Pushkin too quick.

No, it's perfect push kid, stop you got it.

Robert Smith, here we are again.

Why do you do that narrative thing, you know where you start with like a date and right in the middle of the story, the date is nineteen sixty eight.

Good one subject is baseball, specifically the Saint Louis Cardinals, and nineteen sixty eight was a good year for the Saint Louis Cardinals.

They went all the way to the World Series, lost in seven games to the Tigers.

And for nineteen sixty nine, for the next season, they were looking good.

Their big stars were coming back.

Crucially for our story.

One of those returning stars was Kurt Flood.

Sports Illustrated said he was the best center fielder in baseball.

He was an All Star.

He was the co captain of the team.

So things were looking good for the Cardinals going into that year.

But the president of the team one Augustus Anheuser Busch Junior.

There was actually an Anheuser Busch.

I love that, yes, and an Augustus Adheuser Busch Junior Yes, aka Gussie Bush aka aired to the Budweiser Fortune.

He was the president of the team and he was worried.

He did not like the way things were going.

He ran out Anheuser Busch, and he had convinced the company back in the fifties to buy the Cardinals, and he built the Cardinals into this World Series champion in the sixties.

So now we're in the late sixties, he's getting worried.

He actually goes down to spring training, down to Florida at the start of the sixty nine season to tell the players what he thought was wrong, what he thought they were doing wrong.

They love that, They love it.

When he comes to test him.

Oh, thank you, Gussie Bush.

And interestingly, it wasn't their play that he was worried about.

It wasn't what they were doing on the field.

It was what they and their union had been doing off the field in the off season, and specifically, they'd been negotiating for a higher share of baseball's TV revenues, and Gussie Bush, businessman, did not like the way this looked.

So he gave this talk.

He actually invited the press in to hear him give this sort of lecture to the players, and the next day was on the front page of the Saint Louis Post Dispatch.

Robert when don't you give us Gussie Bush's key quote?

All right?

He said, too many fans are saying our players are getting fat, that they only think of money unless of the game itself.

Oh, those businessmen always go back to the love of the game.

That's why we say you so little the love of the game.

Yes, so you know, the players at the time didn't say much.

They actually asked Kurt Flood in this newspaper story for a comment.

He's like, the big Boss has spoken, I'm not going to comment.

But he wrote a book a few years later and said, unsurprisingly that he didn't like this speech.

He said, in particular that Gussie Bush was talking to the players like a rabble of ingrates.

And at this moment this rift was opening up between Kurt Flood, one of the key stars on the team, and Gussie Busch, the owner of the team, And over the course of the sixty nine season, the rift gets wider.

And then at four am on October eighth of that year, Kurt Flood gets a phone call, gets woken up by a phone call, and he rolls over and picks up the phone and calling him is a guy who works for Gussie Bush.

Gussie didn't even make the call in se Gussy didn't even make the call himself.

No, it was one of his underlings.

It was a middle manager basically.

And what the guy on the phone says to Kurt Flood is after twelve years playing in Saint Louis, basically all of his adult life, Flood is getting traded to the Philadelphia Phillies.

Philly is the punishment.

Philly is the punishment.

Yeah, And it really did seem like that to Kurt Flood, because, I mean a Philly had just finished second to last in their division.

And on top of that, Kurt Flood was black, and the Phillies fans had a tradition of treating the team's own black players really badly.

Like one one star outfielder in the sixties for the Phillies who was black, actually started wearing a helmet because the Phillies owned fans threw stuff at him so much.

Right, so he doesn't want to be with the losers who also hate him.

Yes, well said, but the way baseball worked at the time, he didn't have a choice because the rule was when you got drafted by a major league team, you played for that team forever or until they decided to trade you, and if you didn't want to go, you could quit baseball.

This was actually explicit in every player's contract.

They called it the reserve clause because the teams reserved the rights to each player.

And Flood actually, when he was writing later about the Gussie Bush speech in the Locker Room, he used the word feudal feudal to describe this system, like eudl not utili.

Yeah.

Yeah.

In other words, it was like the system where peasants were tied to the land.

They could not move, they had to give part of their crops to the feudal lord.

Yes, right, And in this metaphor, the feudal lord is Gussie Bush, and the players are tied not to like a potato field, but to a baseball field.

Right.

Of course, it seems much more appealing to be a professional baseball player than a medieval surf But on a fundamental level, Kurt Flood thought this was unfair, unjust.

There's a reason for this and a reason why it existed for years, which is people thought that it kept the game competitive.

It kept the richest teams from just buying the best players and then winning all the games.

That's no fun.

Yes, yes, right, if you had just a wide open free market, it might in fact destroy the game.

But still, but still, Kurt Flood thought that the essence of this rule, this idea that you had to be tied forever to the whims of whatever team happened to draft you, was unfair, and that surely there would be a more fair way to structure the game.

And so he decided to fight.

He decided to try and change the rules.

His fight wound up going all the way to the Supreme Court.

It helped change the business of professional sports forever, and it also, at least for a while, destroyed Kurt Flood's life.

I'm Jacob Wilts, I'm Robert Smith, and this is Business History, a show about the history of business.

I love the story of Kurt Flood and the reserve clause because it's about more than sports.

It is about this classic division between capital and labor, the money interests and the workers.

Every business has this dilemma of who should share in the profits, and this goes to every single corporation in America, this decision about who shares in the riches.

Right, So this is a story about that.

It's about antitrust, it's about competition, and it's a story about when people stop thinking of this professional sports as just a game and more as what it is, big business, really big business.

Okay, So nineteen sixty nine, that's the moment we're talking about, right, that's the season that started with that lecture from Gussie Bush.

In that season, Kurt Flood was one of the highest paid players in baseball.

He made ninety thousand dollars.

Robert Smith, how much is that in twenty twenty five dollars?

Two billion dollars?

Yes, two billion, No a courteous man.

Ever, Yes, According to.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI inflation calculator, which I love, it was eight hundred and nineteen thousand dollars, So about eight hundred thousand dollars.

Pretty good, So a lot of money compared to other workers, but not what professional baseball players, especially very good ones, are making today.

Exactly right, So is it a lot of a little well, by today's standards, it's trivial, right, A star would make really whatever, I don't know what twenty times that today?

Something right?

And so there's a couple reasons for that.

Why is his pace so much lower than what contemporary players make?

Reason one is Major League Baseball is just a much bigger business today after adjusting translation, the pie is bigger.

But reason two is the players at the time had much less leverage.

Right, if you have to play for the team that drafted you or quit baseball, there's not that much you can do to demand a higher salary, right, So players were in fact getting a smaller share of a smaller pie.

Which, if you think about it, is wild.

Like think about any other industry, tech, Google and Apple.

I mean, imagine they could sign the greatest computer science majors at Stanford and MIT and sign them to a contract forever.

Like I'm sorry, you're on team Apple.

You are on team Apple.

I can trade you to team IBM, but no, you're on team Apple.

And that situation, they are certainly not going to pay them a lot of money.

They'll pay him some money, but like you don't have why.

Wouldn't they pay their market rate when they don't have to?

Yeah, when they could keep them forever.

And obviously if Apple did this it would be illegal and interact Apple did do it.

Of about ten years ago or something, there was this major scandal there a few big tech companies had this rule.

Among each other like CEO to CEO, where they wouldn't try and recruit each other's employees.

And when it was made public, they got in trouble.

They had to pay hundreds of millions of dollars because it's a violation of anti trust.

Low.

You can't do anti competitive Yeah, but in baseball in nineteen sixty nine, that was how it works.

That's what the reserve clause was.

And Kurt Flood thought that was ridiculous, right.

He thought he was a worker, just like any other worker, should be able to go work for any company that would hire him.

And so when he heard that he was going to be traded to the Phillies, he thought, maybe I should just sue.

Maybe it is illegal, right, maybe I should go go to court and fight the reserve clause.

To figure out whether he should do this, he flies to New York City to talk about this idea of suing baseball with the guy who is the head of the players union.

This is an interesting guy.

His name's Marvin Miller.

Grew up in Flatbush in Brooklyn, rooting for the Dodgers.

Yeah, Ebbittsfield was in the steel Workers Union, worked his way up there and just in the past few years, just in the nineteen sixties, has turned the players Association into like a full fledged labor union, like a real union.

And so Miller is actually part of what Gussie Bush was talking about in that lecture.

In fact, one of his employees, one of the other senior guys at the team, in that same locker room speech, complained about Miller by name, right, So he's part of what's going on here.

So Miller takes Flood out to breakfast in New York at the Summit Hotel in Manhattan, and over breakfast he lays out the legal landscape because he's been thinking about this too, and there is precedent here.

In fact, there have been two earlier cases that are relevant that have gone all the way to the Supreme Court.

And the cases were brought under the Sherman Antitrust Act of eighteen ninety, the classic right, this is the key law for regulating competition in America.

And this law banned I'll rate it every contract, combination, or conspiracy that restricted trade or commerce.

Among the several states.

And so that last phrase there among the several states.

This is because of the Constitution says the federal government can only regulate interstate commerce.

Right, so if there's any sort of business that goes across state lines, the Sherman Anti Trust Act says you cannot collude.

Yes, And I'm belaboring that phrase and that interstate commercation because it actually turns out to be key here.

The first relevant case got to the Supreme Court in nineteen twenty two.

And what had happened at the time interesting business story.

Actually, there were two different professional baseball leagues sort of competing against each other at the time.

There's Major League Baseball, which we know today, and then there was also the Federal Baseball League.

That's funny to say, Federal Baseball League.

So and what happened was classic monopoly play.

Actually, the Major League Baseball owners were buying up Federal Baseball League teams to sort of bring them into the Major League.

So they were essentially using buyouts to eliminate their competition.

Sounds anti competitive, classic thing you're not supposed to do.

And so this case goes all the way to the Supreme Court, and in fact Oliver Wendell Holmes, one of the most famous justices I would say ever, right, writes the decision and what he says is The business of baseball is selling tickets to the game.

Right, teams may travel from state to state.

The entire league comprises several states.

But how do they make money.

They make money when people walk up to the ballpark, pay their money for a ticket, and go in.

And that is not interstate commerce.

The money doesn't cross states.

The money isn't crossing state lines.

Well said, and as a result, the Sherman Antitrust Act doesn't apply and go away, there is no problem here, Okay.

So that is case number one.

Case number two comes about thirty years later, in the early nineteen fifties, and this case is actually much more similar to the case Kurt Flood is thinking about bringing.

In this instance, there's a minor league player, he's like a Triple A player for the Yankees farm system, and he basically says, I should have the right to go play for another team.

I'm going to sue baseball.

And by this point, by the nineteen fifties, the technology has changed.

The game has changed in that you can listen to it on radio, and that is a big part.

Of the business.

No matter where your team goes, you can sit back in Brooklyn listen to your belove of Dodgers on the radio, and that's part of you know, a bigger radio contract, which in theory crosses state lines.

Yes, yes, and TV also by this point, yeah, and so yeah, fundamentally, technological change has driven a change to the business.

Right, Like Oliver Wendell Holmes thing was just like, just look at the money, just follow the money.

It's not inter state commerce.

By this time, it obviously is, right.

And there's actually a fun moment in the transition where in the thirties when radio is first coming in a baseball teams, like especially in New York City, they they block radio for a while because they are thinking like, oh, our business is selling tickets, and if people can just sit at home and listen on the radio, they're not going to come buy a ticket.

We don't want it on the road.

They're not buying cracker jack.

Yeah, that's right.

And so they ultimately realize, of course, like, oh, we can sell the rights to the game and make a lot more money and people will still come.

So by the fifties, by the time this case goes to the Supreme Court, it's clearly a state commerce absolutely.

And yet and yet a majority of the justices in the case call back to that nineteen twenty two opinion delightfully called federal baseball in short, and they say, you know, storry to cease this.

We don't want to overturn past Supreme Court rulings.

And if there's a problem here, Congress can just pass a law that says antitrust law.

Oh yeah, it applies to baseball.

And you know what, we're going to stay out of it.

It's fine.

The reserve clause is going to stay in place.

So you know, the player lost the league one, no change.

And to be fair, I mean, there is something to the court's decision and the owner's stance here because professional sports baseball is a different kind of business.

Right the teams are competing on the field against each other, but they're not really competing against each other economically.

Yeah, right there, they need to collude in fact, right to say like, hey, should we play it o'clock three o'clock?

Like where should we play?

And you could think of the chaos that would happen if there was true competition economic competition in baseball.

I mean you could you could buy all the other team's players.

You could do it halfway through the games.

You could be like I'm buying, I'm buying your best will chair to.

Go back to your thing of like how baseball is different from other businesses, right, Like each team has a separate owner, so in a way it's its own business.

But if it was a regular business, you would want to put all the other teams out of business.

You'd want to destroy them, right, and.

So and the Yankees would, but then they would find that there's nobody to play against, right, right.

Or even more narrowly, right, if you just had a free market in labor, if if the richest owner could buy all the best players, they would, and then they would win every game by a blowout, and that would suck, right, Like a sport where one team wins every game by a blowout is a bad sport, and nobody wants to watch it.

And so at some level you do need some check on a free market in labor, in baseball, or in sports.

You're telling me America's pastime is anti competitive and anti free market.

Yes, yes, yes, all right, Usa, but only to some extent, right like we know now we know today it is much more competitive and much more free market than it was in Kurt Flood's time.

And also true of football and basketball, as we'll talk about, and yet still competitive, right, so it is a question of balance.

And at this time, as Marvin Miller is explaining to Kurt Flood over breakfast, the courts have been all on the side of the leagues and the owners.

Kurt Flood probably hasn't looked at Supreme Court precedent at this point.

He's just like, it's unfair.

It feels unfair.

Now, let's make this happen.

Yeah, And and Marvin Miller, the union guy, is like, it's a million to one shot against you.

And by the way, even if you do happen to win your case, you're not going to get damages.

Nobody's gonna be like, oh, this poor guy who's making you know, the equivalent of eight hundred thousand dollars for playing baseball.

We're gonna give you more money.

So you're not gonna get personal damages.

And people aren't going to be bidding for you because you're a troublemaker.

You are never gonna work in baseball again, not as a player, not as a coach.

Like you're finished if you do this.

And you know, Kurt Flood has been through a lot at this point, I think it's worth talking about here.

Like, you know, he came up in the minor leagues in the nineteen fifties, just a few years after Jackie Robinson became the first black professional baseball player.

When Flood was in the minor leagues, he was playing in the South mostly, and so you know, he would have to wait on the bus while his white teammates went into a restaurant.

One time, the trainer of his own team yelled at him for putting his uniform in the laundry with the white players, and the trainer actually like fished it out with a stick and send it off to the black laundry.

Even once Kurt Flood made the majors, he was a major league baseball player, he rented a house and when the landlord found out he was black, he said, you can't rent this house, and I'm gonna block the door with a shotgun.

And Kurt Flood actually sued that guy for the right to just live in the house that he had rented as a major league baseball player.

So Kurt Flood's seen the civil rights era come not just in theory, but in his own life in baseball.

He's like lived through all of these changes.

Yeah, and so Marvin Miller lays all of this out for Kurt Flood, and Kurt Flood says, okay, but for all of that, if I do win, will it help you know, will it help other players?

And Marvin Miller says, yeah, it will.

And Kurt Flood says, okay, let's do it.

So they decide to sue Baseball.

We'll be back in just a minute, and we're back with the story of Kurt Flood.

So how do you litigate this case?

Right, there have been these two precedents against this concept.

Clearly the Supreme Court, of all the things they have to deal with, does not want to deal with America's past time.

Yeah.

So, well, the first thing is you find a good lawyer who goes his way around the Supreme Court.

And the Union finds what seems like a great lawyer for Flood, a guy named Arthur Goldberg, who had in fact been a Supreme Court justice.

Well, you could just hire Supreme Court justices.

So this part is actually shocking to me.

He had stepped down from the Supreme Court to be the ambassador to the UN, which, like today, would never happen.

So, like either the Supreme Court was less of a big deal then, or the un was more of a big deal or both.

I don't know, but it's weird.

I mean, he got to live in New York City.

True, that's how much better in New York is than DC.

So this guy, Arthur Goldberg says he'll take the case.

He just wants the union to pay his expenses.

He believes in it, and he and Flood decide to start, you know, because precedent is so clearly stacked against them.

They're going to fight the case in what every reporter loves to call the court of public opinion.

They're going to take the case to the people to try and, you know, convince America that the reserve clause is wrong.

And so their first move is to send a letter to the Commissioner of Major League Baseball one Bui Kun.

And it's a public letter.

So Robert, as our designated reader, read us an excerpt from the letter.

Dear mister Kune, and the millions of people we've published this too who can also read it.

Dear mister Qune, after twelve years in the major leagues, I do not feel that I am a piece of property to be bought and sold irrespective of my wishes, I believe that any system that produces that result violates my basic rights as a citizen and is inconsistent with the laws of the United States and of the several states.

Well put, yes, and so I mean, I'm just going to repeat a piece of property to be bought and sold, right like he's clearly invoking slavery here.

So then he goes on in this letter, right, and he makes his request act and he says, I want to be free to talk to other teams about playing for them.

And then can you just read the.

Last line of the letter, I therefore request that you make known to all the Major league clubs my feelings in this matter and advise them of my availability for the nineteen seventy season.

Hire me, pay me money, sincerely yours that parts me, sincerely yours, Kurt Flood.

And so the commissioner gets the letter, and a week later, and what is frankly a classy move, the commissioner calls Flood at home and reads flood his The Commissioner's response to Flood's letter, it says, in part, Robert, Dear Kurt, I certainly agree with you that you, as a human being, are not a piece of property to be bought and sold.

This is fundamental in our society and I think obvious.

However, I cannot see its applicability to the situation at hand.

You have entered into a current playing contract under the circumstances and penny me further information from you.

I don't see what action I can take and cannot comply with the request contained in the second paragraph of your letter.

Sincerely, Yours, Boie Bouie k kewn.

So now you have this public debate, right.

And he has a good point.

You signed a contract.

The reserve clause is in that contract, and you put it into it.

Yes, So people are talking about this now.

People are talking about the fact that Kurt Flood is invoking slavery comparing his status as a professional baseball player.

Around this time, he does an interview with the most famous sportscaster in America, I think of the second half of the twentieth century.

I would say, Howard Cosell.

Really interesting figure in his own right, And in this interview, Cosell basically says, like ker Flood, you're getting rich playing baseball, you know, how can you compare yourself to someone who is enslaved, and Flood says, a well paid slave is nonetheless a slave.

And this is maybe his most famous quote.

The biography, the sort of key biography of Flood is in fact called a well paid slave.

Mike brad Sneyder is a very useful source for this show.

So now this quote is out there.

And this is very provocative at the time, because you know, I was alive in the seventies and there was a feeling that in professional sports there was finally a quality that you know, you could look around and say, yes, but some of our best athletes, our highest paid people in the United States are black men, mostly in professional sports, And there was a kind of I guess, patting yourself on the back for saying, like, we have overcome a lot of these things that the civil rights movement had talked about in professional sports.

And here's Kurt Flood saying no, no, you haven't, and.

Yeah, and kind of to your point, like, people do not like this argument that Kurt Flood is making.

Like there's one sort of mocking article that runs in the paper, onto the headline a tear for Kurt Flood, and it says one is forced to admire Kurt Flood.

When a man is making only ninety thousand dollars, it's eight hundred Jason right.

When a man is making only ninety thousand dollars, he is forced to stand up and fight.

Boohoo, Yeah, booho is what the public is saying.

So it's not going well in the court of public opinion.

And now it's time to try the case in the court of law.

Here comes the judge.

It's nineteen seventy.

The case goes to trial in Manhattan, and this too, starts off badly for Kurt Flood.

His lawyer is now running for governor, so probably not putting in the time he should on the trial.

And Kurt Flood personally has been having a hard time.

After he filed the suit, he basically stopped playing baseball, so he's suddenly gone from being this star who's you know, on the field all the time, I'm making lots of money, to being a guy who has always liked to drink martinis and now has too much time on his hands.

And also he's getting death threats, like multiple basically racist death threats every day because people are so angry that he is suing baseball.

And remember they're not angry because they care about the interstate commerce class.

It's not Sherman and a trust Act in their death threat.

No no, no, no no, Because there's this whole cultural context.

Just to remind everyone, it's nineteen seventy, right, the US is in the middle of this massive culture war, which is tied to a real war shooting in Vietnam.

Right, You've got the Black Panthers, the Stonewall riots, the weather underground is blowing up stuff.

You know, people talk about the division today in America, but like this was a scary divisive time.

People were taking sides, and so Kurt Flood talking about what is essentially, you know, a worker compensation issue, becomes one side of the He becomes symbolic of this bigger split in America.

Yes, and that is that is made explicit in the way this is talked about in public.

Like there is this publication, Baseball Digest, that actually had a cover story about this with the headline Kurt Flood an angry rebel.

Of course, angry black man is like a classic trope, right.

It described him as in revolt against the baseball establishment.

Baseball establishment.

That's like saying you're in revolt against the United States of America.

I mean people talked about the establishment at the time, and so their casting Flood is taking sides in the culture war, and he knew this.

He actually wrote about this a little bit later and said that the way he was portrayed was like a victory for him.

Would mean this is the quote God profaned, flag, desecrated motherhood, defiled apple pie blasphemed, right.

So he's like, knows what's going on.

It's kind of having fun with it.

He just doesn't want to go to Philadelphia.

He just wants to be able to work for whatever company will hire him.

So this is what's going on in his life.

His trial is in court.

He's having a hard time personally.

He gets called to testify and he's clearly very nervous on the stand.

He's talking in a really low voice.

They keep having to ask him to speak up.

And there is this particular exchange between the judge and Kurt Flood that I think is really telling.

Let's read it.

Do you want to be the judge?

Do you want to be Kurt Flood judge?

Of course?

Okay, Now, mister Flood, I presume you are not finding this as easy as getting up at bat.

Is that right?

I no, sir, it is not.

I want you to.

Remember other people have problems, and now you are seeing that it is not an easy thing to testify.

Can you imagine that he's basically.

Saying, like, you are so spoiled, your life is so easy.

You're a rich baseball player.

Well guess what like this is?

This is the way the real world is, like, welcome to it.

It's not so easy.

Yeah, And the judges, you know clearly the establishment.

And I don't to project too much, but I do feel like here the judge is essentially saying, shut up and go play baseball, kid.

It's our game.

It's the one place we can go to not think about Vietnam and protests and politics.

And you ruined it.

And at this moment, what they can do is try and call some witness who will sort of play better than Kurt Flood.

Right.

No current players want to testify because they're scared, because they can't choose who to work for, and they don't want to get you know, shadow band from baseball.

But you know who they get to testify, You know who agrees.

The man everyone wants to see in New York City courtroom rights and you know in New York.

Yeah, Jackie Robinson, Jackie.

Robinson, American hero.

I actually get like mushy talking about Jackie Robinson, right, the first black man to play in the major leagues in the face of like overwhelming racism.

At this point, he's retired, he's fifty one, it's actually going blind.

He agrees to testify, comes into the courtroom and you know, the same city where he played baseball, New York City.

He takes the stand and Flood's lawyer asked him about the reserve clause, and Robert read his answer.

Anything that is one sided in this country is wrong.

And I think the reserve clause is a one sided thing in favor of the owners, and I think it certainly should at least be modified to give a player an opportunity to have some control over his destiny.

Very measured, very measured, very reasonable.

Right.

Oh, it's just why they brought him in.

Right.

They're like, this is not defiling motherhood.

This is Jackie Robinson, and he's just like we should be a little more fair.

Yes, he is a reasonable man, and he is a national hero.

Right.

You know, what's anti American being against Jackie Robinson even the judge.

Even the judge asked Jackie Robinson for an autograph, says it's for his grandson, is it?

I don't know.

And you know, now after this testimony, people start to listen to the other side, to Kurt Flood's side, coming from Jackie Robinson, and the coverage gets better for flood side gets less sarcastic.

You know, the vibes are changing, as we would say today.

But the judge is not in the ViBe's business.

He doesn't care about vibes.

He cares about precedent, and in this instance, the legal precedent is abundantly clear.

There was basically, you know, a nearly identical case twenty years before the Supreme Court let the reserve clause stand.

And so the judge rules against Kurt Flood and in favor of Major League Baseball.

The reserve clause stands.

They appeal, I take it.

They appeal right.

Floods lawyer basically knew they were going to lose.

He says, this first case is just the end of the first inning baseball metaphor.

They lose on appeal, They appeal again, and the case goes to the Supreme Court.

The World Series of courtrooms.

No, but also yes, yes.

One fun detail about the case.

One of the Supreme Court justices re accuses himself because he owns stock in Anheuser Busch, which is run by Gussie Bush and which owns the Cardinals.

I guess there are eight justices there for oral arguments on March twentieth, nineteen seventy two.

The courtroom is packed, press box is overflowing.

People are spilling out, you know, I guess onto the courthouse steps or whatever.

One person not in attendance Kurt Flood.

Kurt Flood.

He is living in MAJORCA, working part time as a sports announcer for an English language radio station, also working in a bar part time.

And this is just a few years after he is one of the top talents in baseball.

Yes, yes, and he's drinking a lot, like I think the core thing is he's drinking too much and the case has just been overwhelming for him.

So he's there.

But you know, we're going to do the trial now, Oh yay, oh yay.

Gather near.

It starts with Kirk Flood's lawyer, Sky Goldberg.

He lays out the case.

You know, major League baseball is obviously interstate commerce at this point.

For the first precedent, we could throw that radio.

And TV or broadcast nationally.

Plainly federal anti trust law should apply.

And under federal and I trust law, the reserve clause is illegal.

And you know, maybe we should mention this here.

There's a fun detail that we haven't talked about yet, and that is this, Like usually when we think about competition, we think about monopoly, there's only one seller of something, but this case is actually monopoly's lesser known cousin, which.

Is which means there is only one buyer for a product and many suppliers.

And this is most commonly used when it comes to the labor market.

We don't think about it, but as workers, we sell our services every day, and if there's only one employer in an industry or a region, that person has monopsony power, meaning that they can keep wages down, they cannot hire you, they can fire you monopsony power.

Yes, and that is also covered under the Sherman an I trust ledge.

It's the same problem, just with a different face.

Right, So that is the argument that Goldberg is making.

But sort of surprisingly given that he used to be a Supreme Court justice, he seems to be making it very badly.

He's kind of off that day.

He actually gets lost on his way to court, the same court where he used to work.

Yeah, they haven't moved it.

They haven't moved it.

And he's like kind of stammering through Kurtflood's stats in his argument, and in fact, as he's leaving the courtroom he says, it was the worst argument I've ever made in my life.

He spent too much time at the UB.

I guess we're too much time running for governor.

I don't know, I don't know, but he did badly.

Now the lawyers for the league get up and make their case, and they say, one, obviously the president is on their side on ambiguous.

And then two, this one is more subtle and i more interesting.

They say, Look, the players have a union, now, a real union, and in their collective bargaining they agreed to the reserve clause.

So it's a labor issue.

This is not an anti trust issue.

And that is a strong argument, because it's not like they are forcing individual players aside a contract.

This is negotiated and that reserve clause, once again is in the contract that everyone put their name to.

Yeah, and so if the players don't like it.

That's what collective bargaining is for, you know, make a better deal when your contract comes up.

So the argument ends, you know, the court goes off, and a few months later the ruling comes out and the justices, again as in the previous case, point out that Congress has actually considered, on many occasions passing a law to make explicit that anti trust law should apply to baseball, but Congress never passed any such law right and so at the court in from this behavior is Congress does not want antitrust law to apply to baseball.

It's not in the Constitution.

It isn't Baseball's not in the Constitution.

So they think, ah, this is kind of Congress's world, and maybe they don't care.

And also I think it is really fair to say when you look into the sort of details of like the opinion and the concurring opinion and whatever, they are, still they are still just on this very Maybe it's weird.

I don't know what kind of vibesy level treating baseball as something other than a business, right like they actually one phrase they use is an exception and an anomaly.

Baseball is an exception and anomaly.

And an anomaly hard to say.

And there's this line somewhere in there and it's this and I kind of love it.

It kind of gives away the game.

They say, if there is any inconsistency or illogic in all this, it is an inconsistency and illogical of long standing that is to be remedied by the Congress and not by this court.

Kind of like Walt Whitman, I contain multitudes now, or like don't blame me, I voted for Congress.

Right, They are washing their hands of anything having to do with baseball.

Yeah, understandable.

You don't want to mess up the game.

People care.

So Kurt Flood loses the reserve clause stays in place.

But the story is not over yet.

We'll have the end of the story in just.

A bad.

And we're back.

It's the top of the night.

Great Flood is down steps to the plate.

It becomes clear that over the sort of arc of Kurt Flood's case, public opinion has, in fact change.

People have stopped thinking of baseball players as you know, grown men who are lucky to live every boy's dream, and have started thinking of them as workers, as people who have a job right, who.

Are making more and more money and are switching loyalties and leaving cities.

And there's a kind of like recognition of what baseball really is.

Yeah, a business.

Right.

For example, after the verdict against Flood comes down from the Supreme Court, the New York Times rights Roberts oh it at flyball to Robert Smith, and he catches it.

The highest court in the land is still averting its gaze from a system in American business that gives the employer outright ownership of his employees.

They're already kind of using Kurt Flood's langladeship.

Outright ownership.

That is very much a Kurt Flood language, right, And in fact, it seems to be popular support.

Right.

Like, there's a poll that comes out around this time, and by a significant margin, people side with Kurt Flood and the players, and so you know, the players feel this shift.

And around the same time, Miller and the players Union notice a sort of more technical detail that follows from the Kurt Flood case, and that is this, Remember, part of the owner's argument was this is a labor issue, not an anti trust issue.

If the players don't like it, they can renegotiate and so the union is like, okay, great.

They pull out the contract, Yeah, iron it out.

They put on their glasses and they see in tiny tiny print.

Yes, So what it says in tiny tiny print is if a player gets to the end of his contract and refuses to sign a new contract, quote, the club shall have the right to renew the contract for the period of one year, ah, one year.

And that's a little bit unclear, right, one year from now.

Can you point to the words one year and say, well, one year from now, like that is what tomorrow and tomorrow.

Have always said.

They have crept that petty pace.

Yes, yes, the players think, well, maybe it means I cannot sign and play for one year and then I'm free.

I'm free.

And so as part of this kind of vibe shift, the union has gotten the league to agree to take disputes to an independent arbiter.

Right goes to arbitration.

A few years after the Kurt Flood case, a few players decide to test this this language to see what does it really mean, and they refuse to sign, and they play another year without signing, and at the end of the year their case goes to arbitration, and the arbitrator said it says one year the days.

Yes, they did it.

They played for a year without a contract.

Now they are free, or as we would say today, free agents.

Let's just pause here, because this is Kurt Flood winning.

This is what he wanted.

He knew it wasn't gonna matter for him, but he wanted to shift the balance of power, and it seems like his case really was instrumental in making that happen.

So now these players who challenged the reserve clause and who won an arbitration can do the thing Kurt Flood wanted to do.

Right the one of these players is a Dodger's pitcher named Andy Messersmith.

He'd been making around one hundred thousand dollars a year pitching for the Dodgers.

The arbitrator says he can go work for any company, any baseball team that will hire him, and the Atlanta Braves offer him one million dollars for three years, so they're immediately more than tripling his salary.

And every baseball player is like, huh, it's not right, and I mean the Dodgers at this point, but I'm just like, you can't do that, and they're like, we could offer more money to our player and encourage him to stay.

And what a normal business does when they want to keep an employee and they.

Don't, and he goes to make more money with the Braves, and all of a sudden, everyone's like, wait a minute, baseball players are underpaid by definition, because we've just seen this in the marketplace.

Yeah, yeah, finally the free market speaks and they're worth three times as much.

And so now it's nineteen seventy six by this point when this happens, and the overall union contract for the players is up for renewal.

And now in this context, the players have all the leverage, right, But interestingly interestingly, they don't want it to be just a total free for all free market at all times for all players, in part because of that valid concern that the owners have always expressed, right, like, it would be bad if the richest team could buy up all the best players all the time.

If it ruins baseball, then it ruins the player's future earnings.

Yes, the pie gets smaller for everyone, right, Ultimately, they want a bigger share of.

A bigger pie, so they can negotiate this.

This is the great thing about free marketing capitalism.

Yes, yes, and so what they negotiate is this deal where the team that drafts a player does still have six years of essentially control over them, so you know, the sort of draft and farm league, and you know, picking good players without being still matters.

But after the sixth year, players can go free agent.

Similar things are happening in basketball and football.

There are cases that the players win in both of those sports that makes it easier for them to go free agent, although in the NFL it stays pretty hard for players to go free agent for a while, and they all well end up coming up with various ways to manage this sort of regulated competition problem.

Like you know, you have a salary caps, you have a luxury tax, various various ways so that the richest owner can't just buy up all the talent.

And it works, right.

Sports stay competitive, they stay popular.

In fact, obviously they get more and more popular, more and more lucrative, and you know the bottom line is, of course there's tons more money in sports today.

But the key question for this case goes back to that division you were talking about at the beginning, right, labor versus capital.

How much goes to the players versus the owners?

And when current flood brought his case about twenty five percent of team revenue went to players about a quarter.

Today it's about half.

So like the percentage going to players has double.

And I'm sure if you listen to AM sports radio they debate this all that's I mean, there are probably people who say, like they're putting in all the work, they should get one hundred percent of whatever, But that's it doesn't matter because that's the negotiation.

That is what a strong worker and a strong workers union can negotiate with strong management.

And it happens in every industry where this sort of has to get worked through.

Yeah, I mean it is the case.

I feel like people do still love to complain about players being overpaid, right, that same thing that Gussie Bush was talking about in the locker room in nineteen sixty nine still feels true today.

Sure they have one bad game and you're like, we'll playing him ten million dollars.

Yes, to play baseball to suck.

And so I do still think there is that vestigial thing of like they're playing a game, it's it's wrong to pay them so much, but like it's a business, and like if you think they're overpaid, like maybe there's a business case, like, are the Dodgers losing money by paying Sho heeo Tani seventy million dollars a year asterisk mostly deferred.

And I think these days, with the number of ways people are getting extraordinarily rich, Shoeotani looks pretty good as someone who is maybe the best of his generation.

Yeah, provides so much joy, so good at what he does.

Yeah, let him have the money.

Yeah, Yeah, I mean I certainly feel that way.

And you know, today, maybe the most kind of relevant contemporary version of this dynamic that played out in the Kurt Flood story is college athletes.

Right.

The NCAA, which was in fact amateur sports, the players were in fact student athletes for a long time, and then more and more money started pouring into college football and basketball in particular people you know, millions, tens of millions of people watch it on TV, huge amounts of money.

And it got weird because like, the coaches were making millions of dollars.

Tons of money, They're building these giant new buildings.

The college was bringing in a ton in donation and said from viewership and all this stuff.

And the players got a scholarship.

Yeah, and they were the amateurs and it just became ridiculous.

And in fact, you know, initially there was this rule that players could sell their name, image and likeness, right that developed a while ago.

They could basically do endorsement deals, is what that meant.

And it was only just this year twenty twenty five that a judge approved an agreement in an antitrust case, a Monopsony case fundamentally that said now colleges can pay athletes.

Just now that is happening, and that is the same story.

And we're even seeing this beyond sports.

Non compete clauses, which used to be in some industries that said, oh, you can leave my television station, but you can't go be an anchor at the competing a.

Kind of like a reserve clause.

And people agreed to them.

And people agreed to them they wrote in the contract.

And now some states are saying like no, like that's that is a restraint of trade of the person who decides to take their talents elsewhere.

And so you know, this thing that Kurt Flood did can't affect all of us who are workers, because it gives everyone just a slight advantage.

I think in talking about you know, what are the fundamental rights you have as a supplier of labor.

So the last thing we should talk about is what happened to Kurt Flood.

You know, the last we heard from him, it was the early seventies and he was working at a bar in Majorca and drinking a lot.

He eventually ran out of money, but his family helped him out.

He got sober, he moved back to the US and ultimately became recognized for what he had done.

His last big public moment came in nineteen ninety four.

The players union had gone on strike.

It was a long strike, it was dragging out.

They had canceled the World Series.

So you know, people again were complaining about, oh, these baseball players, Oh they have such a hard life, how can they demand more money.

It's like the ghost of Gussie Bush, you know, whispering in America's ear or whatever.

And the players themselves are starting to doubt what they're doing, starting to think, you know, maybe we should just go back to work.

But like, the owners had actually been accused at this time of colluding to suppress pay for free agents, right, Like it's a serious thing.

It really does feel like they're trying to drag baseball backwards.

And so some of the players who want to keep fighting, keep the strike going, actually call Kurt Flood in to come and talk in person to a room full of players, to basically give him a pep talk.

And so Kurt Flood comes in and he says, you know, stand your ground.

It says, I thought so that you could be doing this today.

He actually has this line that he says, don't let the owners put the genie back in the bottle.

And when he finish, the players stood up and applauded.

Nice.

Oh, Pushkin just called, You've been traded to a Philadelphia true crime podcast.

Sorry, buddy, not going.

I'm not going.

Let's take it to court.

We'll write a public letter, sternly wooded letter.

Our producer is Gabriel Hunter Chang, our engineer is Sarah Bruguier, and our showrunner is Ryan Dilly.

I'm Jacob Goldstein, and I'm Robert Smith.

We'll be back next week with another episode of Business.

History, a show about the history wait for it, of business Robert Smith.

As you know, there is nowhere in Pushkin's office to make a video to make a video podcast, which is unfortunate.

We tried and it was described as two gray men in a gray.

Box, and reasonably so, fortunately for us.

In an amazing coincidence, literally down the hall from Pushkin's office, there is the showroom of a company called Buzzy Space.

This is a company is where we're sitting right now, and what they do is they design furniture and acoustic solutions that make I'm reading here workplace is more comfortable, more creative, and more fun.

I would even say cozy.

Their furniture is like sort of curved and interesting colors, and I guess keeps things quiet.

Yes, honestly, I wish our office was this showroom.

You can find more at Buzzy dot space.

That's buzz I dot Space.