Hairs vs. Squares Page 10

  In the Oval Office Nixon told Blue, who was making just $13,000 at the time, “I’ve read that you’re the most underpaid player in baseball.”

  Finley, overhearing the conversation, grimaced.

  “Who is the lawyer for this club?” the president asked before turning his attention back to Blue. “I would hate to negotiate your contract next year.”

  Negotiating on behalf of Blue was his agent, Bob Gerst. A thirty-six-year-old Los Angeles attorney, Gerst had been put in contact with Blue by A’s teammate Tommy Davis, a star outfielder for the Dodgers during their championship years in the 1960s. Gerst was a contract lawyer, and he handled the business affairs of Los Angeles Lakers great Jerry West, among others.

  On January 8, 1972, Gerst and Blue arrived at the Michigan Avenue office building that housed the insurance offices for Charles O. Finley and Company, Inc. For five hours the three men sought to negotiate a new deal for Vida in Finley’s wood-paneled inner office high above Lake Michigan. Blue had hoped to increase his salary to $75,000, but Gerst was aiming higher. The agent wanted a deal that would make his client one of the top ten highest-paid players in baseball. Gerst asked for $115,000.

  Finley, who had in mind an offer of $45,000, scoffed. The owner asked the agent what floor of the building they were on. The twenty-seventh, Gerst said. “Mr. Gerst,” Finley said, “you have as much chance of getting $115,000 as I have of going out that window and landing on my feet.”

  When Finley countered with an offer of $50,000, Gerst and Blue lowered their number to $92,000. Finley held firm. He would not raise ticket prices, he said, to satisfy Blue’s demands. Nor would he trade him or sell him. “Either he accepts what we have offered,” Finley angrily remarked, “or he is through in baseball.”

  Gerst attempted to justify Blue’s request. He called his client one of the ten best pitchers in baseball. Gerst pointed to the salaries of Blue’s contemporaries: Bob Gibson, $150,000; Ferguson Jenkins, $125,000; Tom Seaver, $120,000. Gerst also pointed to the increased attendance the A’s had enjoyed—both at home and on the road—during Blue’s thirty-nine starts in 1971. “He’s proven his importance,” Gerst stated, “to the financial well-being of his club and to the league.”

  Finley knew it to be true. Blue’s breakout season in ’71 had helped the A’s increase their attendance over 1970 by 150,000, thereby earning Finley $1.3 million, an increase of $800,000 over the previous year’s profits. Vida averaged 23,100 fans per game; “Blue Moon” Odom, 16,183; and Hunter, a three-time All-Star and reigning ace, 14,719. Blue’s road starts drew crowds that averaged 85 percent more fans than the rest of Oakland’s games. Of the seven A’s games that drew more than 40,000, Blue started six of them.

  On June 1, when the A’s went to Yankee Stadium, fewer than twelve thousand tickets had been sold. When it was announced the wunderkind was pitching that night, over twenty thousand fans purchased tickets at the gate. When the A’s returned to the Bronx later that summer, the Yankees promoted the game as “Blue Tuesday” and colored the scorecard inserts in their team yearbooks blue in honor of Vida. The crowd for Blue’s start at the Stadium swelled to more than fifty thousand.

  Finley’s awareness of Blue’s celebrated status may have cost Vida a chance at becoming a 30-game winner in 1971. Blue was 17-2 at the All-Star break, but he was basically a .500 pitcher (7-6) for the second half of the season. Williams blamed Blue’s struggles on his boss’s late-season juggling of the pitching rotation. According to Williams, Finley called him into his office and insisted the rotation be juggled so that Blue would start seven of his final games in Oakland. Williams said the move “screwed up Blue.”

  “The Athletics,” sportswriter Larry Merchant wrote, “pitched Vida like he had a terminal disease, trying to get everything they could out of him.”

  Watching the A’s that summer, former major league second baseman Jerry Lumpe thought Finley tried to exploit Blue. Bando believed the same and said Vida pitched a lot of games with very little rest just for the attendance.

  Escalating innings—only four pitchers in the majors that season threw more innings than Blue—proved costly. Beginning with an August 20 start against Boston, Blue made seven of his final nine starts at home and won just two of them. After striking out 10 or more batters 11 times through September 3, he fanned 5 or fewer in each of his final five starts.

  Glenn Schwarz, the dean of Bay Area sportswriters, believed the A’s overuse of Blue in 1971 irrevocably damaged the pitcher’s career. In one game Vida worked eleven innings of shutout ball, striking out seventeen. He would have great games and good seasons in years to come, but he would never again be as dominant.

  Finley would tell Blue after the season, “So you won 20 games? Why didn’t you win 30?”

  In his negotiations with Gerst, Finley countered comparisons with Gibson, Jenkins, and Seaver by bringing up Blue’s limited service time in the bigs. “I don’t mind paying a player that has proved himself,” he said, “but a player can’t prove himself in one year.”

  He had to be firm on paying Blue $50,000 for 1972, Finley stated. The owner likely had another reason for refusing to go higher. In his most recent contract negotiations with his other ace, Finley had haggled with Hunter, a 20-game winner for the first time in 1971. They had finally agreed on a deal calling for the Catfish to earn $45,000 for his pitching and $5,000 for his hitting.

  Finley also promised Hunter he would not pay Blue more than he was earning. Finley, however, didn’t tell Gerst and Blue about his promise to Hunter. Instead he stated that based on the fact that Vida had just one full year in the majors, “I think [$50,000] is a fair offer.”

  Blue and Gerst thought otherwise, and the Western Division champs opened spring training minus their golden arm. Gerst took his client’s case to the court of public opinion. He set up an aftershave commercial in which Blue referred to himself as “baseball’s lowest paid superstar.” A’s players backed Blue in his holdout but only up to a point. Curt Blefary said Blue was foolish for giving up $50,000. “He could have made $100,000 with endorsements,” Blefary said.

  First baseman Mike Epstein blamed Gerst for Blue’s not being in camp. “I’m sorry for Vida,” he said. “He obviously hooked up with the wrong guy.”

  Bando said that while he was all for a player’s earning his worth, he felt Finley had offered Blue a fair contract. The only Oakland teammate to speak on Blue’s behalf was Davis, also a Gerst client. He would love to see Vida in uniform, Davis said, “but I respect his decision.”

  Gerst told Finley that Blue would accept the offer of $50,000 if his client could be a free agent at the end of the 1972 season. When Finley laughed off the notion, Gerst countered that Blue was considering jumping to the Japanese League. Finley knew that wouldn’t happen since an agreement between Major League Baseball and the Japanese League stated that no player could jump from one continent to the other without the permission of the owner.

  Keeping up public pressure on Finley, Blue appeared at a press conference with Richard Roundtree, the star of Shaft. It was announced that Blue had signed a deal with MGM to star in a sequel to the highly successful movie. Blue and Gerst then called another press conference in which Vida, reading from a prepared statement, said he had accepted a position as vice president of public relations for Dura Steel Products. Based in Santa Fe Springs, California, it was a company specializing in bathroom and toilet fixtures and located just down the freeway from the picturesque pastel surroundings of Dodger Stadium. Few members of the assembled media took him seriously since Blue chuckled throughout his statement, which included his announcement that he was leaving baseball.

  “Hold it,” he said at one point. “I’m serious.”

  He was not serious enough, however, to stop from meeting again with Finley. Following another failed face-to-face with Blue, Finley asked A’s equipment manager Frank Ciensczyk over drinks in a motel bar if he had any ideas on how to settle the situation. Ciensczyk was startled. “I’m just a
sock-and-jock man, Mr. Finley.” When Ciensczyk suggested that Finley send one of the players to talk to Blue, the boss seized on the idea.

  He ordered Tenace and Blefary to make separate trips to Oakland to persuade Blue to return. Some saw the sending of “goodwill ambassadors” as eccentric, but it fit right into what had become a bizarre and near deadly offseason for the AL’s defending Western Division champions.

  On January 6 Odom tried to prevent a burglary at his neighbor’s house in Macon, Georgia, and was shot in the left side of the neck and the right side of his chest by a man wielding a .38-caliber pistol. Both bullets missed Odom’s muscles, bones, and vital organs.

  In spring training Finley scheduled his A’s for an exhibition game against a Japanese team in which the rules of the game were altered so that a batter would walk on three balls and strike out on two strikes. Finley had long been in favor of the three-balls-and-two-strikes innovation, much to his manager’s dismay. So what if baseball had used different rules for seventy-five years? The boss thought the innovation would catch on, but Williams recalled his pitchers walking about twenty Japanese hitters and the A’s getting the hell kicked out of them. Williams called Finley’s proposed innovation an “invention defeated by defeat.”

  Finley also had his club fooling around with orange baseballs, which would be used in an exhibition game in 1973. Former A’s outfielder George Hendrick, who had been dealt to Cleveland, drove three of Finley’s orange baseballs beyond the outfield wall for homers. Hendrick then told Commissioner Kuhn he couldn’t pick up the spin on the ball. Williams figured Hendrick had told Kuhn that just to get back at Finley and said the orange baseballs experiment had been killed by a grudge.

  Throughout the spring Williams handled Blue’s holdout like he dealt with all contract matters involving his players. He told his players he didn’t give a damn who was right, he just wanted them to be ready for the season. To that end Williams secretly supplied Blue with baseballs and equipment.

  With Blue holding out and with Odom recovering from gunshot wounds and fellow pitcher Chuck Dobson nursing an elbow injury, the A’s were in desperate need of pitching. Following their three-game sweep by Baltimore in the ALCS the previous October, Finley heeded Williams’s call for another reliable starter and acquired stylish southpaw Ken Holtzman from the Chicago Cubs in exchange for outfielder Rick Monday. Holtzman was only twenty-six years old and had authored two no-hitters, the first in 1969 against Henry Aaron and the eventual NL Western Division Atlanta Braves and the second in 1971 against the Big Red Machine in Riverfront Stadium.

  With the A’s still needing another arm Finley pulled the trigger on a deal for Denny McLain.

  “When you haven’t got your big starter in camp and it’s been open for two weeks, you’ve got to take action,” Williams told the press. Privately he had reservations. Since winning a combined 55 games over the 1968–69 seasons for Detroit, McLain had won just 13 games over the 1970–71 campaigns. He was still weeks shy of turning twenty-eight at the time of his arrival with the A’s, but his appearance left Williams unimpressed. The former star looked overweight and out of shape.

  In his first spring start, McLain was manhandled by Milwaukee and bombed for ten runs. San Diego pummeled him for seven runs on fourteen hits. Four days later McLain flashed his old form, shutting out Cleveland for five innings and earning a spot in the rotation as the A’s broke camp and headed to Oakland for the belated season opener against the Twins.

  One player not heading to Oakland was Davis. He had hit .324 for the A’s in 1971 while playing in 79 games, .464 as a pinch hitter. On the morning of March 24 he had climbed aboard the team bus for the trip to Yuma for the game against San Diego. Davis was nursing a sore left leg but was still batting .563. Shortly after the bus arrived at the clubhouse, he was called aside by Williams. The man who had introduced Blue to his agent had been given his unconditional release.

  Though the A’s would claim that injuries had scuttled the aging star’s career, Davis believed it was Finley’s way of seeking retribution. Finley wanted a scapegoat, Davis thought. Charlie didn’t want to get rid of Blue, but he wanted to show “how strong he could be.”

  Davis insisted he had introduced Gerst merely to look after Vida’s endorsements and personal appearances. But if his introducing Blue to Gerst was the reason they had cut him, the gentlemanly Davis said, there was nothing he could do about it. “If it is [the reason],” he said, “it’s very childish.”

  Opening Day on Saturday, April 15, brought a crowd of just 9,912 to the Coliseum for a game matching two teams that had combined to win the AL’s first three Western Division titles since the beginning of the divisional format in 1969. The small turnout wasn’t limited to Oakland alone. Only 17,401 fans showed up at Wrigley Field as the Phillies’ new ace, lefty Steve Carlton, donned the team’s powder blue double-knit uniform and launched his historic season with a 4–2 win over ace Ferguson Jenkins.

  In Shea Stadium a crowd of 15,893 cheered Seaver’s 4–0 shutout of the champion Pirates and booed Commissioner Kuhn. After having waited out the strike, baseball fans watching at home were greeted with NBC cameras panning cloud-shrouded “Big Shea” while play-by-play man Jim Simpson provided the voice-over. It was a raw, windy, cold day at Shea, but as Simpson warmly intoned, “The strike is over and major league baseball is back with us today.”

  Simpson’s broadcast partner and color analyst Sandy Koufax, newly elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame, compared the players’ late start in ’72 to the celebrated holdout he and teammate Don Drysdale had undergone prior to the 1966 season.

  Following a solemn ceremony honoring the late Mets manager Gil Hodges, Seaver stared in at Rennie Stennett and fired his customary first-pitch fastball.

  “It is bitterly cold here in New York,” Simpson told his viewers, “but what a thrill it is to be back and have the 1972 season underway.”

  The thrill was also evident in Cincinnati, where the Reds were engaging in their eighty-eighth season opener. The Western Division rival Los Angeles Dodgers were in town and amid leaden skies and a threat of rain a crowd of 37,895 watched Jack Billingham duel Don Sutton.

  Longtime Dodger voice Vin Scully thought it “rather fitting” that the Dodgers and Reds paired off in the ’72 season opener. In 1962 the Dodgers had opened their new ball park in Chavez Ravine against the Reds, and Frank Robinson had been in a Cincinnati uniform that day. Here the two teams were ten years later on Opening Day, and Scully said it was ironic that Robby was now wearing Dodger blue and playing against the Reds.

  One more difference to this Opening Day was that the Dodgers and Reds were debuting their new double-knits. The designs of the uniforms were different. The Dodgers were still sporting the button-down jerseys, while the Reds had adopted the pullovers with no buttons and no belts popularized by the Pirates and Cardinals. Montreal outfielder Ken Singleton thought the new form-fitting uniforms looked great on Bench, Morgan, Rose, et al. “Of course, on those guys any uniform would have looked great,” he added.

  American League umpire Ron Luciano thought the form-fitting double-knits a perfect fit for television as long as the player had good form. There were some forms, he added, over which even a tent would not have looked good. Some players welcomed them; Singleton was allergic to wool, so he became one of the first Expos to don the double-knits. The home uniform double-knits had a much brighter glow to them; alongside teammates still wearing the somewhat dull flannel uniforms, Singleton was said to look like a light bulb turned on. Others, like veteran Jim Kaat, had their reservations about the stylish uniforms. Kaat noted that on hot days the blousy flannels afforded some ventilation. The double-knits, tapered to the body as they were, did not.

  Scully’s longtime partner on Dodger broadcasts, Jerry Doggett, welcomed listeners on the team’s flagship station, KFI AM 640. Doggett, who was working the first three innings, opened the broadcast, and Scully took the mic in the top of the fourth: “Opening Day 1972 and thank goodness i
t’s here. . . . Despite the weather, despite the dismal forecast, the enthusiasm was certainly not dimmed by any means.”

  Outside of Cincinnati fans were less enthusiastic. In Chicago’s Wrigley Field fewer than eighteen thousand seats were sold for the Cubs’ opener. In St. Louis, one of the best baseball cities in the country, only 7,808 fans showed up for the opener against Montreal. Conspicuously absent was Cardinals owner Gussie Busch. Those who were on hand heckled Bob Gibson as he struggled through the first inning. “Hurry up,” one person shouted. “I’ve got to go to a union meeting!” When Cardinal center fielder Jose Cruz misplayed a single, another fan yelled, “Put a dollar sign on it!”

  Oakland fans, however, quickly warmed to Holtzman, who in his first official start for the A’s held a lineup featuring future Hall of Famers Rod Carew and Harmon Killebrew to three hits over eight innings. He left with a 3–2 lead, but the Twins reached reliever Rollie Fingers for a run in the ninth to send the game into extra innings. Rudi doubled off Dave LaRoche to open the bottom of the eleventh and was sacrificed to third by Jackson. Bando drew an intentional walk, bringing Tenace to the plate. A’s announcer Monte Moore made the call:

  Wouldn’t you know it, the A’s are starting this season on an exciting note. . . . In rides the pitch. Tenace swings. There’s a bouncing ball, right side of the infield. Rudi’s gonna try to score! Carew picks the ball up, here’s the throw to the plate, it’s gonna be close. . . . Mitterwald’s got the ball. Rudi crashes into him and the ball is knocked loose! Rudi is safe at the plate and the A’s win, 4–3!