In June of 1970, Bill Veeck, a renegade baseball owner, took the stand for the plaintiff in the case of Flood v. Kuhn, in which St. Louis Cardinal outfielder Curt Flood essentially sued major league baseball to break the power of the "reserve system," a pernicious practice that bound a player to one team for as long as that one team wanted to keep him. It was this system of, at best, involuntary servitude on which the business of baseball had remained a rigged game in favor of management for over a century.
Veeck thought the system doomed. Sooner or later, he believed, a judge, or somebody else in authority that didn't give a damn about sitting in the owner's box for Opening Day, was going to get a good look at the system. That person probably then would spend four or five minutes laughing so hard that they nearly fainted, and then that person would throw out the whole system for the fraud that it was. Better to eliminate the reserve system gradually, Veeck testified. (He recommended a system of seven-year contracts, much like the system that had prevailed at one time in Hollywood.) That way, he thought, the owners could control the transition between the reserve system and whatever came next. Veeck also pointed out that the reserve system, as it was practiced at the time, ran counter to some cherished American beliefs about the country's values.
"I think it would certainly help the players and the game itself to no longer be one of the few places in which there is human bondage," Veeck testified, according to the account in Brad Snyder's A Well-Paid Slave, an exemplary book on the Flood case. "I think it would be to the benefit of the reputation of the game of baseball … At least, it would be fair."
The owners didn't listen. Veeck was not one of them. He had a predilection for putting midgets on the field. And black people. And, as far as the authoritarian exercise of whiteness went, baseball management made the Politburo look like the O'Jays. They ignored Veeck. They even beat the Flood case in the Supreme Court. Then, in 1975, an arbitrator named Peter Seitz threw out the reserve clause and free agency fell onto baseball all at once and everywhere. The system utterly collapsed and, just as Veeck had predicted, it was not a soft landing.
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