A Well-Paid Slave (35 page)

Bob Burnes of the
St. Louis Globe-Democrat
rushed to Musial's defense. He called Musial “a great American” and suggested “it would appear someone does begrudge him his hard-earned success.” Burnes lumped Flood's book in with those of Bouton and former St. Louis Cardinals linebacker Dave Meggyesy. “The one common denominator is that all three have walked away as losers,” Burnes wrote. “They are admitting that they couldn't or wouldn't keep up with the rest and now find some vicarious satisfaction in abusing those who made a success of things.”

Flood's new bosses were not pleased, either. Ted Williams disliked Flood's book because of “Curt's public disclosure of his exploits with women and his resentment of authority in general.” Williams made no secret of his disagreement with Flood's lawsuit, which he had termed “ill-advised” and “wrong.” “Baseball has been played for 100 years and for more than 50 the reserve clause has been in effect, and Curt Flood is the first player I've ever heard of who said he's being treated like a slave,” Williams had said in January 1970.

Williams toned down his comments but stood by his opinion after Flood joined the Senators. “Tell you this, I love baseball so much, I hate to see it torn apart by irresponsible writers,” Williams said.

“Like Curt Flood?” Robert Lipsyte asked.

“No, he's entitled to say and do what he wants,” Williams replied. “I think he's wrong, that's all.”

Even one of Flood's biggest boosters, Bob Short, took offense at
The Way It Is
. Short forced Flood to delete a paragraph from the book's galleys quoting Short about their oral agreement. The lawsuit,
The Way It Is
, and a skeptical manager ensured that Flood's first spring training in two years would not be easy.

O
n February 22, Flood walked into the Senators' spring training camp in Pompano Beach, Florida, on edge. He had vowed to come in two weeks early to get into shape, but arrived only a day before the team's other position players. It was the first indication that he did not really want to be there. He quietly passed out 40 copies of
The Way It Is
to his new teammates and coaches. He did not hold any massive book signings or conduct any press conferences. He kept to himself on a team composed mostly of younger players, save for slugger Frank Howard and a few others.

Elliott Maddox made a distinctly different first impression the next day. A 23-year-old black outfielder, he had come over to the Senators from the Detroit Tigers as part of the Denny McLain trade. Street-smart from having grown up in East Orange, New Jersey, and book smart on his way to graduating from the University of Michigan, Maddox learned from the antiwar protests at Ann Arbor how to stand up for himself.

On Maddox's first day in Pompano Beach, he pasted a “Free Angela Davis” sticker above the nameplate on his locker. The Senators objected to the yellow-and-black bumper sticker about the black activist accused of murder. During the first day of practice, someone had written “Fuck you” on the sticker. Management asked him to take it down. He asked why. If the manager, Ted Williams, could have a picture of Richard Nixon in his office, why couldn't Maddox put up a lousy bumper sticker? Maddox responded by pasting the sticker inside his locker and adding a poster of Black Panther Party co-founder Huey P. Newton. In the poster, Newton wore a beret and sat in a high-back wicker chair that looked like a throne. He held a rifle in one hand and a large spear in the other. Newton had attended Oakland Tech, the same high school as Curt Flood.

Flood walked by Maddox's locker and stopped when he saw the poster. “I like that,” he said.

Maddox idolized Flood. He admired the way Flood had played center field for those great Cardinals teams, respected Flood for sitting out the previous season and for suing baseball, and made a concerted effort to win Flood's friendship.

For a brief time, Flood and Maddox roomed together in spring training. Flood holed himself up in their room at the Surf Rider Motel and drank vodka all night until he passed out. He refused to leave the room for breakfast or dinner. Either he ordered room service or Maddox brought him something to eat. If there was no food, Flood simply drank. Maddox tried to keep Flood from drinking by talking about baseball. A converted infielder, Maddox had begun to learn to play the outfield the previous season from Tigers great Al Kaline. Rooming with Flood served as Maddox's postgraduate outfield education.

One baseball subject was taboo—the St. Louis Cardinals. On his first day in camp, Flood said: “I have one goal this year—to kick [the] hell out of the Cardinals in the World Series.” He later claimed to have been misquoted. Back in the room, the Cardinals were off-limits. Even though it had been nearly a year and a half, the trade made his old team too painful even to discuss. On the other side of the state in St. Petersburg, a reporter asked Flood's old friends Lou Brock and Bob Gibson about his comeback. Brock was optimistic: “He's out there because he has something to prove.” Gibson knew better: “Curt came back because he needed the money. It's as simple as that.” Neither of them could help Flood with his problems.

Maddox knew that he could not talk baseball with Flood all night long. Flood would not talk about his career with the Cardinals, nor would he discuss his year away from baseball. And when Maddox stopped talking baseball, Flood's drinking resumed. That spring, Flood spent most of his time off the field in his room either abusing alcohol or sleeping it off.

Flood found no relief on the playing fields of Pompano Beach. His manager, Ted Williams, was part of the problem. Flood tried to make a good first impression with Williams. “Ted is a nonconformist,” Flood remarked during his instructional league stint. “He's unafraid of rocking the boat, of going upstream. Hell, I really like that in a man.” Williams recalled seeing Flood at the Reds' spring training in 1957 as a young third-base prospect. Flood recalled eavesdropping by the batting cage in spring training as a young player with the Cardinals while hitting coach Harry Walker and Williams talked hitting.

On Flood's first day in camp, he impressed Williams by hustling over to him after calisthenics.

“I'm glad you're here,” Williams said, “but more important, I'm glad you're back in baseball. This is where you should be.”

Williams meant in baseball, not with the Senators. He opposed Flood's lawsuit and did not think Flood could be a useful player anymore. But now Curt Flood was Ted Williams's problem.

Williams indoctrinated Flood the way he did every new player—he talked hitting. He asked Flood where the good right-handers pitched to him. Flood pointed to the outside corner. “I thought so,” Williams said. “That's what I would do if I was managing against you. You're a good opposite-field hitter, so I'd pitch to your strengths and defense against it. You're going to get your share of hits that way, but the other club has to depend on its defense to hold the damage to a minimum.”

Hitting was Williams's obsession. His book,
The Science of Hitting
, landed in bookstores that May and remains the definitive work on the subject. In 1969, Williams had talked the Senators into becoming hitters. He raised the team's batting average 27 points that season from .224 to .251—tied for third best in the American League. He even made a hitter out of shortstop Eddie Brinkman, who raised his average 79 points from .187 to .266. In doing so, he also turned the Senators, who finished the season with an 86-76 record, into winners. For producing the first winning season in the expansion Senators' nine-year history (and the first above-.500 season by a Washington team since 1952), Williams was named the American League Manager of the Year.

But sustained managerial success eluded Williams. A staunch Republican and Nixon fan, Williams had gained weight and had begun to look and sound like John Wayne. He had trouble communicating with players from the counterculture generation. Several players, led by McLain, started an anti-Williams faction called “the Underminers Club.”

Even though the group included at least two black players, race did not seem to be the issue. Williams had used his 1966 Hall of Fame induction speech to lobby for the induction of Negro league legends Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson “because they were not given a chance.” Williams's color blindness may have stemmed from his Mexican mother and his childhood in working-class San Diego. For Ted, baseball ability was the great equalizer. Indeed, in 1971, half of the position players in his Opening Day lineup were black.

Williams's problems were more generational than racial. Maddox and some of the team's other young players could not relate to him. During the 1971 season, Maddox marched into Williams's office and asked why he had been benched in favor of Larry Biittner. Williams said he wanted to look at a younger player. Maddox pointed out that Biittner was two years older than he was. Williams told Maddox not to be such a smart-ass.

Publicly, Williams said all the right things about Flood and what he expected from him coming back from his year-and-a-half layoff. “As good a player as he is,” Williams said, “it shouldn't make any difference at all.” Williams pointed out that he had enjoyed one of his best seasons in 1946 after three years as a World War II pilot. He also hit .407 at the end of the 1953 season after nearly two years as a Korean War pilot. Flood, however, was not Ted Williams. He was a singles hitter who relied on his speed to leg out base hits.

Privately, Williams gave Flood almost no chance of coming back. Williams received reports from his friends in the National League that Flood's play had fallen off dramatically in 1969. Having read Flood's book, he also knew about Flood's “bedding and boozing” in Denmark.

Flood defended his physical conditioning during his layoff. “Sure, I lived the good life in Copenhagen during the time I was out of action,” he said. “But I took care of myself. I like a drink once in a while. Yet I also know when to stop.”

The medical experts begged to differ. “Flood has to have the oldest 33-year-old body I've ever examined,” Senators team doctor George Resta said. Team trainer Bill Zeigler agreed. Flood had no strength in his arms and no muscle tone. A small man at 5 feet 9 and 165 pounds, he now looked even smaller. His washboard stomach and sinewy arms and legs had atrophied since his missed fly ball in the 1968 World Series.

Even his face looked different. His cheeks looked fuller, and the circles under his eyes were more pronounced. Broadcaster Harry Caray saw Flood in spring training and thought Flood had “aged ten years.” He mentioned the bags under Flood's eyes to Williams. Williams said he had noticed the same thing.

Flood's first day in camp did nothing to change Williams's mind. During his first time in the batting cage, Flood flailed against a non-roster sinkerball pitcher, Jim Southworth. Southworth never made it to the major leagues, but that day he made Flood look foolish. Flood struggled to get any of Southworth's pitches out of the batting cage. A few dribbled into the infield. Williams made excuses for Flood, saying he should not have faced a sinkerballer like Southworth in his first few at-bats. But the next hitter, a switch-hitting outfielder named Richie Scheinblum, roped Southworth's offerings into the outfield.

Flood's struggles at the plate continued during the first few intrasquad games. He failed to get a ball out of the infield in the first two games and finished 0-for-7. Flood sat next to Williams to try to pick up batting tips. Williams held Flood out of the first few exhibition games against the Montreal Expos and then used him for four games as a designated hitter. He wanted Flood to get as many at-bats, particularly against American League pitching, as possible. Williams thought the biggest problem for Flood would be learning the American League pitchers. “They don't know me, either,” Flood said. He finally got his first base hit of spring training in his 10th at-bat, a solid liner to left off Orioles pitcher Dave Leonhard, but Leonhard picked him off first base. “The toughest thing is the hitting,” Flood said. “You can almost fake the fielding if you want to, but you can either hit or you can't.”

Flood flopped in the field as well. He dropped an easy fly ball March 15 against the Kansas City Royals. His arm also proved to be suspect. As a runner tagged from third later in the game, Flood pumped once. His throw then bounced in to cutoff man Frank Howard. It revived speculation that Flood's arm was shot. Williams later criticized Flood for playing too deep in center field. Flood even took to borrowing his son Gary's Mickey Mantle glove to try to cure his fielding woes.

After the first few days of spring training, Flood quietly booked his own room in the team's spring training hotel. Maddox switched into a room with one of his former Tigers teammates, pitcher Norm McRae, just down the hall.

Maddox was constantly knocking on Flood's door. He wanted to keep Flood company, to learn about the game, and to keep Flood from drinking too much. Sometimes Flood told him to come back in an hour. If Maddox did not come back in exactly an hour (or sometimes even if he did), Flood would open the door only four inches. His bloodshot eyes glared at Maddox. Never mind, Flood would say. Sometimes he said he was tired or in bed. Sometimes Flood did not even bother to get up; he simply yelled through the door.

During the nights when Flood let him in, Maddox could see that his new friend was a troubled soul. Flood spent only a few minutes talking about his problems at the plate or in the field. Normally, if a ballplayer was not playing well, he would spend much of the night obsessing over his swing or his fielding techniques. Playing baseball, however, was not the first thing on Flood's mind.

After a while, Flood told Maddox that he wanted to be alone. “I've got things to think about,” he said. Maddox replied that Flood's hitting and fielding would come around. “No,” Flood said, “it's not about that.”