Curt Flood baseball memorabilia to be auctioned

Much of the memorabilia Curt Flood's widow will sell at a Louisville auction tomorrow remains painful for Philadelphians to contemplate.

There is his white-gold World Series ring from 1964, the year the Phillies' historic collapse gave his Cardinals the pennant. There are trophies and awards that remind us how good a player Philadelphia lost when Flood, setting in motion the legal fight that would topple baseball's reserve clause and trigger free agency, refused his 1969 trade here. There are letters and documents from that landmark case, which reached the U.S. Supreme Court three years later.

No matter how historians or his widow try to spin the events triggered by that seven-player Phillies-Cardinals trade 40 years ago this fall, there's no escaping the idea that the catalog of more than 60 items adds up to a stinging rejection of this city and its baseball team.

Judy Pace-Flood, whose late husband's collection will be sold by Hunt Auctions of Exton at the Louisville Slugger Museum's 5th Annual Live Auction this weekend, doesn't see it that way.

And she said her husband, who died at 59 of throat cancer in 1997, did not see it that way, either, even though Philadelphia and the Phillies in the late 1960s must have raised numerous red flags for a talented black athlete such as Flood.

His decision to test the reserve clause "had nothing to do with where Curt was going," she said in a telephone interview this week. "To view his actions in that light is far too simplistic. It's like saying that those civil-rights pioneers who challenged the laws that made them ride in the back of the bus did so only because they thought the ride was too bumpy back there. It was much more complex than Philadelphia."

Still, Flood did call Philadelphia America's "northernmost Southern city." And, the reserve clause still intact, he did return to the game elsewhere, ending his career in Washington in 1971.

Now, four decades after the historic event, it's tempting to speculate how different baseball might be had not the prospect of playing for the 1970 Phillies been so unappealing.

Would Flood still have tested the system? And if not, how long would it have been before someone else did? Would the free-agent era his action precipitated have been delayed for a year? A decade? Longer?