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would.
    â€œThat’s good enough for me,” Flood replied.
    Miller knew he had found a man of uncommon principle, but the union’s executive director was not done playing devil’s advocate. He explained that a lawsuit would take at least two to three years to wind its way through the federal court system to the Supreme Court. By the time the Court reached a decision, Flood would be 34. He would lose three seasons and nearly $300,000 in salary. His playing career would be over.
    Flood responded that he had no intention of playing for the Phillies and that he was serious about sacrificing his playing career to sue baseball.
    The owners, Miller continued, were a mean and vindictive bunch. Flood’s lawsuit would end any aspirations he had to be the first black major league manager.
    Flood said he had no interest in managing.
    What about working as a major league coach or scout? Miller said Flood would be blacklisted. He could forget about any future career opportunities in the game.
    â€œYou’re not telling me anything new,” Flood said.
    Flood’s lawsuit would be targeting not only Major League Baseball, Miller said, but also his former employer, Anheuser-Busch. Gussie Busch was the most powerful businessman in St. Louis. He had set up Flood’s former teammate Roger Maris with a Budweiser distributorship in Florida. The head of the King of Beers could just as easily destroy Flood’s photography and portrait business and reputation in St. Louis.
    Flood had not thought of that, but was not deterred. He was not likely to be receiving any Christmas cards from Busch this year anyway.
    Miller then pressed Flood about his financial condition. Miller’s inquiries led him to tell Flood about another reserve clause lawsuit, involving New York Giants outfielder Danny Gardella.
    A stocky, muscular man who liked to walk up a flight of stairs on his hands, burst into opera songs, and quote Shakespeare, the 5-foot-7-inch Gardella once left a suicide note on the bed of his Cincinnati hotel room blaming his road roommate, Nap Reyes, for his death. Reyes ran to the open window and saw a smiling Gardella hanging from a ledge 22 floors off the ground.
    In 1946, Gardella risked his baseball life. He rejected a raise from $4,500 to $5,000 after batting .272 with 18 home runs the previous season. The Giants thought that wartime pitching had inflated Gardella’s offensive numbers, and by all accounts, he could not field worth a lick. Gardella showed up at the Giants’ spring training camp without a signed contract. He argued with the team’s traveling secretary after barging into the main hotel dining room in a sleeveless sweater. The team kicked him out of the hotel and planned to auction him off to a minor league team. Gardella made his own deal, signing a $10,000 contract to play for Veracruz in the Mexican League. Baseball commissioner Happy Chandler placed a five-year ban on Gardella and 14 other players who had signed Mexican League contracts.
    Gardella returned from Mexico after a year. He tried to play for the semipro Gulf Oilers in a 1947 game on Staten Island against the Negro American League’s Cleveland Buckeyes and the legendary pitcher Satchel Paige. Alerted to Gardella’s presence, Chandler sent a telegram that was read over the stadium loudspeaker: The black players would be banned from the majors for playing against Gardella or any other players who had jumped to the Mexican League. With major league teams beginning to open their doors to blacks that season, Paige and the Buckeyes obeyed Chandler’s edict.
    In 1948, a trial judge threw out Gardella’s lawsuit against the reserve clause based on Federal Baseball . On appeal, however, Gardella landed two of the best federal judges in history, Learned Hand and Jerome Frank. The intellectual heir to Justice Holmes and perhaps the greatest American jurist never to serve on the Supreme Court, Hand wrote a careful