Postcard: Mesa, Arizona, March 1973

While the New York Yankees had a wife swap between pitchers Fritz Peterson and Mike Kekich in Florida in March of 1973, the Oakland A’s went about the business of getting ready to defend a world championship in Arizona. The only snag was that the A’s had no experience as world champions.

The organization had not gone into spring training as World Series champions since 1931, when Connie Mack’s Philadelphia Athletics won their second straight title. But as winter gave way to spring in 1973, Connie Mack was long gone, and the Athletics had been sold and twice moved, first to Kansas City, then Oakland. And the team was owned by a man who threatened any employee who called his team any name other than the A’s, Athletics be damned.

Not that Charles Oscar Finley wasn’t generous. Coming off his 1972 world championship, the A’s owner was as generous as he would ever get. In fact, Finley drew the ire of the other owners in baseball for his benevolence. And when he developed the best team in baseball, those who would criticize his methods and flair looked as though they had a mouthful of sour grapes.

Manager Dick Williams was the one who jury-rigged a World Series lineup without Reggie Jackson, ordered a fake pitchout that caught Johnny Bench looking with two men on, navigated six one-run games in a seven-game Series, and made so many trips to confer with his pitchers that the rules on postseason mound visits became more rigidly enforced,1 but it was Finley who spent all winter being feted. In addition to nights in his honor in both Gary, Indiana, and his adopted hometown of LaPorte, Indiana, the A’s owner also picked up “Hoosier of the Year” from the Indiana Society of Chicago. More than a thousand people came to a “Thank You Charlie Finley” gala in Oakland.2 And to top it off, Finley became the only team owner ever named The Sporting News’ Sportsman of the Year – it not being lost on the recipient that the newspaper was the traditional “baseball bible.” Finley gave interviews to any and all who asked, taking Parade Magazine on a tour of his 21-room, 1,280-acre LaPorte spread and tossing out pearls of wisdom: “If anyone will pay the high price of success, he can attain it. But the price is high. You have to do more work than your competitor, and sacrifice some of your competitor’s enjoyments.”3

Finley was on top of the world when he arrived in Mesa, Arizona, for spring training in 1973. Unlike some owners who spent all of spring training – and most of the season –around their clubs, Finley operated at a distance of about 2,100 miles from his team. Even while serving as its general manager.

Yet Charlie Finley got to 1973 spring training ahead of several players – holdouts Vida Blue, Dave Duncan, and Ken Holtzman, plus Joe Rudi and team captain Sal Bando, signed but not yet delivered (the former moving his family and the latter driving cross-country). Finley wanted to be on hand to personally hand out 1972 World Series rings to his world champion ballplayers. And what rings they were.4

Each A’s World Series ring, valued at about $1,500 in 1973 (roughly $8,100 in 2013 dollars), was individualized with the player’s name while “WORLD CHAMPIONS 1972” encircled a full carat diamond. The teams that Oakland defeated to claim the pennant (Detroit Tigers) and World Series (Cincinnati Reds) were listed on each side of the ring. Underneath Charlie Finley’s signature was his motto: “S + S = S,” Finley’s self-proclaimed and oft-quoted formula of “Sweat plus Sacrifice equals Success.” The high price for success he told the Parade reporter about was now displayed on his finger – and the fingers of his employees.

Finley also provided players with full-sized replicas of the World Series trophies and charm bracelets with a half-carat diamond for each ballplayer’s wife.5 All this largesse infuriated the other major-league owners, whose taste for jewelry selection had never approached this level of ostentation or expense. That only made the equation even more successful by Finley’s reckoning. 

A shrewd businessman, Finley had raised himself up from humble beginnings in the steel mills to business tycoon by selling affordable group disability insurance to doctors, making as much as $43 million in premiums per year.6 Finley did not get where he was by being afraid of change. He and his wife, Shirley, came up with the kelly green and Fort Knox gold uniforms that ended a decades-long embargo on garish baseball threads; he paid a $300 mustache bonus in ’72 to each of his hirsute A’s, ending a half-century without facial hair in the game; he kept fans’ eyes on the field by hiring beautiful ballgirls to man Oakland-Alameda Coliseum’s expansive foul territory; and he had plenty of ideas about how to shake up the game in fair territory as well, proposing everything from orange baseballs to night World Series games to designated hitters and designated runners. The only thing that bothered the other owners more than Finley’s showmanship and uncompromising manner was that his ideas not only worked, they made them all more money. Well, except the designated runner – and the orange baseballs. The balls proved hard for players to grip and were abandoned after three spring-training games in ’73 at the behest of the commissioner.7 Finley would, however, get the day-glow balls in the hands of players warming up at the 1973 All-Star Game in Kansas City, a colorful calling card as if to say that the owner had not forgotten Kansas City – or his dislike for the place.8

March of 1973 marked the A’s fifth spring in Arizona. Finley relocated the team’s spring home from Bradenton, Florida, to Rendezvous Park in Mesa in 1969, one year after he relocated the club’s summer home from Kansas City to Oakland.9 Finley bought the Kansas City franchise in December 1960, after the death of Arnold Johnson, who’d bought the Philadelphia Athletics from Connie Mack and moved them to the Midwest. The Kansas City A’s were bad under Johnson and were worse under Finley. He grew frustrated with the stadium, the city, the league, and the confines that forced him to remain in a struggling market. After the A’s stuck it out for 13 seasons in Kansas City –seven of them under Finley – he finally coerced the American League into allowing him to move the team. He’d looked all over the country, but Oakland was a fresh market – albeit one with the San Francisco Giants nearby – and, most importantly, Oakland had a new stadium. Yet it was not exactly love at first sight, for owner or audience. Though they played better than the team ever had in Kansas City, Oakland attendance never approached one million in the club’s first five seasons by the Bay.

Though coming off a championship season, the 1973 A’s did not draw any better in Arizona than they had in Oakland. The A’s had their highest spring-training attendance since their move from Florida: 21,206 … for the month. That translates to 1,515 fans per spring-training home game.10 The 1972 world champion A’s drew 921,323 in Oakland, only 14th among the 24 major-league teams. The attendance situation was a sore enough point that World Series hero Gene Tenace discussed it with the press in Mesa. “Sometimes I find myself feeling sorry for [Finley] because we don’t draw better in Oakland,” said Tenace. “I hope attendance picks up this year, but I won’t believe it until I see it.”11

Sympathy, however, was an emotion rarely articulated by A’s players about their boss. And while many players received raises for the coming season, playing hardball was the way Finley generally did business: alternating a hard-line approach between platitudes in his unique brand of salesmanship that launched a mountain of insurance policies. Though Ken Holtzman soon came to terms for 1973, Finley still had holdouts in catcher Dave Duncan and star hurler Vida Blue. Duncan told the press that this was only the latest money squabble in a cycle that dated back to 1963, when he turned down 17 other clubs to sign with Finley.12 Blue’s problems were more recent and more bitter. The lefty’s 1972 contract negotiation had been so acrimonious that Commissioner Bowie Kuhn had stepped in – Finley referred to it as butting in. Kuhn made the 22-year-old star and the 54-year-old tycoon stay in a room until they agreed on a figure. Even after they decided on $63,000, the two fought over how it would be announced to the press.13 So after a down year by Blue in ’72, Finley was looking to cut the southpaw’s pay.

Also unhappy in camp in ’73 was George Hendrick. The outfielder, who had started five games in center field during the World Series in place of injured Reggie Jackson, came to Mesa in the spring to once again serve as a spare outfielder. If he was lucky. Finley told Hendrick to expect to remain in Arizona, playing for Triple-A Tucson. The first overall major-league draft pick in 1968, Hendrick would become the first player to win a Silver Slugger award at two positions, but at age 23, he was hitting just .200 in his first 100 major-league games. He did not endear himself to his owner by asking for a trade.

Though Finley publicly bluffed that he would trade Blue, he wasn’t about to chuck away a 22-year-old Cy Young and MVP winner, no matter what happened in ’72 or how much each person loathed the other’s business practices. Blue and Finley agreed on a $53,000 contract in the final week of ’73 spring training.14  A blue-chip stud pitcher was gold in the days before free agency, when players were indentured to a team for as long as the owner saw fit. Or as long as a team could afford them, now that salary arbitration had just entered the game as the result of an 11-day lockout at the start of spring training in February of ’73.15 Even with arbitration entering the game – it would hit Finley especially hard in the coming years – Vida Blue was irreplaceable. Not everyone on the roster was indispensable, however. “If we have to get along without Duncan,” the owner said as he headed back to the Midwest, “I’m sure we can.”16

So Duncan, who’d turned up his nose at Finley’s $40,000 contract offer, wound up the Opening Day catcher … in Cleveland. On March 24 Finley sent Duncan and Hendrick to the Indians for catcher Ray Fosse and spare infielder Jack Heidemann. (It turned out that Heidemann, not Hendrick, spent the summer of ’73 in Tucson; he never played an inning in Oakland before being sold back to the Indians a year and a day after Finley acquired him.)

In Fosse the A’s received a better bat behind the plate. Though he was never the type of hitter he’d been before Pete Rose slammed into him in the 1970 All-Star Game, Fosse was an experienced backstop revered by Cleveland’s pitching staff. The trade also assured that Gene Tenace would be an everyday player in 1973. A part-time catcher who played in just 82 games during the 1972 season, Tenace became the starting catcher for the postseason. He responded by hitting four World Series home runs, single-handedly outhomering the Big Red Machine and becoming the Series MVP. But Tenace’s arm was exposed by the Reds, who stole 11 of 13 bases against him. Dick Williams moved Tenace to first base and Duncan took over behind the plate for Game Seven, cementing Tenace’s reputation as a good backup catcher but not good enough to be an everyday receiver for a championship club.

Finley spun stories about a bad shoulder as the explanation for shifting Tenace to first base in 1973, then the owner reversed course during Duncan’s spring holdout because the A’s needed someone to catch. Sure, bringing in a new catcher for a world-championship pitching staff in the final week of spring training was a risky move, but Charlie Finley liked taking risks – he’d already taken plenty since his club claimed the world championship.

Barely a week after the 1972 World Series ended, Finley went about reimagining the Swingin’ A’s. He acquired Paul Lindblad, a 31-year-old southpaw who grew up outside Kansas City and had been signed by Finley when the team was still there. (Finley had traded Lindblad, Don Mincher, and Frank Fernandez to the Washington Senators in May of 1971 and got back Mike Epstein and Darold Knowles.)

After getting Lindblad back, Oakland’s owner/GM then shipped out 34-year-old reliever Bob Locker to the Chicago Cubs to bring in outfielder Bill North, ten years younger than Locker. North, unhappy and unproductive in Chicago, had been displaced in his natural center-field position by Rick Monday, whom Finley had shipped to Wrigley Field after the 1971 season in exchange for Ken Holtzman. Finley, who spent most of his time in Chicago, kept tabs on the Cubs throughout the year, including their numerous exhibition games at Mesa. Finley fleeced the Cubs for two of the keys to his A’s dynasty: Holtzman, who with Catfish Hunter and Vida Blue gave Oakland three aces in its rotation; and North, who supplied speed to track down balls in center field while combining with Bert Campaneris to give the A’s a lethal top of the batting order.

As happened with Dave Duncan in March, Finley passed another personal headache on to someone else. First baseman Mike Epstein, a vocal foe of Finley’s in the Oakland locker room, was shipped to Texas a month after the 1972 World Series. The A’s got back reliever Horacio Pina, the second deal in a month for a durable Rangers reliever. Pina’s 15 saves and 60 appearances for the Rangers, not to mention Texas teammate Lindblad’s league-leading 66 games, added two veteran arms to an already outstanding A’s bullpen headlined by Rollie Fingers and Darold Knowles. The A’s came into 1973 with four solid relievers who had been among the top ten either in saves (Knowles), appearances (Lindblad), or both (Fingers and Pina). And this was an era when a team was fortunate to have one or two reliable relievers.

Never one to stand still, Finley kept dealing. By the time the 1973 season began, the A’s had a dozen players who had not been on the team the previous season. Among those shipped out was Matty Alou. The 33-year-old outfielder-first baseman was sent to the Yankees in return for Rich McKinney, a versatile if not overly successful contact hitter. As if to show that the owner had nothing against the Alous – he’d dumped brother Felipe after only two games in 1971 – Finley acquired the third Alou brother, Jesus, in July 1973 and he played a key role in the ’73 postseason.

Constantly bringing in new veterans meant that old hands had to be dispatched. Finley released infielder Larry Brown plus relievers Joel Horlen and Marcel Lachemann, but among the released veterans was one name better known than the rest, and whose absence would be felt in 1973.

Orlando Cepeda, an 11-time All-Star and a future Hall of Famer, had batted .289 in 91 plate appearances for the Braves before being acquired for Denny McLain on June 29, 1972, in a deal of former MVPs both seemingly on their last legs. Literally. Cepeda had such knee trouble that it was nearly impossible for him to play the field; he appeared in an Oakland uniform in just three games – all as a pinch-hitter in July. Cepeda’s physical issues and his place in the upper salary tier for the early 1970s at $90,000, explain Finley’s considerations for the release of “Baby Bull” on December 18. For Cepeda’s part, even though he played just three games for the A’s, he had endured more than enough from the Oakland owner. When Finley, a phone addict decades before the cellular phone, insisted that Cepeda call him from Puerto Rico or be released, Cepeda opted to end his A’s tenure.17  Exactly one month after his release, Cepeda joined the Red Sox as the first player ever signed to the position many were still calling the designated pinch hitter.

Finley had long lobbied for the designated hitter, but when it was finally approved in the American League on January 11, 1973, he was caught without someone on his team equipped for the role. In spring training the A’s lost several chances to experiment with the new position because the National League refused to allow the DH in any games they were involved in, and three of the other seven Cactus League teams hailed from the NL. Finley, not surprisingly, was outraged at the Cubs, Giants, Padres, and especially National League President Chub Feeney: “When will they wake up?”18

With fewer games to get the hang of the new rule, the A’s seemed to wing it when the season began. Speedy Bill North was Oakland’s DH choice on Opening Day, becoming the first designated hitter to bat leadoff. Manager Dick Williams would use five other players who combined with North to bat just .231 with two home runs and six RBIs in the newly created position over the first month of the season before Finley acquired the Phillies’ Deron Johnson, who had collected 194 homers in a little over 5,000 plate appearances, and had also played for Finley in Kansas City in the early 1960s.

Johnson filled what became the prototypical DH profile: a veteran slugger with something left in the tank who was better off without a mitt. Johnson hit 19 homers and knocked in 81 runs while batting .251 and hardly missing a game for the A’s. But Oakland discard Orlando Cepeda hit .289 with 20 homers and 86 RBIs for Boston in ’73 to earn the first Outstanding Designated Hitter Award.

Finley couldn’t win ’em all. At least until October. 

 

Sources

Parts of this story were adapted from the author’s book on the 1973 season, Swinging ’73: Baseball’s Wildest Season, published in 2013 by Lyons Press, Guilford, Connecticut.

Books

Clark, Tom, Champagne and Baloney: The Rise and Fall of Finley’s A’s (New York: Harper & Row, 1976).

Green, G. Michael, and Roger D. Launius, Charlie Finley: The Outrageous Story of Baseball’s Super Showman (New York: Walker & Company, 2010).

Markusen, Bruce, Baseball’s Last Dynasty: Charlie Finley’s Oakland A’s (Indianapolis: Masters Press, 1998).

Rosengren, John, Hammerin’ Hank, George Almighty and the Say Hey Kid: The Year That Changed Baseball Forever (Naperville, Illinois: Sourcebooks, 2008).

Williams, Dick, and Bill Plaschke, No More Mr. Nice Guy: A Life of Hardball (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers, 1990).

Newspapers and Magazines

Associated Press, “Rule Will Limit Trips to Mound by Dick Williams,” Schenectady (New York) Gazette, October 3, 1973.

Bergman, Ron, “Finley Denies Blue Trade Rumor,” Oakland Tribune, March 5, 1973.

Bergman, Ron, “Finley Leading A’s Holdouts 4 to 3,” Oakland Tribune, March 3, 1973.

Levitt, Ed, “Finley and Feeney,” Oakland Tribune, March 13, 1983.

————, “Pressure on Tenace,” Oakland Tribune, March 5, 1973.

Orr, Robin, “Sports Millionaire Charles O. Finley,” Parade Magazine, January 28, 1973.

Websites

baseball-almanac.com

baseball-reference.com

oakland.athletics.mlb.com/oak/downloads/y2011/2011_media_guide.pdf

sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=2635604

springtrainingonline.com/teams/oakland-athletics.htm

throughthefencebaseball.com/1973-the-last-time-kc-hosted-the-all-star-game/23892

 

Notes

1 Associated Press, “Rule Will Limit Trips to Mound by Dick Williams,” Schenectady Gazette, October 3, 1973.

2 G. Michael Green and Roger D. Launius, Charlie Finley: The Outrageous Story of Baseball’s Super Showman (New York: Walker & Company, 2010), 180.

3 Robin Orr, “Sports Millionaire Charles O. Finley,” Parade Magazine, January 28, 1973.

4 Ron Bergman, “Finley Leading A’s Holdouts 4 to 3,” Oakland Tribune, March 3, 1973.

5 Ed Levitt, “Pressure on Tenace,” Oakland Tribune, March 5, 1973.

6 Robin Orr, “Sports Millionaire Charles O. Finley,” Parade Magazine, January 28, 1973.

7 Green and Launius, Charlie Finley, 182.

8 Eric Aron, “1973: The Last Time Kansas City Hosted the All-Star Game,” throughthefencebaseball.com/1973-the-last-time-kc-hosted-the-all-star-game/23892, July 9, 2012.

9 springtrainingonline.com/teams/oakland-athletics.htm

10 2011 Oakland A’s Media Guide, oakland.athletics.mlb.com/oak/downloads/y2011/2011_media_guide.pdf

11 Ed Levitt, “Pressure on Tenace.”

12 Ron Bergman, “Finley Denies Blue Trade Rumor,” Oakland Tribune, March 5, 1973.

13 Green and Launius, Charlie Finley, 157-8.

14 Bruce Markusen, Baseball’s Last Dynasty: Charlie Finley’s Oakland A’s (Indianapolis: Masters Press, 1998), 193.

15 espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=2635604

16 Ron Bergman, “Finley Denies Blue Trade Rumor.”

17 Markusen, Baseball’s Last Dynasty,182-3.

18 Ed Levitt. “Finley and Feeney.” Oakland Tribune, March 13, 1983.