But perhaps Congress would have acted if not for the powerful lobbying by MLB owners. If Congress wanted to apply antitrust laws to baseball, it should pass a law. In this case, some of the justices dubiously argued that Congress did not intend for antitrust laws to apply to baseball, because Congress had never said anything about baseball. Furthermore, if a player ever played for a different league, the player would be permanently blacklisted by MLB, which had a protected monopoly on the game of baseball-the US Supreme Court had given MLB a special exemption from federal antitrust laws in its Federal Baseball v. Prior to Flood suing MLB, players could strike to obtain a higher salary, but no other team was allowed to hire them. He did it for principle, to ensure that future baseball players would be “free,” that is, “free” as in “free agency,” the freedom for a player to negotiate a contract with any team of his choosing. Flood knew that by suing he was sacrificing the remainder of his career. The players could choose to either sign the contract or to not play at all. The reserve clause bound the players to a team in effect, the players were owned by the team. Today’s players owe as much to Miller as they owe to Flood.įlood lost a couple of years during his early career because of racism, and he cut his playing career short so that he could sue MLB in 1970 over its “reserve clause,” which Flood likened to slavery. They chose Marvin Miller to be its executive director. The players on each team selected representatives to the MLBPA. But such a strike was not an organized strike, as might happen when a labor union goes on strike, that is, until the players decided to form the MLB Players Association (MLBPA). That is what Los Angeles Dodgers Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale (both eventual Hall of Famers) did before the 1966 season. They could choose not to play if they were unhappy with the contract being offered to them. Players in Flood’s era were not entirely without recourse, however. Most of them were too young to know (or took for granted) how Flood’s sacrifices made it possible for them to achieve the seven and eight figure salaries they enjoy today. America is better.” Sadly, however, not a single player in the game at the time was in attendance. Jesse Jackson said that because of Curt Flood, “People are better. Will compared Flood to Rosa Parks and compared the US Supreme Court decision against Flood in 1973 (to be discussed shortly) to the infamous Dred Scott decision denying the freedom of a St. At Flood’s funeral in 1997, non-athletes Jesse Jackson and George Will also sang Flood’s praises while dozens of the game’s greatest baseball players from the 1960s were in attendance. In 1966, Flood’s teammates picked him to be their co-captain along with catcher Tim McCarver, a position that illustrates the great respect they had for him. The influence that baseball had on social justice is a testament to the popularity of baseball. I think there was no greater factor than the integration of Major League Baseball (MLB) to break down the barriers to integration in housing and many other facets of life. Arguably the most notable was Jackie Robinson, a baseball Hall of Famer, who broke the color barrier in baseball in 1947. Historically, it is not been unusual for athletes to be at the forefront of controversial social justice movements. Likewise, public opinion generally supports these actions. (The NFL denied this.) Roll forward to 2020: This year athletes in all major sports have been publicly supportive of the Black Lives Matter protests, and this time the team owners are for the most part united with the players. After the season ended, Kapernick was blacklisted by the NFL. In 2016, Colin Kapernick began a protest against social injustices experienced by African Americans when he “took a knee” during the playing of the national anthem before a National Football League (NFL) game.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |