Lockman 2016
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OVERTHROWN: CURT FLOOD, JIM BOUTON, AND BASEBALL’S FREE AGENCY REVOLUTION A Senior Thesis submitted to the Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts in American Studies By Gwendolyn R. Lockman Washington, D.C. April 21, 2016 !ii © Copyright Gwendolyn R. Lockman All rights reserved !iii OVERTHROWN: CURT FLOOD, JIM BOUTON, AND BASEBALL’S FREE AGENCY REVOLUTION Gwendolyn R. Lockman Thesis Adviser: Michael Kazin, PhD ABSTRACT Baseball is not only the national pastime, but also a business and a workplace. After a century of the reserve system, players finally secured the right to become free agents and negotiate contracts in 1975. This thesis examines the influence of Curt Flood and Jim Bouton on the labor struggle in professional baseball in the long 1960s, directed by the inquiry “How were Curt Flood and Jim Bouton’s rebel narratives related in their challenges to the baseball establishment in the early 1970s?” This study relies on archival research conducted at the Giamatti Research Center at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, analysis and comparison of Ball Four, by Jim Bouton, and The Way It Is, by Curt Flood, and interviews conducted both by the author and the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR). I conclude that the combined effects of Curt Flood and Jim Bouton’s personal narratives advanced the fight for free agency because they were able to inspire empathy among and for baseball players as employees treated unfairly by owners. This is the first work that compares Flood and Bouton extensively, and argues that the two stories ought to be considered together to understand the state of baseball in the long 1960s. Players were suppressed through formal means, such as the reserve clause, but also by “unspoken codes” that dictated appropriate behavior. Baseball’s relationship with the US Supreme Court determined the course of baseball expansion, which delayed the realization of !iv free agency. The rise and fall of the black activist athlete complicated progress in American athletics in the long 1960s. Bouton and Flood were the first to present narratives that illustrated how difficult it was to make a living as a baseball player with overt political messages that called on the readers to find it in their humanity to empathize with the struggle of the players as men. By understanding how these stories confirmed one another’s accounts, unfolded at the same moment in American history, the role of race in society and baseball, and the success of the fight for free agency, it is clear that Flood and Bouton made significant progress by presenting their narratives. !v For Roy Haynes, a family legend Inez Mae Haynes Lockman, his daughter, my grandmother And Tariq, Kairee, and Garrison. “Baseball, it is said, is only a game. True. And the Grand Canyon is only a hole in Arizona.” –George Frederick Will, Men at Work "That's beautiful: the hurrah game! well—it's our game: that's the chief fact in connection with it: America's game: has the snap, go, fling, of the American atmosphere—belongs as much to our institutions, fits into them as significantly, as our constitutions, laws: is just as important in the sum total of our historic life." –Walt Whitman, in With Walt Whitman in Camden !vi Acknowledgements It is an understatement to say baseball is important to me. I appeared in the Poplar Shopper in a baseball dress sometime around 1995, and one of my oldest memories of playing in the yard of our farm house in Northeastern Montana involves my dad, my brother Tyler, a plastic yellow bat, a white whiffle ball, and me swingin’ for the fences. Most of the men in my family— on both sides, for at least three generations— played ball at some point, and the women in my family were unafraid to be sports fans, encouraging me to enjoy the fun of play. My grandpa Pat Ryan even played baseball against Dave McNally, a fellow Montanan, who is rather important to this story, at least at its conclusion. It is both a blessing and a curse to be a baseball fan and a baseball scholar. This project brought me immeasurable joy, and a funded trip to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York, a fantasy I barely dreamed of as an inhabitant of the West. But this project was also deeply frustrating and saddening. The “Baseball Establishment”—the owners, the managers, the Hall of Fame, the unspoken rules and rituals obeyed by all involved parties, including fans—is a monolith. It is awesome, by which I mean it is remarkable and inspires fear, demanding obedience and suppressing those who challenge it, but it also has a purpose. There are times when I find myself as a fan standing with the villain of this story, there are times when I find that the scholarly endeavor points me in another direction, and then there are the human feelings, too, that made this an emotional journey. I am indebted to Dr. Chandra Manning, PhD, from whom I took “Baseball in American Society” at Georgetown, for teaching me that you can be a deeply passionate fan and a critically thinking scholar of baseball. Professor !vii Manning also introduced me to Curt Flood’s story, sound methodology and editing for history writing, and encouraged me to pursue this thesis. There are not words enough to thank Erika B. Seamon, PhD. Rarely have I seen a person so passionate about their work as her. It has been a joy to spend three years exploring, counting felled trees and pigs. Thank you for the opportunity to work with you as your teaching assistant, and for making this thesis understandable when I was grasping in the dark. Thank you to her invaluable partner in thesis-crime, Colva Weissenstein, for your constant level-headedness, killer fashion sense, and for laughing at my angst in class. Thank you also to the seniors of the American Studies class of 2016. I can’t wait to see how you change the world. Thank you to Michael Kazin, PhD, for advising this project. There’s something very gratifying about running into your thesis adviser at Nationals Park on a Sunday when your thesis is about baseball. I am grateful for your guidance and attention for detail that helped me get this story where it is today. Thank you also to Professor Stephen Lane, for understanding what I discovered before I did, but making me figure it out on my own nonetheless. Among the many truly wonderful educators to whom I am indebted, I want to recognize Mr. Jeff Nord, my AP United States History teacher in high school. Without Mr. Nord I would not be where I am today, and I never would have conceived that I could one day, at Georgetown University, present an 80-page thesis after taking on more training in History. There really is no such thing as a free lunch, Mr. Nord, especially in D.C. Thank you to all of my friends, roommates, coworkers, and family. Thank you to my parents, Jamie and Clem Lockman, for your unyielding support and love of baseball movies. You introduced me to baseball in all its cultural forms, but I am especially grateful for season tickets !viii for Missoula Osprey games, letting me pick bats that aren’t Lyle Overbay’s, MLB.com subscriptions, cupboards full of baseball cards, Twins memorabilia, Bull Durham, Field of Dreams, The Brothers K and Ball Four. !ix Table of Contents Introduction ................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter One: “It was not a year to treasure, nor yet one to forget too quickly.” ........ 18 Chapter Two: “The players have zero recourse.” ........................................................ 33 Chapter Three: “It is racism, in its most subtle form.” ................................................ 52 Chapter Four: “Boys, the reserve clause is the one thing you can’t fool with.” ......... 65 Conclusion ................................................................................................................... 76 Bibliography ................................................................................................................ 81 Appendix A: DOCUMENTS ......................................................................................... 93 Appendix B: INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPTS ................................................................ 99 !x !xi !1 Introduction “You ain’t read nothing yet until you see ‘Ball Four.’”1 My relationships with two books made it clear to me what can be uncovered through American Studies scholarship. On April 7, 2012, I watched a special airing of the 1962 film adaptation of To Kill A Mockingbird, on USA Network on April 7, 2012. To celebrate the film’s 50th anniversary, USA Network aired To Kill A Mockingbird ad-free, with an introduction by President Barack Obama. I reeled at the impact a novel could have: a novel concerning social ills, provocative for its time; adapted for film during the Civil Rights Movement; a film that won Academy Awards; a film and a novel that together helped form my understanding of racial inequality in the United States; and the meaning behind the first African American President of the United States introducing the 50th anniversary viewing on cable television. My mother gave me The Brothers K, a novel detailing the story of the Chance family in Washington state, told through the coming of age of four brothers, their father’s return to minor league baseball, and twenty years—1956 to 1975—of American political and cultural history. Author David James Duncan delicately wove together a story about family, religion, education, work, America, and baseball with an unmatched talent for hilarity and tragedy. Looking at my adoration for To Kill a Mockingbird and the Brothers K now, I see the same interests that inspired this thesis: the impact of race relations in the 20th century, the 1960s as an era, the utility of understanding American culture through intersectional and interdisciplinary lenses, and, of course, baseball.