Charlie Finley's A's of The 1970s Part 3A: 1972 - The Fighting, The Holdouts, The Mustaches

 

Two separate issues that would demonstrate the worst in Charlie Finley began to unfold in the lead up to the 1972 season: the first showed how horrible he could be to his players; the second would show how much the establishment loathed him.

Given Vida Blue’s incredible 1971 season, understandably he wanted a significant raise from the mere $14,500 he had made that year. Even President Richard Nixon thought Blue was underpaid. Blue, advised by teammate Tommy Davis, hired an attorney to help him in negotiations to help him figure his salary for the 1972 season.

Gerst would do his homework. According to him, Blue’s presence had helped increase the A’s home attendance by over 150,000 the previous year. When Finley started negotiations at $45,000, Gerst countered with the average salary paid to the top ten pitchers in baseball: $115,000.

Finley made it very clear in the meeting of his position in words that would brook no argument:  “I know you pitched 300 innings. I know you had 24 complete games and 8 shutouts. I know you won the Cy Young and MVP. I know you deserve that kind of money. And if I were in your place I’d ask for it. But I ain’t gonna give it to you.”  Charlie Finley made it very clear that he did not negotiate salaries; he dictated them. If that meant that the best pitcher in baseball sat out the 1972 season, and seriously hurt his teams chance of winning the pennant that year, well, that was too bad. The fact that very nearly happened just showed how willing Finley was to cut off his own nose to spite his face. What he did not predict was that Gerst and Blue were up to the challenge.

Finley did everything in his power to win the fight in the public domain, which was not easy considering how much they hated him to begin. Gerst was more than willing to parry every single argument Finley made in the press. At one point Finley suggested that if sharply escalating salaries forced him to raise ticket prices, he would get out of baseball altogether. Gerst said that might not be such a bad idea and I imagine all of baseball felt the same thing.

This was telling because of an event going on simultaneously. In the winter of 1971, the Players Association headed by union boss Marvin Miller had demanded a seventeen percent increase in their pension plan to meet inflation. The owners reaction to this was typical: they branded the players as greedy and entitled.

The players then voted to authorize a strike, the first one in the history of baseball. The Lords of Baseball, as they were referred to at one point, believed as strongly as possible as treating the players as vassals and any demand they requested as ‘bad for the game’. To be clear, it would be bad for their profit margins and they viewed the two as one and the same. In that sense they particularly loathed Charles Finley who was a force for change. The fact that so many of his ideas became part of the game’s makeup was something they would never acknowledge, in particular by Commissioner Bowie Kuhn.

The owners were not helped by the fact that an equally abrasive owner – Gussie Busch of the Cardinals – talked to the press after an owner’s meeting and said that they were not giving in. “If they want to strike, let them strike” he said proudly. He couldn’t have hardened the player’s resolve more if he’d been working for Miller.

As the cries for settlement grew louder, ownership naturally grew more entrenched. Finley was the most qualified man to help them, but they would never acknowledge it unless they had to. As the opening of the 1972 season began to be washed out due to failed negotiations, Finley made it clear that they had too.

He convinced the owners to gather in conjunction with a player’s meeting across town in New York. “A strike can never be settled without a compromise. It can not be a one-way street.” This was a very reasoned approach to any labor dispute, and naturally the hard-liners now hated Finley even more.

But a settlement was reached at roughly fifty percent of what the players asked for and the season began, though many games would be erased from the scheduled. (How many differed from team to team; the A’s would play 154 in 1972; their eventual divisional opponents the Tigers would play 156.) The A’s were about to play ball. Vida Blue wasn’t.

Gerst had told Blue not to sign under any circumstances. He took a job at a steel firm where his hiring was a PR disaster. Finley said he was willing to let Blue sit out the season and began making moves to try and work around the loss of 24 games.

His most public one would be disastrous. He made a trade with Texas for Denny McLain. Four years earlier, McLain had gone 31-6 for the Tigers. Three years later, after a series of disastrous events, he had gone 10-22 for the Washington Senators. It didn’t work: McLain only won 1 game before being demoted to the minors.

Another trade would end up being vital to the A’s during their championship run. Finley traded Rick Monday to the Chicago Cubs for a  pitcher named Ken Holtzman. A Jewish left-hander who inevitably drew comparison to Sandy Koufax (he had begun his career in 1968 two  years after Koufax retired) Holtzman had slowly become one of the better pitchers in the National League. He’d already thrown no-hitters and won 17 games twice in the past four years before going 9-15.

Finley greeted Holtzman the same way he did every player: he cut his salary by ten percent. Every December he would do the same thing to any A who worked for him. The player wouldn’t sign the contract, Finley would threaten them, and they would either fold. If they didn’t they would get a small raise, though well below what better players on lesser teams were getting.

Holtzman would win 77 games for Finley the four years he was with the A’s and be the spot in their rotation that they had been lacking during their 1971 run. He started well in 1972, going 4-1 with four complete games and a 2.30 ERA in his first five decisions.

The A’s also made their debut in the garish green-and-gold uniforms that were one part of what made them the most distinctive looking team in baseball in the 1970s. (We’ll get to the other famous part in a bit.) The problem was Holtzman couldn’t pitch every day. Catfish Hunter was as good as before, but that was the end of the A’s good news. Blue Moon Odom was working his way back from arm surgery that had derailed him for much of the previous season. Chuck Dobson had elbow trouble. Diego Segui was out of favor. The A’s needed Blue.

Kuhn, knowing that baseball needed it’s top drawing card back, intervened. On April 27^th all the parties came to Chicago to try and work things out. After 22 hours, they seemed to reach a compromise in which Blue would get $50,000 for the year, as well as some bonuses. Everyone was happy. Then Finley went out for doughnuts.

In actuality he went to the press and made sure his narrative came out. In it, Blue had settled for the $50,000 he had proposed and he had not had to compromise one bit. When Blue learned this, he said he was fine with the deal but not with Finley getting the lead the narrative. He walked away from the table.

When Kuhn learned about this he was enraged and forced Finley to keep the deal open ‘in the best interests of baseball.” He told Finley if Blue did not accept the offer as given, he would make Blue a free agent. Finley had been through this four years earlier when Ken Harrelson had become a free agent and signed with the Red Sox. He didn’t want history to repeat itself. Finley finally agreed.

But for Blue the scars would go beyond this deal. Not only would he have a terrible season, going only 6-10, he was never the same pitcher after his experience with Finley. He would win 20 games twice more in his career and finish with 209 wins, but he would never again approach the kind of numbers he had in his marvelous 1971 year, never even striking out as many as 200 players. The wounds would run far deeper. Eventually he became addicted to drugs and in 1984 was suspended from baseball for one year for a cocaine problem, which he would spend some time in prison. It was just another in a long line of destruction the autocratic Finley did in his career to the people around him.

During the 1972 season the A’s also developed the trademark that gave them their nickname. It began in February when Jackson showed up with a mustache in spring training and bragged that he intended not only to not shave but maybe to grow a beard. Finley instructed Williams to tell Jackson to shave it and when that failed, tried reverse psychology. He told the rest of the team to grow mustaches as well. In his mind, he told the other players to do the same figuring that the flamboyant Reggie would shave rather than be ‘ordinary’

The strategy spectacularly backfired. By May, not only had Reggie not shaved but the entire team was sporting mustaches. Finley changed his tune and tried to use it as a marketing technique. He declared that June 18^th would be ‘Mustache Day’. Any one who showed up to the park with a mustache got in free. And he offered $300 to any player who had one by then. As Fingers put it, “for $300, I’d grow a mustache on my ass.”

“Mustache Day” brought 26,000 fans to the Coliseum. After the game, most of the players shaved. However when the AL West race began to heat up, many of the same players grew them back out of superstition. With that the A’s of the 1970s became forever known as the ‘Mustache Gang.” But that reputation undercut them for much of the 1972 season, as most sporting observers thought they looked undisciplined and impossible to take seriously. They wouldn’t change their minds until after the World Series.

The A’s spent much of the season battling the surprising Chicago White Sox for the AL West title. Since Bill Veeck had sold them at the end of the 1961 season, the Sox’s attendance had dropped as quickly as the team in the standing to the point that it seemed likely they would have to leave Chicago. Then in the offseason, the White Sox acquired Dick Allen, one of the best sluggers in baseball and one of the most difficult men in the game for managers to handle. Allen had played with three different teams in three years before he ended up in Chicago but manager Chuck Tanner was of the same mindset of his and his treatment of Allen led to the 1^st baseman having one of the greatest seasons of the 1970s. Allen batted .308 with 37 home runs and 113 RBIs, leading the American League in both categories and winning that AL MVP.

Allen was for all intents and purpose the White Sox offense but they had two starters that were nearly enough to carry them. Wilbur Wood went an incredible 24-17 with 8 shutouts. A knuckleball pitcher with a rubber arm, Wood had 20 complete games and threw a ludicrous 377 innings. Sometimes pitching with only three days rest, he started an incredible 49 games that year. His partner in crime was Stan Bahnsen, who went 21-15.

For much of the season Allen thought the White Sox could defeat the A’s because of how miserable they were under Finley. “When we’d play the A’s and one of their guys would reach first, I’d get an earful about Finley. Especially from Reggie (Jackson). He’d start talking about how cheap Finley was…no meal money, no food in the clubhouse. For a while that worked in our favor, but by September the A’s were all united in their loathing of Finley…They began playing for each other, not their owner.”

They also fought each other. In what would quickly become a trend for Finley’s A’s, internecine fights erupted in the clubhouse on multiple occasions. In May,  Jackson and Mike Epstein, a first baseman acquired from Texas the season before got into an argument over tickets that quickly took on an anti-Semitic tone. Epstein choked Jackosn so far that Gene Tenace had to haul him off Jackson. Williams came in and was infuriated.

Perhaps not coincidentally, the A’s won 9 of their next ten games. Finley made matters worse by taking Jackson’s side and telling Epstein that he was ruining the team. Epstein demanded to be traded and while Finley held off for that season, he did after the World Series.

The A’s struggled throughout the year with slumps and injuries but they would eventually hold on to beat the White Sox by five and a half games. The strength was their pitching. Even with Blue having a sub-par year, Catfish Hunter picked up the slack going 21-7 with a 2.04 era. Ken Holtzman won 19 games with a 2.51 era and Blue Moon Odom went 15-6 with a 2.50 ERA. The bullpen was the best in the American League with Rollie Fingers going 11-9 with 21 saves and receiving back up from Darrold Knowles and Bob Locker. None of the A’s produced huge offensive numbers, even by the standard of the 1970s. Reggie Jackson hit 25 home runs and drove in 75 runs and Mike Epstein hit 26 and drove in 70. Sal Bando led the team with 77 RBIs and Bert Campaneris told 52 bases to lead the American League.

In the next article I will deal with the 1972 postseason, which would establish the A’s reputation for great play and incredible rowdiness.