 300 and became known as perhaps the best defensive center fielder in baseball. Listed at just five feet, nine inches tall and 165 pounds, he did not hit many home runs, but he regularly batted over. Louis reached the World Series again in 1967, beating the Boston Red Sox, and 1968, falling to the Detroit Tigers.įlood reached his peak as a player in these years. They then defeated the New York Yankees in the World Series. In 1964 the Cardinals, sparked by a midseason trade for another talented black outfielder, Lou Brock, ended their championship drought in dramatic fashion, finishing atop the National League standings by erasing the Philadelphia Phillies’ six-and-a-half-game lead with just twelve games left to play. Flood, joined a year later by first baseman Bill White and pitcher Bob Gibson, would become one of the first blacks to succeed with the Cardinals.Īs the team improved over the next several seasons, Flood established himself in center field. Meanwhile, teams with black stars-the Dodgers with Robinson and Roy Campanella, the Giants with Willie Mays, and the Braves with Hank Aaron-had won every National League pennant since 1951. Jackie Robinson had broken baseball’s color line in 1947, but the Cardinals did not field their first black player until 1954 and still had not acquired an exceptional black player by the time Flood arrived in 1958. Among the reasons for the team’s decline was its belated effort to sign African American players. Although hurt and disappointed by the unexpected move, he dutifully reported to the Cardinals, a slumping franchise that had not won a pennant since 1946. Flood nevertheless excelled on the field, earning late-season call-ups to Cincinnati in 19 to play in his first few major-league games.Īfter the 1957 season, the Reds traded Flood to St. Other painful experiences awaited him during his minor-league seasons in North Carolina and Georgia, where he faced hostile crowds even at his home ballparks and was barred from restaurants and gas station restrooms when the team’s bus stopped on road trips. Expecting a room in the Reds’ upscale hotel, he was instead hurried out a side door and driven to a boardinghouse, where the team’s black players were forced to live in segregated quarters. Teachers and coaches became important mentors as well, and continued to inspire him long after he had left Oakland.įlood signed his first baseball contract with the Cincinnati Reds at age seventeen and reported in 1956 for spring training at Tampa, Florida, deep in the Jim Crow South. Despite these challenges, they supported Flood when he demonstrated early talent for both athletics and art. Far from wealthy, his parents worked long hours in low-paying jobs to keep the family out of poverty. Although he lost his case before the Supreme Court in 1972, Flood’s lawsuit paved the way for player free agency, which radically changed the economics and culture of baseball and other professional sports.īorn on January 18, 1938, in Houston, Texas, Curtis Charles Flood grew up in Oakland, California, as the youngest of Herman and Laura Flood’s six children. Flood is best remembered, however, for his lawsuit challenging Major League Baseball’s reserve clause. A three-time All-Star and seven-time Gold Glove recipient, he played on three National League pennant winners, two of which also won World Series titles. Louis Cardinals, playing center field for them from 1958 to 1969. Curt Flood spent most of his baseball career with the St.
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