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