Curt Flood was as crucial to baseball players' economic rights as Jackie Robinson was to breaking the color barrier. A three-time All-Star and seven-time Gold Glove winner for his defensive prowess in center field, Flood hit over .300 six times during a 15-year major league career that began in 1956. Twelve of those seasons were spent wearing the uniform of the St. Louis Cardinals. After the 1969 season, the Cardinals attempted to trade Flood, then 31, to the Philadelphia Phillies, which set in motion his historic challenge to baseball's infamous "reserve clause." The reserve clause was that part of the player's standard contract which bound the player, one year at a time, forever to the club holding his contract. Flood had no interest in moving to Philadelphia, a city he had always considered racist ("the most northern and southernmost city in the nation"), but, more importantly, he objected to being treated like property and to the restriction of his expected freedom by law. reserve clause. Flood was fully aware of the social relevance of his rebellion against the baseball establishment. Years later, he explained: "I think you really have to understand who that person was, who that Curt Flood was. I'm a child of the sixties, I'm a man of the sixties. In that period of time this country was We were in the Southeast Asian. Good men were dying for America and for the Constitution. In the southern part of the United States we were marching for civil rights and Dr. King had been assassinated, and we had lost the Kennedys. And to think that just because I was a professional baseball player , I could ignore what was happening outside the walls of Busch Stadium, it was truly hypocrisy and now I discovered that all those rights that these great Americans died for, I no longer have in my profession." With the support of the Players Association and with former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg arguing on his behalf, Flood prosecuted the case known as Flood v. Kuhn (Commissioner Bowie Kuhn) from January 1970 to June 1972 at the district, circuit and Supreme Court levels. Although the Supreme Court ultimately ruled against Flood, upholding baseball's exemption from antitrust laws, the case set the stage for the 1975 Messersmith-McNally rulings and the advent of free agency. The financial and emotional costs to Flood as a result of his unprecedented defiance of the reserve clause were enormous.