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Every season, it seems, when some hapless team throws in the towel and begins selling off its players for a bag of balls and a pile of cash, a chorus of pundits, sportswriters and talking heads decries the firesale and invokes the sacred name of Bowie Kuhn, the commissioner who blocked the Oakland A's 1976 attempt to sell off their players to the highest bidder. It's a particularly popular topic on sports-talk radio since A) it requires outrage, and that's an emotion talk radio does well and B) it gives the impression that the talk radio show host is a a well-informed commentator who's studied the history of the game and not some loud-mouthed blowhard whose only discernible skill is to bring strippers and porn stars on the air every Friday to pick NFL games.
But occasionally, the lauding of Bowie Kuhn is performed by people who ought to know better. This year's offender, Peter Gammons went straight to the source when it came time to decry the firesale of this year's hapless team, the Cincinnati Reds -- he interviewed Bud Selig about the Commissioner's memories of Charlie Finley's 1976 wheelings and dealings.
Selig -- laughably described by Gammons as "then-owner of the Milwaukee Brewers," as if he has no interest in the team these days -- may have his memories of Finley's attempt to sell Joe Rudi and Rollie Fingers to the Boston Red Sox and Vida Blue to the New York Yankees. I have my own, and they're largely shaped by what could be considered the definitive account of the incident -- John Heylar's Lords of the Realm, a fascinating insider's look at the history of labor relations in baseball. Read Heylar's account, and you won't come away with the belief that Kuhn acted in the best interest of baseball, but rather made an arbitrary decision -- at the behest of his prime benefactor -- to punish an owner he detested.
Just a year before the 1976 trade deadline, Finley had led a group of dissident owners in trying to get Kuhn fired. Among the owners in that group -- George Steinbrenner, who had recently been banned from day-to-day involvement with his team by Kuhn for his Watergate-related conviction. If Kuhn was inclined to look at any Finley moves with a jaundiced eye -- and he was -- the involvement of Steinbrenner was "like waving a red flag" in front of the commissioner, Heylar writes.
To sum up a long story, with the onset of free agency, Finley had no chance of retaining the star players on a team that had won five straight division titles. He decided the best course of action was to trade players -- either for younger, less expensive players or for cash (which he intended to use to sign younger, less expensive players). So he sold Rudi and Fingers to the Sox for a million dollars a piece and auctioned off Blue for $1.5 million. At least until Kuhn put the kabosh on that. Most of the members of Kuhn's executive council were aghast at Finley's move but argued against intervening. One of the main exceptions was Walter O'Malley, the Dodgers owner who, in effect, ran baseball and had pulled the strings that gave Kuhn his commissioner post. Guess whose advice Kuhn decided to follow?
Kuhn's reasoning -- that selling off players to the highest bidder was not in the best interest of the game -- appears sound until you realize that owners had been doing exactly that for more than hundred years. Then consider that at the time of the trade the Red Sox were six games behind the Yankees, the ultimate winner of the AL East that year. They finished 15 1/2 back. Think the addition of Rudi and Fingers might have helped them close the gap? Meanwhile, Finley ordered Rudi, Fingers, and Blue out of the lineup for 11 games while the legal wrangling over the trades took place. The A's wound up 2 1/2 games behind the Kansas City Royals in the Al West. I don't know which fans Kuhn had in mind when he blocked the Finley trades and threw the season into chaos "in the best interests of the game," but it certainly wasn't the interest of fans in Boston or Oakland.
All that Kuhn did by blocking the trade was prevent an Oakland dynasty in decline from rebuilding (odds are that Finley was a poor fit for the free agency era and would have been unable to recapture his prospect-finding magic of the 1960s, but without the cash from the Boston and New York trades, he had no chance). That, in turn, forced Finley to sell his team (which may have been the point all along) -- and he almost sold it to Marvin Davis, who planned on moving the A's to Denver. I'm not sure how forcing a team to relocate would have served the best interest of Oakland fans, but then Bowie Kuhn is a much more clever man than I.
