NEW YORK — Curt Flood set off the free-agent revolution 50 years ago Tuesday with a 128-word letter to baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, two paragraphs that pretty much ended the career of a World Series champion regarded as among the sport’s stars but united a union behind his cause.
St. Louis had traded the All-Star center fielder to Philadelphia just after the 1969 season. Flood broke with the sport’s culture of conformity and refused to accept the Cardinals’ right to deal him, becoming a pioneer and a pariah.
After weeks of discussions with the Major League Baseball Players Association, Flood began the union’s equivalent of Lexington and Concord, challenging the reserve clause in first shot of a labor war that would consume the sport for more than a quarter-century.