Book Success Story: Lawyer Writer Brad Snyder's Well-Paid Slave: Curt Flood's Fight for Free Agency in Professional Sports

We previously published an interview with Talmage Boston, a litigator with a passion for baseball history and author of 1939: Baseball's Tipping Point, which chronicles the pivotal 1939 season.

In the same vein is Brad Snyder, a 1999 graduate of Yale Law School and former law clerk for the Honorable Dorothy W. Nelson on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, who left his associate position at the law firm of Williams and Connolly of Washington, D.C. law firm, to write full time about baseball.

Snyder's most recent effort is the recently published Well-Paid Slave: Curt Flood's Fight for Free Agency in Professional Sports (Viking Oct. 2006). The book chronicles the legal crusade of Curt Flood, an all-star centerfielder with the St. Louis Cardinals, who rejected a trade to the Philadelphia Phillies after the 1969 season, and challenged baseball's "reserve" clause – a standard contractual provision that bound professional baseball players to their teams for life – all the way to the Supreme Court (see Kuhn v. Flood). While Flood lost the case, his legal battle paved the way for today's free agency system that enables players to receive fair market value for their services.

Read Snyder's full bio here.

Credit to the Wall Street Journal Law blog for a post on Snyder's book.