Former MLB Commissioner Bowie Kuhn passed Thursday night. Kuhn was MLB commish for 15 years, ending in 1984, and did battle with Curt Flood in a landmark anti-trust case, and was in office when arbitration — and the beginning of today’s free agency — started to come into being. Ken Rosenthal parses Kuhn’s enduring influence on the game, and Thomas Boswell provides a nicely turned memorial for Kuhn in today’s Washington Post.
Baseball fans who remember Kuhn’s starchy demeanor as commissioner will be surprised to read about Kuhn crossing his eyes, cracking jokes, and generally mugging it up in Boswell’s piece, in which he emerges as a gentle, awkward character. His tenure as commish was before my time, pretty much, but I do recall Kuhn fondly as a stiff, if good-natured, old dude who always threw out the first pitch at my hometown’s Little League Baseball Parade when I was a kid.
Dave Zirin’s take :
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?SectionID=105&ItemID=12350
“Major League Baseball’s website, in their Selig-sanctioned obituary, claims that Bowie Kuhn “presided over the dawn of free agency and the end of the reserve system.” [The reserve system bound a player to their team for life.] That’s sort of like saying the Czar Nicholas II “presided over” the Russian Revolution.
The truth is that Kuhn “presided over” a game that saw players as bonded labor to be bought and sold. He also “presided over” the ignominious routing of the Major League plantation system. The reserve clause, on his watch, was swept into the dustbin of baseball history alongside the color line and the spitball.
The man who stood up to Kuhn, and opened to door to free agency was named Curt Flood. In October 1969, the St. Louis Cardinals traded Flood to Philadelphia and the All-Star centerfielder just said no. Flood contacted Kuhn directly, writing, “Dear Mr. Kuhn after 12 years in the major leagues I do not feel that I am a piece of property to be bought and sold irrespective of my wishes. I believe that any system that produces that result violates my basic rights as a citizen and a human being. I believe that I have the right to consider offers from other clubs before making any decisions. I, therefore, request that you make known to all the major league clubs my feelings in this matter, and advise them of my availability for the 1970 season.”
It sounds polite but at the time this was political TNT. Kuhn didn’t take Flood seriously at all replying: “Dear Curt: I certainly agree with you that you, as a human being, are not a piece of property to be bought and sold. That is I think obvious. However, I cannot see its application to the situation at hand.”
The great columnist Red Smith wrote in response to their exchange, “Thus the commissioner restates baseball’s labor policy any time there is unrest in the slave cabins. ‘Run along, sonny, you bother me.'”
But he seemed so nice at those Ridgewood Little League parades.