HBO Sports will explore the life and career of former St. Louis Cardinals centerfielder Curt Flood, one of baseball’s landmark figures. The Curious Case of Curt Flood debuts Wednesday, July 13 (9:00-10:30 p.m. ET/PT), the day after the Major League Baseball All-Star Game, exclusively on HBO. When Flood left the game in 1971, he was making the princely sum of $110,000 a year. The HBO documentary does a thorough job of detailing the sort of personal and professional ruin Flood suffered as a result of challenging baseball’s reserve system. Regardless of how you might feel today about the sort of salaries that modern professional athletes command, that should not detract from the significant role that Curt Flood played in tilting the economic balance of power from the feudal advantage the owners had in the late 1960s to the more even distribution today.