Why I Am Challenging Baseball In his article, Why I Am Challenging Baseball, former player Curt Flood takes aim at the reserve clause, which states that the player’s rights were owned by the team and that the player was not allowed to freely enter into a contract with another team. This issue was one seeped in controversy at the time, with Flood’s attempted lawsuit shortly after this article was published only adding an added match to the fire. Though his suit failed, Peter Seitz eventually ended the long-term Reserve Clause in 1975, with the clause now only applying to the first three years of a player’s career. However, was the initial question raised by Flood in this article (Is the Reserve Clause legal?) answered effectively? Or was there a reason other than player discrimination that he lost his multiple court cases? If nothing else, Flood provides compelling arguments as to why the Reserve Clause is unfair to the players of the day. Throughout the article he …show more content…
Despite detailing the unfair treatment of baseball players at the words of the Reserve Clause, he never clarifies exactly how it is unconstitutional. He even mentions at several points where he talked to a lawyer friend about the case, as well as the executive board of the Players Association (130-131), but he doesn’t go into his specific legal arguments. While no one can argue for the Reserve Clause in terms of morality, if the clause doesn’t technically violate any laws in the Constitution, then the case is probably a lost cause. He closes out the article by trying to show the unconstitutionality of the clause using an analogy of an accountant in the same position (Flood 132), and if he had done the same thing while outlining exact violations of the Constitution in the process, this could have been a great article. As it is, it’s a very compelling thinkpiece that falls short with actual
Kilroy was on vacation when his old college roommate asked him to throw out the first pitch, and while doing so he dislocated his shoulder, which caused him to lose the first 35 games of the season. In this case the defendant is James Kilroy and the plaintiff is the Oakland Ogres. In Kilroy’s contract it states that the player shall not play baseball for any other team during the offseason, or any impromptu or competitive game of football, baseball, softball and other athletic events. The Oakland Ogres believe that because Kilroy participated in this event in the offseason, he breached their contract and should be punished because of it. The Ogres believe it is a clear breach of the limitations that were set on his offseason to prevent something like this happening.
An associate editor in SPORTINGNEWS Roy Clements wrote the argument of Buck Weaver’ reinstatement in the MLB. He was a one of the eight players, who banned from the MLB. After his death, his family tries to get into him in the MLB again. It tries to reinstate him in MLB because the MLB commissioner considers Pete Rose, who banned from MLB because of gambling on baseball, try to reinstate in the MLB.
Chapter II: Review of Literature Antitrust Laws The antitrust law began when the United States Congress passed the very first antitrust laws in 1890. These laws were called the Sherman Act. The Sherman Act was a “comprehensive character of economic liberty aimed at preserving free and unfettered competition as a rule of trade.” These Laws existed for many years.
Stewart’s years of practicing law in Washington DC, while often handling constitutional law cases provided a strong foundation to his well-researched, bestselling, and award winning account
Flood’s arguments against Kuhn are controversial because he as an African American who compared the reserve clause to slavery. While the Major League’s attorneys argued that baseball was an important part of American culture and the reserve system caused greater good for the sport of baseball. The case was taken to the Supreme Court was because Arthur Goldberg and his colleagues, the lawyers for Flood, believed the reserve clause violated the Constitution’s thirteenth amendment. The case was assigned to Judge Irving Ben Cooper, who had been a New York State Judge before his federal and Supreme Court judge career. This is interesting because the case has originally been opened in New York, where Major League Baseball was headquartered.
The article “Courts and the Future of ‘Athletic Labor’ in College Sports” by Michael H. LeRoy (a professor at the school of labor and employment relations, and college of law, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), is written in regards to the way athletes are treated and compensation in which examples of previous court cases are used to justify how athlete benefits may be changing sooner than thought. LeRoy uses pathos to draw out and capture an emotional appeal by using examples to validate his reasoning which is obvious within the body of his text where he discusses constitutional rights, academics, discrimination and antitrust in detail. In his first paragraph over constitutional rights, LeRoy first discusses the importance of case
The reserve clause was one of the most controversial conditions within player’s contracts in Major League Baseball. This clause, in essence, retained players from signing with other teams once the current contract expired. Players like Curt Flood challenged the reserve clause because how unfair the terms were. He was traded to the Philadelphia Phillies after the 1969 season, but refused to leave the St. Louis Cardinals. Flood filed a lawsuit and Flood v. Kuhn made it all the way to the Supreme Court.
Baseball enjoys having full immunity because the court system and congress chooses to not to get involved in any and all baseball activity. One hundred years later, this “reserve clause” was removed by the baseball community allowing the players the right to either sign with the current team or with a different team. The choice was all up to the players and not with the owners. This subject is important because baseball shouldn’t be treated as a business deal, it is a great American sport that people love to watch and play. It is a game which is all about having fun and amusement for fans to come out and watch during their spare time.
The Supreme court accepted the case. Fields attorneys are arguing that the Stolen Valor act is unconstitutional. Field attorneys argued that Fields cannot be convicted because he lied. The First amendment protects speech that does not directly harm others. Fields attorneys claim that Fields had lied about himself, and by lying about himself he only hurt himself.
I thought that , that was wrong because all races should be allowed in the major league. Pick a fight with him. Why that was important and still is important is because they still in our 2015 day still do this stuff. Also here is another thing that they did from the text (page258)“Even his own teammates tried to pick a fight with
Sports journalists from across the media spectrum had reacted to the Saints’ bounty scandal in a unified voice. Through JumboSearch, I dredged up their consensus: the New Orleans Saints had breached the ‘bounty-rule,’ a Constitutional clause that outlawed targeted, incentivized violence. In one report, the ‘bounty-rule’ supposedly outlined in the League Constitution was lifted verbatim from a policy piece I had read earlier. Using that piece as my guide, I scoured the Constitution for the ‘bounty-rule’. It did not
Cassuto tells us “even the U.S. State Department Bureau of International Information Programs proclaims baseball as ‘the game of innocence and growth.’” Baseball salaries were not always as absolute as they are today. Back whenever Babe Ruth, America’s favorite player, played, they would cut salaries based on performance and if someone was not good enough, they were out of luck. Business and baseball go hand and hand now, and even in the early days of it. People never talked about how the players were always left out.
Club owner Charles Comiskey was widely disliked by the players and was resented for his miserliness. Comiskey long had a reputation for underpaying his players, even though they were one of the top teams in the league and had already won the 1917 World Series. Because of baseball 's reserve clause, any player who refused to accept a contract was prohibited from playing baseball on any other professional team. Because of the clause, players were prevented from changing teams without permission from the owner of their team, and without a union the players had no bargaining power. Comiskey was probably no worse than most owners — in fact, Chicago had the largest team payroll in 1919.
In 1945, 2% of major leagues consisted of blacks and in 1995, 19% of major leagues consisted of blacks. The very first black person to play major league baseball was Jackie Robinson in 1947. By the 1970’s, a little less than a quarter of major league baseball players were black. Today, major league sports teams are much different than before, many teams consist of the minority being white people and the majority being other races. Segregation has changed immensely over time, in the past 5 decades blacks went from having no basic human rights to being recognized as equal beings and it shows through sports as well as many other areas of segregation such as the lack of opportunity and safety, segregation in schools, and discrimination in public