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Top 5 Reasons You Can't Blame Charlie Finley for Breaking Up the Oakland A's Dynasty
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Terrence Clay
Aug 28, 2023, 2:05:53 AM8/28/23
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https://unclemikesmusings.blogspot.com/2020/05/for-october-17-top-5-reasons-you-cant.html
October 17, 1974: Game 5 of the World Series, at the Oakland Coliseum. Vida Blue of the Oakland Athletics and Don Sutton of the Los Angeles are tied 2-2 going into the bottom of the 6th, when Mike Marshall relieves Sutton and retires the side.
In the 7th‚ a shower of debris from the fans halts the game for 15 minutes. When play is resumed‚ Joe Rudi hits Marshall's 1st pitch for a homer to give the A's a 3rd 3-2 win‚ clinching a 3rd straight World Championship for the team.
The A's thus become only the 2nd major league franchise to win 3 straight World Series, and remain the only one other than the Yankees to have done it. This was also the 1st all-California World Series, or even the 1st with both teams playing more than a few blocks west of the Mississippi River (take note, fans of St. Louis and Minnesota).
Jim "Catfish" Hunter died in 1999, Paul Lindblad in 2006, Jim Holt in 2019, and Claudell Washington earlier this year. The other 22 men on the 1974 A's World Series roster are still alive: Blue, Rudi, Reggie Jackson, Rollie Fingers, Sal Bando, Bert Campaneris, Gene Tenace, Dick Green, John "Blue Moon" Odom, Darold Knowles, Angel Mangual, Ted Kubiak, Dave Hamilton, Jesús Alou, Ray Fosse, Dal Maxvill, Herb Washington (no relation to Claudell), Billy North, Ken Holtzman, Manny Trillo, Larry Haney and John Donaldson. (UPDATE: Mangual died on February 16, 2021.)
After the 1974 season, A's owner Charles Oscar Finley reneged on a clause in his contract with ace itcher Hunter, who was then declaresd a free agent, and signed with the Yankees. The A's still won the American League Western Division in 1975, but lost the AL Championship Series to the Boston Red Sox.
Then the reserve clause was struck down. Free agency, and thus much higher salaries, were coming, and Finley didn't want to pay them. First, he traded Reggie to the Baltimore Orioles, where he played out his contract. Then he sold Blue to the Yankees for $1.5 million, and Fingers and Rudi to the Red Sox for $1 million each. He figured, better to get as much money for them now, than to lose them to free agency and get nothing for them.
Commissioner Bowie Kuhn voided those sales. This benefited the Yankees, as they didn't have to deal with Blue's worsening drug problem, and the Red Sox did not get the improvement that Fingers and Rudi would have given them. But was it really, as Kuhn put it, in "the best interests of baseball"?
When the 1976 season came to an end, with the A's finishing 2nd, a mere 2 1/2 games behind the Kansas City Royals, Finley didn't lift a finger to sign any of the players who went for the big money. He didn't try to bring Reggie back, and Reggie signed with the Yankees. Fingers and Tenace were signed by the San Diego Padres. Rudi was signed by the team then known as the California Angels. Campaneris was signed by the Texas Rangers, and would join Rudi on the Angels 2 years later. Team Captain Bando was signed by the Milwaukee Brewers.
Finally, after an attempt to trade Blue to the Cincinnati Reds after the 1977 season fell through, Finley traded him across the Bay to the San Francisco Giants. The A's crashed to last place in 1977, losing 98 games, behind even the expansion Seattle Mariners. They lost 93 games in 1978, and bottomed out at 108 losses and just 306, 763 fans for the entire season.
Finley sold the team in 1980, and they instantly got better. He died in 1996. He is still not in the Baseball Hall of Fame, while Reggie, Catfish and Fingers are.
Pretty much everybody who's studied 1970s baseball -- and several books have been written about the period, all of them examining the A's, the Team of the Decade -- agree that if Charlie O. hadn't been so cheap, and otherwise so vindictive, and had paid his players what they were worth, and had otherwise treated them well enough to make them want to stay in Oakland, the dynasty could have continued, getting in the way of the Big Red Machine, George Steinbrenner's Yankees and Whitey Herzog's Royals.
But Finley broke up his dynasty.
Top 5 Reasons You Can't Blame Charlie Finley for Breaking Up the Oakland A's Dynasty
5. The Curse of Connie Mack. Finley's breakup of his dynasty may be the most famous salary dump in sports history, but it wasn't even the second-most damaging one in the history of his own franchise.
After winning 4 Pennants in 5 years, including winning the World Series in 1910, 1911 and 1913, the Philadelphia Athletics lost the World Series in 1914. After that, Connie Mack, then the team's manager, treasurer, and owner of 1/4 of the franchise, broke up his dynasty, rather than pay his players enough to refuse the higher salaries being offered by the new Federal League.
He sold Hall of Fame 2nd baseman Eddie Collins to the Chicago White Sox, let Hall of Fame 3rd baseman Frank "Home Run" Baker sit out the entire season in a holdout, and let Hall of Fame pitchers Eddie Plank and Chief Bender sign with the Feds. The A's went from first to worst, finishing in 8th place, going from 99-53 to 43-109, a 56-game dropoff that has never been matched in major league history.
He then let pretty much everybody else get away, including trading Baker to the Yankees, who helped them build their 1st dynasty in the early 1920s. In 1916, the A's went 36-117, for a .236 winning percentage. Those 117 losses are no longer an American League record, but the .235 winning percentage remains the lowest in the major leagues since 1899.
Mack rebuilt the A's into a 2nd-place team by 1927. In 1929 and 1930, the A's won the World Series. In 1931, they won 107 games, but lost the World Series. But Mack had lost all of his non-baseball assets in the stock market crash in the days following the 1929 triumph. So he had to sell off his great players again.
In 1932, the A's went 94-60, to finish 2nd. They had catcher Mickey Cochrane, 1st baseman Jimmie Foxx, left fielder Al Simmons, and pitcher Lefty Grove, all of whom would be elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. By the time the 1934 season dawned, all of them had been sold, and the A's finished 78-82.
Over the next 3 years, Tom and Jack, the Shibe brothers, died, leaving Mack in virtual full control of the franchise. He refused to replace himself as manager, and the team deteriorated as he fell into senility. In 1950, agreeing on little else, his sons ganged up on him, and took control of the franchise. They were no better, and after the 1954 season, they sold the team to Arnold Johnson, who moved them to Kansas City.
Johnson was no better, either, and when he died in 1960, Finley bought the team, moving it to Oakland in 1968, reaching a Division title in 1971, and in 1972, winning the team's 1st Pennant in 41 years. Finley knew the history of the team, and he knew that Mack had broken up the team in the name of money before. He figured he could get away with it himself. He didn't.
4. The Oakland Fans. He wasn't making money off of them, because they simply didn't show up. The A's only drew 914,993 fans during their Division title season of 1971, 921,323 for the 1st World Championship season of 1972, just barely cleared a million at 1,000,763 in 1973, fell to 845,693 in 1974, and peaked at 1,075,518 in 1975.
What's more, that 1,000,763 figure for 1973? Finley lied about that. He bumped the team's home finale attendance up by at least 5,000 to make it.
After low attendance at the team's 1974 parade, Finley was overheard saying, "This fucking city can't do anything right." He tried to sell the A's to Denver oil baron Marvin Davis so they could be moved in time for the 1978 season, to a New Orleans group for 1979, and tried with Davis again in 1980, before selling them to Walter Haas, who kept them in Oakland.
Not once from their 1968 arrival until 1981, the 1st full season under Haas and the 2nd season of Billy Martin's "Billy Ball," did the A's have a higher average attendance than the American League as a whole. The last time they did was 1958, when the novelty of being in Kansas City was still in place.
Throw in the fact that Oakland would be abandoned by the NHL's California Golden Seals (another team that Finley had owned) in 1976; the NFL's Oakland Raiders twice, in 1981 and again in 2019; and the NBA's Golden State Warriors in 2019, if only to go across the Bay to San Francisco, and it seems clear that Oakland, itself, is part of the problem.
3. Finley's Health. He had a heart attack on August 7, 1973. He survived it, but it gave him the impression that he needed as much money as possible to cover his health costs, and to have something to leave for his children, since the chance that he could die soon went way up. (The fact that he got rich by selling health insurance made this ironic.) Given that thought, it was only natural that his hobby, his baseball team, became something of secondary importance.
2. Shirley Finley. She left Charlie, and he knew he was going to take a bath in the divorce. So he needed as much money as he could get.
1. Free Agency. Finley decided he didn't want to pay big bucks for big players. This was why he tried to sell the players before he would have lost them for nothing. He figured, he built the dynasty, so he should reap the rewards; and that, since he built one dynasty, he could build another. Given that Connie Mack had done both things, both concepts were far from unreasonable.
VERDICT: Guilty. Very guilty. Let's look at the 5 reasons again:
5. Mack had been out of power with the A's since 1950, and dead since 1956. He was not responsible for Finley's decisions, and cast no curse on later team owners. Furthermore, the circumstances were very different: Mack needed his 1933 and '34 selloffs to keep the franchise afloat. He was not a rich man. Finley was. He had a choice.
4. Whose idea was it to move to Oakland? Finley's. He should have known that the San Francisco Giants were going to dominate the San Francisco Bay Area market, having had a 10-year head start on him.
It's also worth noting that the A's actually had higher attendance than the Giants in the 1970 season, and then every season from 1972 to 1976. After Finley sold the team, the A's would again have higher attendance than the Giants every year from 1981 to 1995, except for 1986, 1987 and 1993.
The Giants have had higher per-game attendance every season since 1996, but, for most of those seasons, despite playing in an increasingly unsuitable Oakland Coliseum, the A's have had higher per-game attendance than either team -- and, in some years, more than both teams combined -- had during Finley's heyday.
So why the low attendance during said heyday? It wasn't because the fans were bad, or the stadium (then) was bad, or the city was bad. It was because Finley's approach was bad.
People who have studied him have said that he tried to sell the A's they same way he sold insurance, which was how he got rich. And the same approach didn't work: He was operating as a print guy in a broadcast world. For most of his tenure, the A's didn't have a local TV contract. For some of it, they didn't even have a local radio contract. One year, the biggest radio station broadcasting A's games was the campus station at the University of California at Berkeley.
As Barack Obama would say, the problem wasn't that Finley was a bad man, the problem was that he just didn't get it.
Okay, he was a bad man. Which leads us to...
3. Instead of making him rethink his life, what kind of person he was, and what kind of person he should be, the heart attack only made Finley meaner. As Sal Bando put it, "Most players, prior to the 1973 season, anyhow, would consider Mr. Finley a father figure. With his heart attack, things started to change. He became more vindictive."
What's more, Finley didn't die soon. Although he was plagued by heart disease thereafter, he lived another 22 years, dying on February 19, 1996, just short of his 78th birthday.
2. The divorce was no excuse. He still would have had enough money to fund the team.
1. Other team owners spent big in free agency. Finley could have done so as well. He had the money. The players had earned those big salaries, by winning for Finley's team. Look at the 3 team owners who bid the most on Finley's players. George Steinbrenner of the Yankees got Reggie and Catfish. Ray Kroc of the Padres signed Fingers and Tenace, and made the next best effort after George to get Reggie. Gene Autry of the Angels got Rudi, and also tok Don Baylor, whom Finley had gotten from the Orioles for Reggie in early '76, but refused to re-sign.
Autry also signed Reggie when his Yankee contract ran out. He also got Campaneris in a trade with the Rangers. He also took Rod Carew off the Minnesota Twins' hands in a trade, when their owner, Clark Griffith, proved to be every bit as cheap as Finley, and also an unrepentant racist. He also signed Fred Lynn when the Boston Red Sox refused to keep him. He also signed Bobby Grich and Doug DeCinces when the Orioles wouldn't keep them. He also got Tommy John in a trade with the Yankees.
Autry was willing to spend money if he thought it would bring results. It didn't: The Angels won the AL West in 1979, '82 and '86, but never won a Pennant until after he died, by which point all of those players had retired
These were rich men, but they did not mind spending big bucks in the hopes of getting big results. It only worked for Steinbrenner, but you can't fault Kroc or Autry for trying. You can fault Finley for refusing to try.
The breakup of the 1971-75 Oakland A's was Charlie Finley's fault. Not Bowie Kuhn's, not AL Presidents Joe Cronin's or Lee MacPhail's, not players association head Marvin Miller's, not reserve clause-killing arbitrator Peter Seitz's, not any of the players', not the City of Oakland's, not the Oakland fans'.
Yes, you can blame Charlie Finley. And you should.
October 17, 1974: Game 5 of the World Series, at the Oakland Coliseum. Vida Blue of the Oakland Athletics and Don Sutton of the Los Angeles are tied 2-2 going into the bottom of the 6th, when Mike Marshall relieves Sutton and retires the side.
In the 7th‚ a shower of debris from the fans halts the game for 15 minutes. When play is resumed‚ Joe Rudi hits Marshall's 1st pitch for a homer to give the A's a 3rd 3-2 win‚ clinching a 3rd straight World Championship for the team.
The A's thus become only the 2nd major league franchise to win 3 straight World Series, and remain the only one other than the Yankees to have done it. This was also the 1st all-California World Series, or even the 1st with both teams playing more than a few blocks west of the Mississippi River (take note, fans of St. Louis and Minnesota).
Jim "Catfish" Hunter died in 1999, Paul Lindblad in 2006, Jim Holt in 2019, and Claudell Washington earlier this year. The other 22 men on the 1974 A's World Series roster are still alive: Blue, Rudi, Reggie Jackson, Rollie Fingers, Sal Bando, Bert Campaneris, Gene Tenace, Dick Green, John "Blue Moon" Odom, Darold Knowles, Angel Mangual, Ted Kubiak, Dave Hamilton, Jesús Alou, Ray Fosse, Dal Maxvill, Herb Washington (no relation to Claudell), Billy North, Ken Holtzman, Manny Trillo, Larry Haney and John Donaldson. (UPDATE: Mangual died on February 16, 2021.)
After the 1974 season, A's owner Charles Oscar Finley reneged on a clause in his contract with ace itcher Hunter, who was then declaresd a free agent, and signed with the Yankees. The A's still won the American League Western Division in 1975, but lost the AL Championship Series to the Boston Red Sox.
Then the reserve clause was struck down. Free agency, and thus much higher salaries, were coming, and Finley didn't want to pay them. First, he traded Reggie to the Baltimore Orioles, where he played out his contract. Then he sold Blue to the Yankees for $1.5 million, and Fingers and Rudi to the Red Sox for $1 million each. He figured, better to get as much money for them now, than to lose them to free agency and get nothing for them.
Commissioner Bowie Kuhn voided those sales. This benefited the Yankees, as they didn't have to deal with Blue's worsening drug problem, and the Red Sox did not get the improvement that Fingers and Rudi would have given them. But was it really, as Kuhn put it, in "the best interests of baseball"?
When the 1976 season came to an end, with the A's finishing 2nd, a mere 2 1/2 games behind the Kansas City Royals, Finley didn't lift a finger to sign any of the players who went for the big money. He didn't try to bring Reggie back, and Reggie signed with the Yankees. Fingers and Tenace were signed by the San Diego Padres. Rudi was signed by the team then known as the California Angels. Campaneris was signed by the Texas Rangers, and would join Rudi on the Angels 2 years later. Team Captain Bando was signed by the Milwaukee Brewers.
Finally, after an attempt to trade Blue to the Cincinnati Reds after the 1977 season fell through, Finley traded him across the Bay to the San Francisco Giants. The A's crashed to last place in 1977, losing 98 games, behind even the expansion Seattle Mariners. They lost 93 games in 1978, and bottomed out at 108 losses and just 306, 763 fans for the entire season.
Finley sold the team in 1980, and they instantly got better. He died in 1996. He is still not in the Baseball Hall of Fame, while Reggie, Catfish and Fingers are.
Pretty much everybody who's studied 1970s baseball -- and several books have been written about the period, all of them examining the A's, the Team of the Decade -- agree that if Charlie O. hadn't been so cheap, and otherwise so vindictive, and had paid his players what they were worth, and had otherwise treated them well enough to make them want to stay in Oakland, the dynasty could have continued, getting in the way of the Big Red Machine, George Steinbrenner's Yankees and Whitey Herzog's Royals.
But Finley broke up his dynasty.
Top 5 Reasons You Can't Blame Charlie Finley for Breaking Up the Oakland A's Dynasty
5. The Curse of Connie Mack. Finley's breakup of his dynasty may be the most famous salary dump in sports history, but it wasn't even the second-most damaging one in the history of his own franchise.
After winning 4 Pennants in 5 years, including winning the World Series in 1910, 1911 and 1913, the Philadelphia Athletics lost the World Series in 1914. After that, Connie Mack, then the team's manager, treasurer, and owner of 1/4 of the franchise, broke up his dynasty, rather than pay his players enough to refuse the higher salaries being offered by the new Federal League.
He sold Hall of Fame 2nd baseman Eddie Collins to the Chicago White Sox, let Hall of Fame 3rd baseman Frank "Home Run" Baker sit out the entire season in a holdout, and let Hall of Fame pitchers Eddie Plank and Chief Bender sign with the Feds. The A's went from first to worst, finishing in 8th place, going from 99-53 to 43-109, a 56-game dropoff that has never been matched in major league history.
He then let pretty much everybody else get away, including trading Baker to the Yankees, who helped them build their 1st dynasty in the early 1920s. In 1916, the A's went 36-117, for a .236 winning percentage. Those 117 losses are no longer an American League record, but the .235 winning percentage remains the lowest in the major leagues since 1899.
Mack rebuilt the A's into a 2nd-place team by 1927. In 1929 and 1930, the A's won the World Series. In 1931, they won 107 games, but lost the World Series. But Mack had lost all of his non-baseball assets in the stock market crash in the days following the 1929 triumph. So he had to sell off his great players again.
In 1932, the A's went 94-60, to finish 2nd. They had catcher Mickey Cochrane, 1st baseman Jimmie Foxx, left fielder Al Simmons, and pitcher Lefty Grove, all of whom would be elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. By the time the 1934 season dawned, all of them had been sold, and the A's finished 78-82.
Over the next 3 years, Tom and Jack, the Shibe brothers, died, leaving Mack in virtual full control of the franchise. He refused to replace himself as manager, and the team deteriorated as he fell into senility. In 1950, agreeing on little else, his sons ganged up on him, and took control of the franchise. They were no better, and after the 1954 season, they sold the team to Arnold Johnson, who moved them to Kansas City.
Johnson was no better, either, and when he died in 1960, Finley bought the team, moving it to Oakland in 1968, reaching a Division title in 1971, and in 1972, winning the team's 1st Pennant in 41 years. Finley knew the history of the team, and he knew that Mack had broken up the team in the name of money before. He figured he could get away with it himself. He didn't.
4. The Oakland Fans. He wasn't making money off of them, because they simply didn't show up. The A's only drew 914,993 fans during their Division title season of 1971, 921,323 for the 1st World Championship season of 1972, just barely cleared a million at 1,000,763 in 1973, fell to 845,693 in 1974, and peaked at 1,075,518 in 1975.
What's more, that 1,000,763 figure for 1973? Finley lied about that. He bumped the team's home finale attendance up by at least 5,000 to make it.
After low attendance at the team's 1974 parade, Finley was overheard saying, "This fucking city can't do anything right." He tried to sell the A's to Denver oil baron Marvin Davis so they could be moved in time for the 1978 season, to a New Orleans group for 1979, and tried with Davis again in 1980, before selling them to Walter Haas, who kept them in Oakland.
Not once from their 1968 arrival until 1981, the 1st full season under Haas and the 2nd season of Billy Martin's "Billy Ball," did the A's have a higher average attendance than the American League as a whole. The last time they did was 1958, when the novelty of being in Kansas City was still in place.
Throw in the fact that Oakland would be abandoned by the NHL's California Golden Seals (another team that Finley had owned) in 1976; the NFL's Oakland Raiders twice, in 1981 and again in 2019; and the NBA's Golden State Warriors in 2019, if only to go across the Bay to San Francisco, and it seems clear that Oakland, itself, is part of the problem.
3. Finley's Health. He had a heart attack on August 7, 1973. He survived it, but it gave him the impression that he needed as much money as possible to cover his health costs, and to have something to leave for his children, since the chance that he could die soon went way up. (The fact that he got rich by selling health insurance made this ironic.) Given that thought, it was only natural that his hobby, his baseball team, became something of secondary importance.
2. Shirley Finley. She left Charlie, and he knew he was going to take a bath in the divorce. So he needed as much money as he could get.
1. Free Agency. Finley decided he didn't want to pay big bucks for big players. This was why he tried to sell the players before he would have lost them for nothing. He figured, he built the dynasty, so he should reap the rewards; and that, since he built one dynasty, he could build another. Given that Connie Mack had done both things, both concepts were far from unreasonable.
VERDICT: Guilty. Very guilty. Let's look at the 5 reasons again:
5. Mack had been out of power with the A's since 1950, and dead since 1956. He was not responsible for Finley's decisions, and cast no curse on later team owners. Furthermore, the circumstances were very different: Mack needed his 1933 and '34 selloffs to keep the franchise afloat. He was not a rich man. Finley was. He had a choice.
4. Whose idea was it to move to Oakland? Finley's. He should have known that the San Francisco Giants were going to dominate the San Francisco Bay Area market, having had a 10-year head start on him.
It's also worth noting that the A's actually had higher attendance than the Giants in the 1970 season, and then every season from 1972 to 1976. After Finley sold the team, the A's would again have higher attendance than the Giants every year from 1981 to 1995, except for 1986, 1987 and 1993.
The Giants have had higher per-game attendance every season since 1996, but, for most of those seasons, despite playing in an increasingly unsuitable Oakland Coliseum, the A's have had higher per-game attendance than either team -- and, in some years, more than both teams combined -- had during Finley's heyday.
So why the low attendance during said heyday? It wasn't because the fans were bad, or the stadium (then) was bad, or the city was bad. It was because Finley's approach was bad.
People who have studied him have said that he tried to sell the A's they same way he sold insurance, which was how he got rich. And the same approach didn't work: He was operating as a print guy in a broadcast world. For most of his tenure, the A's didn't have a local TV contract. For some of it, they didn't even have a local radio contract. One year, the biggest radio station broadcasting A's games was the campus station at the University of California at Berkeley.
As Barack Obama would say, the problem wasn't that Finley was a bad man, the problem was that he just didn't get it.
Okay, he was a bad man. Which leads us to...
3. Instead of making him rethink his life, what kind of person he was, and what kind of person he should be, the heart attack only made Finley meaner. As Sal Bando put it, "Most players, prior to the 1973 season, anyhow, would consider Mr. Finley a father figure. With his heart attack, things started to change. He became more vindictive."
What's more, Finley didn't die soon. Although he was plagued by heart disease thereafter, he lived another 22 years, dying on February 19, 1996, just short of his 78th birthday.
2. The divorce was no excuse. He still would have had enough money to fund the team.
1. Other team owners spent big in free agency. Finley could have done so as well. He had the money. The players had earned those big salaries, by winning for Finley's team. Look at the 3 team owners who bid the most on Finley's players. George Steinbrenner of the Yankees got Reggie and Catfish. Ray Kroc of the Padres signed Fingers and Tenace, and made the next best effort after George to get Reggie. Gene Autry of the Angels got Rudi, and also tok Don Baylor, whom Finley had gotten from the Orioles for Reggie in early '76, but refused to re-sign.
Autry also signed Reggie when his Yankee contract ran out. He also got Campaneris in a trade with the Rangers. He also took Rod Carew off the Minnesota Twins' hands in a trade, when their owner, Clark Griffith, proved to be every bit as cheap as Finley, and also an unrepentant racist. He also signed Fred Lynn when the Boston Red Sox refused to keep him. He also signed Bobby Grich and Doug DeCinces when the Orioles wouldn't keep them. He also got Tommy John in a trade with the Yankees.
Autry was willing to spend money if he thought it would bring results. It didn't: The Angels won the AL West in 1979, '82 and '86, but never won a Pennant until after he died, by which point all of those players had retired
These were rich men, but they did not mind spending big bucks in the hopes of getting big results. It only worked for Steinbrenner, but you can't fault Kroc or Autry for trying. You can fault Finley for refusing to try.
The breakup of the 1971-75 Oakland A's was Charlie Finley's fault. Not Bowie Kuhn's, not AL Presidents Joe Cronin's or Lee MacPhail's, not players association head Marvin Miller's, not reserve clause-killing arbitrator Peter Seitz's, not any of the players', not the City of Oakland's, not the Oakland fans'.
Yes, you can blame Charlie Finley. And you should.
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