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 Curt Flood’s Public Case When the Cardinals traded Curt Flood to the Phillies in 1969, he was disgusted not just by the trade itself but by his treatment that day. Flood received an unceremonious telephone call from Cardinals office assistant Jim Toomey, a“middle-echelon coffee drinker,”just before dawn on a chilly October morning.“If I had been a foot-shuffling porter,” he recalled,“they might have at least given me a pocket watch.” After that, said Flood, “one miserable telephone call released the poison of self-pity. The hard-boiled realist who answered the telephone was a weeping child when he set the receiver down. The lightning had struck. The dream lay shattered. It was a bad scene.” The moment provided Flood with an epiphany that came to influence the appearance of his case in public discourse for the following forty years. “Player trades are commonplace,” said Flood, “The unusual aspect of this one was that I refused to accept it. It violated the logic and integrity of my existence.”And thus he initiated pursuit of a line of reasoning that echoed his defiant letter to Bowie Kuhn and that might illuminate the dehumanizing entailments of being a Major League Baseball (MLB) player:“I was not a consignment of goods. I was a man, the rightful proprietor of my own person and my own talents.”1 In February 1970, four months after receiving that phone call, Flood and Richard Carter spent several weeks at a St.Louis Holiday Inn intending to write a book but spent most of their time enjoying more frivolous pursuits .2 Despite the distractions, those thirty boozy days produced The Way It Is, which from just about any angle is saturated with the kind of cutting sarcasm that seems to have emerged from a person lost in a deep malaise. Flood’s biographers tend to read his emotional disposition by interpreting this tenor as bitterness and resentment. Whether or not that is a fair assessment, I consider Flood’s experiential and affective rhetoric not for what it says about Flood’s state of mind but instead for how the forms of experience and affect that he introduced into public argument helped him address the quandary presented by his blackness.In that sense,I regard The Way It Is as a strategic document that helped Flood make his way between 2 curt flood’s public case . . .  the whims of the Players Association and the racial imagery of the wellpaid slave. Tom Haller would not be the only person to ask if Flood’s challenge was a “black thing.” “Let a black person utter the word slavery, and the room instantly empties,” says Houston Baker, noting that “many white Americans move emotional and logical mountains to dissociate themselves from slavery.”3 To at least that extent, Flood’s self-description as a well-paid slave staged an awkward encounter between the well-meaning liberalism of his white colleagues and the embodied racial justice discourses that had preceded him. The Way It Is relied for its rhetorical energy on a fundamental, persistent ambiguity regarding those racial justice discourses. Even while weaving allegorical connections to race throughout the text, Flood refused to be explicit. The narrative revealed the concrete meaning of blackness as feature of lived experience, but it also dwelled closely on the abstract economic principles violated in baseball’s reserve clause. On the one hand, these themes worked symbiotically as Flood attempted to lend expression to the idea of “well-paid slavery.” On the other hand, these themes worked parasitically as Flood struggled to make his politics practical.Are you doing this because you’re black? The answer to that question was often left to speculative inference.After presenting a life history nuanced by detailed memories of racial experiences, Flood offered a tellingly ambiguous capstone to The Way It Is: “Frederick Douglass was a Maryland slave who taught himself to read.‘If there is no struggle,’ he once said,‘there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing the ground. . . . Power concedes nothing without a demand.It never did and it never will.’To see the Curt Flood case in that light is to see its entire meaning.”4 Uttered in strident and dramatic tones, the comparison to Douglass condensed an array of implied meanings that without explicit elaboration constituted his case’s “entire meaning...

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