by Andy January, 1997 RotoHeads: What a bunch of stiffs. One of baseball's most influential players dies and nobody even mentions it. I'm speaking of course of Curt Flood. If you look up the word "injustice" in the dictionary, Curt's picture might be there as an example. Now, being a somewhat Philly phan, I really didn't care for the St.Louis Cardinals all that much at the time. Still, Flood deserved his due and had to be noted as a pretty good player in his day. Unfortunately his day ended somewhere around noon in this analogy. Sure, we all long for the days before free agency when a team stayed a team and you could feel a sense of belonging to and with your chosen heroes, but don't blame Curt Flood because the Lords of the Realm have screwed up our innocence. Then again, that's a whole other story. All Flood did was say, "no, I'd rather stay with my family and play baseball in St. Louis. If the club doesn't want me as a player, fine. But I don't want to go anywhere else." And who would want to move to Philadelphia, anyway? And for this crime, Curt Flood was banned from baseball, an outcast black-balled in backroom edicts because he challenged the good ol boys who were furious that he wouldn't consider himself their property, something to move at their beck and call. Worse, his supposition that he had individual rights to ply his trade where he wanted assumed a legal issue that blew the shingles off the country club roof. The Supreme Court side stepped Flood's challenge in the courts deciding this was a legislative matter since Congress in their infinite wisdom had decided that baseball was not really a business and didn't have to play by the same rules as everyone else. So Flood, the man, could stay in St.Louis, but Flood, the ball player, had to go to Philadelphia. Of course by the time all this settled, the point was moot. Andy Messersmith and Catfish Hunter had already signed with George for astronomical sums now payed to part time utility infielders who can hit .250 on astro-turf. And Flood never raced beneath a screaming gapper to rob a triple again. So here's to Curt Flood, boys. He played the game. I don't expect this eulogy to end up in the web site we call home alongside the tribute to Kirby. Still, he deserves a tip of the cap, to a career that might have been.