By Yours Truly
http://throneberryfields.com/2017/03/07/new-book-remembers-hunters-free-agency-groundbreak/If the excerpt I have just read from Jason Turnbow’s
Dynastic, Bombastic, Fantastic: Reggie, Rollie, Catfish, and Charlie
Finley’s Swinging A’s is any indication, it promises to be maybe the single best study of one of baseball’s most memorably
controversial teams. The early-to-mid-1970s Oakland Athletics were many things. Dull wasn’t one of them.
You remember: the Mustache Gang who ruled baseball (three straight World Series rings, a feat not achieved since) while
they played and were owned almost as though there were no rules beyond the caprices of themselves (if ever any team
adhered to the old maxim that boys will be boys, the early 70s A’s were it), and, particularly, their Mad Hatter-like owner.
My copy is on order.
Sports Illustrated has excerpted
one of the key chapters, the one in which Finley’s duplicities provoked
the next-to-last kicking open of the free agency door, by way of a pitcher with a stubborn integrity, Hall of Famer Catfish
Hunter.
What you probably remember: Catfish Hunter, his agent, and Yankee official and longtime Hunter friend Clyde Kluttz
high-tailing it to New York, on the final day of 1974, after one and all agreed in principle that Hunter, freshly declared
a free agent, would become a Yankee.
What you may not remember is exactly how Hunter got there in the first place. Call it a combination of Finley and the call
of the wild.
It started with Finley trying to squeeze Hunter on a $100,000 loan the owner made the pitcher to enable Hunter to buy a
large farm next to his Hertford, North Carolina property. It ended with Hunter so anxious to get even one day in the woods
at the end of deer season that he was ready to make a deal even if it wasn’t the top dollar deal on the table.
The loan term mandated Hunter repaying at $20,000 a year at 6 percent interest. The two men made it on a handshake.
Oops. Finley concurrently bought the Memphis Pros of the upstart American Basketball Association and the California
Golden Seals (long since merged into what’s long been the Dallas Stars) of the National Hockey League. The strain those
buys made on his overall business prodded Finley to push Hunter hard for faster-than-mandated loan repayments.
“He’d call me in the clubhouse. He’d call me off the field. He called me at the hotels on the road. He called me at home.
He called my father, who was furious,” Hunter would remember.
The pitcher tried to arrange alternate financing through North Carolina banks, a tough proposition when he couldn’t be
there in person, with Finley refusing him time off to do it. At one point Hunter was so nervous he offered to pitch on a
ten-year deal at $15,000 a year in lieu of the $150,000 owed. When Finley rejected that, Hunter ended up selling 80
percent of the farm to a family friend to repay Finley.
It left a taste in Hunter’s mouth sour enough that, from that point forward, the righthander would document every subsequent
agreement with Finley extensively, a final detail, “it turned out, would prove to be instrumental in the years to come,”
Turnbow writes.
Hunter’s next A’s contract would be only the second multi-year contract Finley ever offered one of his players: two years,
$100,000 per, not quite equal to Tom Seaver’s or Steve Carlton’s annual salaries but enough for Hunter. The kicker: On the
advice of his attorney J. Carlton Cherry, Hunter wanted half the money deferred.
“Put it into a life insurance annuity, [Cherry] said, which could be cashed in for additional income once Hunter’s baseball career
ended,” Turnbow writes. “The benefit to this arrangement was that instead of being in a high tax bracket in 1974, Hunter would
be taxed later on, when he was effectively unemployed and on the hook for a smaller amount.”
For Finley, the deferral was fine but the requirement to pay $25,000 in taxes immediately wasn’t. In time he’d deny agreeing
to anything. He even failed to sign the final contract. In effect, Hunter pitched 1974 without a valid contract. Finley paid Hunter’s
non-deferred salary but not the required annuity to Jefferson Insurance, Hunter’s home agents.
“Hunter was effectively pitching for half the money for which he signed.,” Turnbow writes. Finley was ready to urge Hunter to
take a straight $50,000 payment. Hunter consulted Washington legal wheel/agent Jerry Kapstein, who asked whether Cherry
gave Finley official notice of a contract breach. (He had.)
When Hunter told Kapstein the period passed and Finley made no formal responses to Cherry’s notice, Kapstein uttered the words
that would shake baseball: “Based on those facts, it would appear to me you will be a free agent.”
During the American League Championship Series, Finley again tried to offer Hunter a straight-up $50,000. Hunter replied that
Finley needed only to pay the way the contract called for. Finley exploded to American League president Lee MacPhail, complaining
he’d shown Hunter the money; MacPhail fell for it and said publicly he couldn’t see how anyone could make Hunter a free agent.
“The trouble with that logic was that Hunter, like any employee in any profession, was entitled to the terms of his contract,” Turnbow
writes, “and accepting a check for which he’d have to pay taxes was not within those terms. When Hunter claimed to become a free
agent after the season, he had little idea whether it would actually come to pass. There was no questioning, however, that Catfish
meant every word he said.”
Indeed. Hunter refused to talk about it publicly during the World Series. Players Association executive director Marvin Miller sent
commissioner Bowie Kuhn a request to recognise Hunter as a free agent, which Kuhn rejected. The commissioner’s offer to mediate
the matter himself was also spurned, Miller citing a basic agreement clause mandating an independent arbitrator.
When the 1974 World Series ended with Oakland’s third straight rings, the union filed against Finley for breach of contract and
Kuhn and baseball government for failing to recognise the breach and declare Hunter a free agent. Arbitrator Peter Seitz broke a
tie to rule in Hunter’s favour.
By 18 December 1974, Kuhn’s options to stop it exhausted, the bidding war for Hunter was on in earnest. His neighbours in Hertford
and nearby Ahoskie wavered between bemusement and befuddlement at the slickers looking to make a country boy a wealthy man.
They came especially from the Braves, the Red Sox, the Indians, the Royals, the Expos, the Mets, the Phillies (then-owner Ruly
Carpenter thought he’d have it in the bag when he offered Hunter unlimited hunting privileges on the Carpenter family’s South
Carolina acreage), the Pirates, the Padres, and the Cardinals.
Hunter didn’t even accept the largest dollars offered. With ten teams minimum in the bidding, so it seemed, nobody saw the Yankees
coming. Including maybe the Yankees, who hadn’t made quite the best offer in terms of dollars.
But the Yankees had a critical in with Hunter: minor league scouting director, Clyde Kluttz, once a major league backup catcher and
later the scout who steered Hunter to the A’s in the first place, was a longtime Hunter confidante.
Kluttz swept into town before New Year’s Eve to find Hunter tired of driving into nearby Ahoskie every day to continue fielding and
rejecting offers, however good it felt to the righthander to be calling the dance. Kluttz had only one question to Hunter’s endless
ones: “Jimmy, what would it take to make you a Yankee?”
Hunter’s answer: he wanted five years’ salary, fifteen years worth of deferred money, and annuities to ensure the education of his
children. His next question: Could the Yankees do it and with what kind of lucre?
Kluttz wrote his answer on a napkin while the two old friends had coffee: $750,000 over five years in salary; a $1 million signing
bonus; $1 million in life insurance; $500,000 deferred money; $50,000 per child for his children’s education; and, $200,000 to
cover any future legal fees he might incur.
Hunter showed Cherry and company the napkin. Cherry was a little dismayed that at $3.5 million it totaled third-highest among the
offers his client received, and well short of the Padres’ $4 million plus offer. (Then-owner Ray Kroc was also willing to throw in stock
and a McDonald’s franchise, neither of which appealed to Hunter.) But Hunter wanted to pick his team. More important, it was where
and how securely the dollars were spread that mattered more to the pitcher than his actual salary.
Thus did Hunter, Kluttz, and Cherry join up in New York for an 8:15 pm Eastern time press conference, with a Yankee cap atop Hunter’s
smiling head. Why did Hunter take what amounted to the third-best offer? Kluttz wasn’t just an old friend but shot straight, no chaser
with the righthander, a quality that meant as much to Hunter as making sure his wife and children would be set.
The Catfish also had another motivation: deer season was almost over, the arbitration and the subsequent sweepstakes had kept him
from the woods. “He had to make a decision,” wrote John Helyar in
The Lords of the Realm, “before he went out of his mind.” The Yankees,
too, wanted the Hunter deal finished by the calendar year’s end for tax reasons.
Curt Flood, standing up for his fellow players, tried and failed to bury the reserve clause. After the 1975 season, Seitz would rule in favour
of Andy Messersmith and bury it. In between, as catcher Ted Simmons would remember, Hunter showed players (to their amazed glee) and
owners (to their self-inflicted chagrin) “what was out there” if allowed to shop their services on an open market.
All because his boss foolishly tried squeezing him in one direction and, violating his contract, cutting corners in another. The only squeeze
Hunter wanted to know from there was his finger on the trigger of his hunting rifle and his fingers around a baseball, until he retired after
the 1979 season. (He died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis—Lou Gehrig’s disease—two decades later, at 53.)
The sad paradox was that Finley could be and was very generous with his players from time to time—paying them fat bonuses for assorted
feats, including $5,000 to Hunter after the righthander pitched his perfect game, and a spanking new Cadillac after the Hall of Famer won
21 in 1971.
But he also took perverse pleasure in insulting them during contract talks (
doing it to Vida Blue after his breakout 1971 was only the most
notorious) and humiliating them when they saw fit to retaliate. (When Reggie Jackson struggled one season after a bitter contract negotiation,
he broke out of one slump with a monstrous grand slam and, spying Finley’s box as he rounded the bases, mouthed an obscenity. Finley
forced him to apologise publicly.)
Finley, alas, would feel another kind of squeeze, after the A’s were knocked out of a fourth straight pennant by the Red Sox in the 1975
ALCS. The man who’d
strong-armed the Beatles to surrender an off-day on their mammoth 1964 tour to play in Kansas City couldn’t strong-
arm his way out of the free agency era-to-be that his own chicaneries helped nourish.
