Motivation Quote by Curt Flood

Flood’s line lands like a locker-room door slam: plain, rhythmic, and deliberately unpoetic because the point isn’t artistry, it’s refusal. The repetition of “I’m” and “I am” insists on personhood the way a contract insists on control. Then he pivots to the vocabulary of commerce - “property,” “consignment of goods” - language that sounds cold because it’s meant to. He’s not arguing about batting averages or salaries; he’s exposing the moral ugliness hiding inside baseball’s legal fine print.

The context is the reserve clause era, when players could be traded, shelved, or shipped without meaningful consent. Owners talked about “assets,” “rights,” “transactions.” Flood flips that script by borrowing their diction and showing what it really implies: that a grown man with a family can be treated like a crate with a label. “Consignment” is especially sharp; it evokes freight, inventory, something moved around for someone else’s profit. It also hints at how institutions sanitize exploitation by dressing it in neutral terms.

The subtext is both personal and political. Flood isn’t only demanding better working conditions; he’s drawing a bright line between labor and ownership, and he’s doing it as a Black athlete in a country still fighting over the meaning of citizenship and bodily autonomy. The intent is confrontational but strategic: make the public hear the reserve clause the way it would sound in any other workplace. By insisting on his humanity first, Flood forces baseball to defend not just a policy, but a premise: that the game’s “tradition” depended on treating players as movable goods.