Free Agent

How a fleet-footed center fielder changed the national pastime forever.

STEPPING UP

The Story of Curt Flood and His Fight for

Baseball Players' Rights

By Alex Belth

Persea. 228 pp. $22.95

Whether they remember him with reverence or resentment, serious baseball fans know St. Louis Cardinals' center fielder Curt Flood's crucial place in baseball history. He was the man who challenged the oppressive reserve clause that tied players to one team for life unless owners decided otherwise. So it's surprising that 37 years after Flood brought his landmark suit challenging his trade to the Philadelphia Phillies in 1969, and almost 20 years after his untimely death in 1987 at the age of 59, Flood's first biography is just hitting bookstores.

The All-Star will have to wait a little longer for a book that does justice to his life's complexity, but for now Alex Belth's Stepping Up serves as a useful primer on the life of a major leaguer who shouldn't need one. With a foreword by Flood's teammate, baseball announcer Tim McCarver (who was traded to the Phillies with Flood but went along with the move), the book may introduce a new generation of baseball fans, as well as people still trying to understand the social changes that swept the nation in the 1960s, to Flood's moving life story.

Flood's role as a star on the dominant Cardinals teams of the '60s, as well as his fight against the game's reserve clause, puts him alongside Jackie Robinson as a baseball pioneer, partly but not exclusively because both men were African Americans. And yet Flood remains in comparative shadow. The broad outlines of his personal life alone are fascinating. He was born and raised in the productive baseball soil of Oakland, Calif., which gave the game Frank Robinson, Joe Morgan, Vada Pinson and Rickey Henderson, and was coached at McClymonds High School by the legendary George Powles (who deserves but still doesn't have a biography of his own).

Having struggled with the Cincinnati Reds (he was signed in 1955 for a $4,000 one-year contract), Flood blossomed after he was traded to the Cardinals in 1958, where he joined a team in racial transition. Over the next decade he played with such black legends as pitcher Bob Gibson, first baseman Bill White, left fielder and base-stealer extraordinaire Lou Brock, as well as memorable Latino pioneers Minnie Minoso (a black Cuban who also played in the Negro Leagues), Orlando Cepeda and Julian Javier. David Halberstam's October 1964 told the story of baseball's changing racial landscape through the World Series in which Flood's colorful Cardinals defeated the overwhelmingly white New York Yankees. Many baseball fans, in St. Louis and nationally, thrilled to the story of the scrappy team that deposed the pinstriped New Yorkers.

But by 1968, when the Cardinals went to the World Series again, baseball players' rising salaries had become a divisive issue. Writing in Sports Illustrated, William Leggett wondered if owner Gussie Busch was "undermining the very structure of baseball" by overpaying his team. Busch apparently wondered the same thing. He traded Cepeda to the Atlanta Braves for Joe Torre after the Cards lost the '68 Series, and he was looking to deal Flood, too. The center fielder, injured and increasingly bitter, survived through the Cards' disappointing 1969 season but was sent to the Phillies that October.

Flood went down in history for challenging the reserve clause, but it may surprise some people -- whether they credit or blame him for the current free agent system -- that he lost his challenge. He pursued it all the way to the Supreme Court only to have the top justices uphold the clause. It finally fell in 1975, when a baseball arbitrator invalidated it, and the owners' attempts to appeal the ruling failed.

Belth's biography nicely captures Flood's Oakland roots and his development as a small, hard-working player who had to fight for his starting and ultimately starring baseball role. It also depicts the backdrop of the civil rights and counterculture movements of the time, without which Flood's eventual stand against the reserve clause can't be understood. Because Stepping Up gets so many details and broad themes right, it feels curmudgeonly to carp about its flaws, but they're numerous enough to interfere with its impact. One is, simply, the writing. The book could have a future as a school text on baseball, civil rights or the reserve clause, but no one should pick it up as literature. At times it reads like a Young Adult-genre biography. And Flood's provocative, nuanced life story is poorly served by Belth's rather literal black-and-white approach, which usually comes down to Flood good, Flood's detractors bad and/or racist. The complicated baseball star's drinking, family troubles, bad business decisions and inability to nurture his considerable artistic talents are almost always written off as a result of the stress of being a black baseball pioneer. Yet Flood himself wouldn't want to be remembered as merely a victim.

Still, Belth gets the role of race right in the overall Flood story. In hindsight, it seems no accident that the grousing about the increasing economic power of baseball players coincided with the decline in the number of whites in the game. And it's probably also no accident that it was a black player who took Flood's stand. "After twelve years of being in the major leagues, I do not feel I am a piece of property to be bought and sold irrespective of my wishes," he said, and the echoes of slavery were deliberate and correct. Facing the fledgling Players Association, which debated but ultimately supported his legal challenge, Flood was questioned about the role of race in his challenge. He played it down, but Belth is right to make it central to the book.

To this day, baseball has a hard time reckoning with the role of race in its controversies. It's almost impossible, for instance, to have a sober discussion of whether race plays a role in the current troubles of San Francisco Giants superstar Barry Bonds. Clearly Bonds brought many of his woes on himself, but equally clearly, his record-breaking achievements earned him an aggressive criminal investigation into his alleged steroid use as well as an aggressive campaign to illegally leak results of that investigation to the media, while Cardinals record-breaker Mark McGwire enjoyed only acclaim for his substance-enhanced achievements. It seems obvious, to me anyway, that the road is harder for black baseball pioneers, including Bonds, but arguing that publicly will consign you to the margins of polite debate, along with members of the Flat Earth Society and Roswell conspiracy theorists.

Bonds aside, Flood clearly shares a lot with Jackie Robinson, whose number 42 he wore as a tribute to the Brooklyn Dodgers pioneer when he first signed with Cincinnati. Both men died an untimely, early death -- Robinson at 53, Flood at 59 -- and it's hard not to think that the pressure of being baseball trailblazers shortened their lives. Let's hope Belth's biography at least starts the process of getting Flood a place alongside Robinson in baseball's pantheon of rebel-heroes, and the credit he deserves for his sacrifice.

Joan Walsh is editor-in-chief of Salon.com