#Curt flood agency possible athletes for free#
#Curt flood agency possible athletes professional#
#Curt flood agency possible athletes series#

Couple of hours on the bus at worst, he says. I tell Dick I’m not interested in travelling and he says that it’s not major-league travel, ’cause all the teams are in Florida and the Tropics only play the south division in the regular season. He says the teams got a little but not a lot of money to play with. He goes on and tells me they’re starting up this whole league of guys who used to play in the majors and now got grey hair and liver spots.

#Curt flood agency possible athletes professional#

No, he says, it’s this thing that they’re trying to get off the ground, the Senior Professional Baseball Association. I ask him if it’s Single-A, Rookie League, one of these independent semi-pro things. He tells me that he’s managing this new team, the West Palm Beach Tropics.

#Curt flood agency possible athletes series#

“No, this is Dick Williams,” he says and, yeah, turned out to be telling the truth - a guy with two World Series rings of his own, a guy I never even met even when he managed against us in ’67, is calling me up out of the blue.ĭick spells it all out. “This is Dick Williams,” the voice on the other end of the line says. But a lot of guys - most of them, really - I fell out of touch with. And, of course, a few of the older guys snagged jobs with clubs and I’d see them in February and March and we’d bullshit around. One-by-one they went the way of all ballplaying flesh. The last group of guys I worked with in St. Guys who saw my hands as much as they saw their wives’, some of them a lot more, depending on how often they had to play hurt and how close they were to their wives. I’d catch up with guys who’d first hopped up on my table as rookies, whose careers had been in my hands. Pete and from the day pitchers and catchers reported I’d head over to the ballpark and they’d give me a day rate to help out. Nicest park on the whole circuit, I say.įor years in semi-retirement I had my spring routine.

I knew it from all the years the Cards came down for Grapefruit League and we played out of Al Lang Stadium right downtown. When we first moved down, we bought a little place in St. Why go anywhere else when I spent my whole working life going everywhere else? Packed my bags and went to Florida and never been outside the state in, damn, it ain’t years but decades. You go right down the line.īusch Memorial was practically new back in ’67 but they’re calling it Old Busch Stadium nowadays and I guess they’re gonna tear it down with this new place they’re building. Roger Maris, a few years after his 61 and the asterisk but still a heckuva player. Four guys in Cooperstown - Gibby, Sweet Lou Brock, Lefty Carlton and Orlando Cepeda, the Baby Bull. That was one of the great teams, I’ll tell you, ’67 Cards. My ring from ’67, though, it ain’t never been off ’cept when I’m working, brother, and my name is engraved on there just like Bob Gibson’s on his. My wedding ring is in a safe deposit box and my ring from the ’64 World Series is right beside it. They’ll remember that I wore a World Series ring and put it in a safe place before getting to work on them.

More likely he ends up becoming a real-estate salesman who walks 18 for the exercise and doesn’t stop and think that the reason he’s not limping or having to use a kart is me.Įither way, they’ll probably have trouble remembering my name. Maybe someday one of those kids will be a first-rounder and remember the old guy who volunteered for his high-school alma mater and kept him in one piece. Just that no one wants to see a kid get hurt and that’s what happens when they’re not taped up right and sent out there in harm’s way. I hadn’t worked in quite a few years ’cept for helping out with the local high school’s teams. In tribute to the man and to Black History Month, here follows a portrait of Curt Flood that he might have appreciated: a short story founded in historical facts but spun with artistic license, fiction in search of the man’s essence and the tenor of his times. Coretta Scott King said the painting “comes closest to depicting the dignity and reverence - and especially the love - which characterized his life.” That painting today hangs in the White House.Īs an artist, Curt Flood understood the difference between a photograph and the canvas, between life and the stage, between facts and greater truths. In 1968, he painted a portrait of Martin Luther King Jr. Less well-known about Curt Flood is the fact that he was an accomplished artist - back in his playing days his sketches appeared in the St.

#Curt flood agency possible athletes for free#

Though the justices found unanimously for MLB, Flood’s fight set the stage for free agency and for the talent getting a fairer shake. His lawsuit against Major League Baseball and the league’s reserve clause, which maintained a team’s rights to a player after that player’s contract expired, made it all the way to the U.S. Curt Flood’s influence on the business of professional sports is well-established.