October 17, 1974: Three Straight In Oakland

Top row: Rollie Fingers, Joe Rudi, Vida Blue.

Middle: Reggie Jackson, Charlie Finley, Gene Tenace.

Bottom: Sal Bando, Catfish Hunter, Bert Campaneris.

Among this team's many talents: Faking smiles.

October 17, 1974: Game 5 of the World Series is played at the Oakland Coliseum. Vida Blue of the Oakland Athletics and Don Sutton of the Los Angeles Dodgers are tied 2-2 going into the bottom of the 6th inning, when Mike Marshall relieves Sutton and retires the side.

In the 7th‚ a shower of debris from the fans halts the game for 15 minutes. When play is resumed‚ Joe Rudi hits Marshall's 1st pitch for a home run to give the A's a 3rd 3-2 win‚ clinching a 3rd straight World Championship for the team.

The A's thus become only the 2nd major league franchise to win 3 straight World Series, and remain the only one other than the New York Yankees to have done it. This was also the 1st all-California World Series, or even the 1st with both teams playing more than a few blocks west of the Mississippi River (take note, fans of St. Louis and Minnesota).

After the 1974 season, A's owner Charles Oscar Finley reneged on a clause in his contract with ace pitcher Hunter, who was then declared a free agent, and signed with the Yankees. The A's still won the American League Western Division in 1975, but lost the AL Championship Series to the Boston Red Sox.

Then the reserve clause was struck down. Free agency, and thus much higher salaries, were coming, and Finley didn't want to pay them. First, he traded Reggie to the Baltimore Orioles, where he played out his contract. Then he sold Blue to the Yankees for $1.5 million, and Fingers and Rudi to the Red Sox for $1 million each. He figured, better to get as much money for them now, than to lose them to free agency and get nothing for them.

Commissioner Bowie Kuhn voided those sales. This benefited the Yankees, as they didn't have to deal with Blue's worsening drug problem, and the Red Sox did not get the improvement that Fingers and Rudi would have given them. But was it really, as Kuhn put it, in "the best interests of baseball"?

When the 1976 season came to an end, with the A's finishing 2nd, a mere 2 1/2 games behind the Kansas City Royals, Finley didn't lift a finger to sign any of the players who went for the big money. He didn't try to bring Reggie back, and Reggie signed with the Yankees. Fingers and Tenace were signed by the San Diego Padres. Rudi was signed by the team then known as the California Angels. Campaneris was signed by the Texas Rangers, and would join Rudi on the Angels 2 years later. Team Captain Bando was signed by the Milwaukee Brewers.

Finally, after an attempt to trade Blue to the Cincinnati Reds after the 1977 season fell through, Finley traded him across the Bay to the San Francisco Giants. The A's crashed to last place in 1977, losing 98 games, behind even the expansion Seattle Mariners. They lost 93 games in 1978, and bottomed out at 108 losses and just 306,763 fans for the entire season.

Finley threatened to move the team to Seattle for the 1976 season, came within inches of moving them to Denver for 1978, tried to move them to New Orleans in 1979, and finally sold the team in 1980. They instantly got better. He died in 1996. He is still not in the Baseball Hall of Fame, while Reggie, Catfish and Fingers are.

Pretty much everybody who's studied 1970s baseball -- and several books have been written about the period, all of them examining the A's, the Team of the Decade -- agree that if Charlie O. hadn't been so cheap, and otherwise so vindictive, and had paid his players what they were worth, and had otherwise treated them well enough to make them want to stay in Oakland, the dynasty could have continued, getting in the way of the Big Red Machine, George Steinbrenner's Yankees and Whitey Herzog's Royals.

But Finley broke up his dynasty.

The debate over the Team of the Decade for the 1970s comes down to the A's and the Cincinnati Reds. The argument for "the Big Red Machine" is that their 1975 team was the best single-season team of the decade, while their 1976 team went 7-0 in the postseason.

But the Reds didn't win 3 World Series in the decade. The A's won 3, all in a row. What's more, the 1st of these, in 1972, was over the Reds, clinching in Cincinnati, and doing it without their best player, because Reggie Jackson was injured in the Pennant-clincher.

Reds fans will argue that they had the edge at nearly every position: 1st base, Tony Pérez over Gene Tenace; 2nd base, Joe Morgan over Dick Green; shortstop, Dave Concepción over Bert Campaneris; 3rd base, Pete Rose over Sal Bando; left field, George Foster over Joe Rudi; center field, César Gerónimo over Billy North; and catcher, Johnny Bench over Ray Fosse. The one exception they'll make is that Reggie Jackson was better than Ken Griffey Sr. in right field.

What they did in their respective careers aside: At the time, Tenace was on the same level as Pérez, Campaneris was on at least the same level as Concepción, North was on at least the same level as Gerónimo, Bando was a better all-around player than Rose, and Foster was not yet a better player than Rudi. Then there's the pitching: The A's clearly had better starting pitching; and, while the bullpen was a Cincinnati strength, so was it a strength for Oakland, and the Reds didn't have a closer like Rollie Fingers.

The Team of the 1970s was "The Swingin' A's," not "The Big Red Machine."

It is noteworthy that, from the Giants' Pennant of October 3, 1962 to the 49ers' NFC Championship of January 10, 1982, the City of San Francisco had no league champions in any sport, while the City of Oakland had 8: The 1967 AFL Champion Raiders; the 1969 ABA Champion Oaks; the 1972, 1973 and 1974 World Series Champion Athletics; the 1975 NBA Champion Warriors; and the 1976 and 1980 NFL Champion Raiders.

One more note, as the A's won the last title of calendar year 1974: In his book about types of sports fans, True Believers, journalist Joe Queenan wrote about a friend of his, whose favorite teams were the A's, the Miami Dolphins, the Boston Celtics, the Philadelphia Flyers, the Notre Dame football team and the North Carolina State basketball team. Why? Because they all won championships when he was 8 years old, in calendar year 1974.

Except the guy has stuck with those teams all this time, and every one of them has since won at least one more title by 2022 (except the Dolphins, and the Flyers just barely, in 1975), but has also given him some misery. Indeed, the A's might end up moving, although since he doesn't live in the Bay Area, his loyalty isn't to Oakland. His loyalty cannot be questioned. I have more respect for him than the guy who roots for whatever team LeBron James plays for, or the guy wearing a Golden State Warriors T-shirt who doesn't know that the Warriors (and the A's, for that matter) used to play in Philadelphia.

UPDATE: The A's did move after the 2024 season, with John Fisher, their owner since 2005, doing what Finley threatened to do, but never did: Take them out of Oakland.

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October 17, 1974 was a Thursday. Football was in midweek. There were 2 games in the NBA. The New York Knicks beat the expansion New Orleans Jazz, 89-74 at Madison Square Garden. This was the 1st regular season game ever played by the Jazz, who moved to Salt Lake City in 1979, becoming the Utah Jazz. And the Phoenix Suns beat the Seattle SuperSonics, 114-97 at the Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix.

The American Basketball Association opened its season the next day. There were 4 games played in the NHL:

* The Boston Bruins beat the Philadelphia Flyers, 4-1 at The Spectrum in Philadelphia.

* The Washington Capitals beat the Chicago Black Hawks, 4-3 at the Capital Centre in the Washington suburb of Landover, Maryland.

* The Buffalo Sabres beat the California Golden Seals, 6-1 at the Buffalo Memorial Auditorium.

* And the St. Louis Blues beat the Montreal Canadiens, 3-2 at the St. Louis Arena.

One game played in the World Hockey Association: The Michigan Stags beat the Indianapolis Racers, 4-2 at the Market Square Arena in Indianapolis. The Stags thought they could compete with the now-struggling Detroit Red Wings, but they didn't have a TV contract, and moved in mid-season, becoming the Baltimore Blades, and folded at the end of the season.

June 18, 1976: Charlie Finley's Fire Sale Is Canceled

June 18, 1976: Charlie Finley's attempt to hold a "fire sale" so that he could rebuild his Oakland Athletics is canceled by Major League Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn.

Charles Oscar Finley built a team that won 5 straight American League Western Division titles, 1971 to '75. And 3 straight World Series, 1972 to '74. But their attendance was never all that high. In only 2 of the 21 seasons that he owned the team in Kansas City and Oakland, 1960 to '80, did the A's get over 1 million in official attendance, '73 and '75. And the '73 figure of 1,000,763 is in dispute, because some people think Charlie O tinkered with it.

He discovered what Connie Mack, known for building up winners and then breaking them up with the earlier A's in Philadelphia, discovered: It brings in more fans if you have a good team that stays in the race most of the way and doesn't win, than if you have one that runs away with the Pennant. And then, when the players don't win, you don't have to give them big raises.

Pitcher Jim "Catfish" Hunter had it written into his contract that Finley had to pay toward an annuity -- and when Finley didn't, Hunter took Finley to an arbitrator, and Catfish was declared a free agent. Finley didn't lift a finger to re-sign him, and lots of other teams did. Of course, the fingers that George Steinbrenner of the Yankees lifted were clutching a lot of money.

Without Catfish, the A's still won the West in 1975, but got swept by the Red Sox in the AL Championship Series. At the dawn of the '76 season, Reggie Jackson (who liked to say that Finley gave him his chance in baseball, "Lord, but the man was cheap, though") and Ken Holtzman were traded to Baltimore for Don Baylor and Mike Torrez. Within a year, none of them was on either of the teams involved in this trade.

On June 15, then the trading deadline, Finley sold Vida Blue to the Yankees for $1.5 million, and Joe Rudi and Rollie Fingers to the Red Sox for $1 million each. Finley had players and the lust for money. Steinbrenner of the Yankees and Tom Yawkey of the Red Sox had money and the desire for a championship. These sounded like good deals for all 3 owners.

Rollie Fingers, a Red Sock for 3 days

Kuhn didn't think so. He usually bent over backwards to help the owners and screw the players, and, certainly, Blue could make more money with the Yanks, and Rudi and Fingers with the Sox, than anyone was making with the A's. But Kuhn hated Finley (and the feeling was mutual), and ordered the Yanks and Sox not to play their new acquisitions until he could straighten everything out.

Kuhn thought about it for 3 days, then canceled the deals, citing "the best interest of baseball." He said he didn't want Pennants to be bought outright.

Well, what the hell did he think the Yankees were doing all through the 1920s, '30s, '40s, '50s and into the '60s? What did he think Steinbrenner had been doing the last 3 years? What did he think Yawkey, who was then dying of leukemia, had been trying to do for over 40 years?

It's professional baseball. The players are paid for their services. Every championship has been bought, since the 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings.

Clearly, Kuhn put the kibosh on the deals for one reason, and one reason only: He hated Finley. Whether this was the best thing for baseball is a debate for another time; whether the Yankees, or the Red Sox, or both, would have been better off if the deals had gone through, is still another debate.

So let's have that debate:

* The Red Sox needed a better bullpen. It's why they signed Bill Campbell in the following off-season. Fingers would have helped. But they were loaded with outfielders. They didn't need Rudi. And with the dissension they already had, things could have gotten worse. The fact that Yawkey had leukemia, and died on July 9, didn't help: His wife, Jean, inherited the team, and the guys she let run the team made a lot of mistakes over the next few years.

* But the Yankees would have had a bigger problem: Blue's drug problem. George Steinbrenner would have had to get rid of him. And who would have taken him, knowing he had that problem? Having Blue would have made no difference in the 1976 World Series, and might have prevented them from winning the Pennant over the Kansas City Royals in 1976, '77 and '78.

* So who would have benefited the most from the sales, if they had gone through? The Orioles would both have been able to take advantage of the Yanks' and Sox' problems. The Royals did take advantage of the A's' problems. And, if the Yankees or the Red Sox had managed to get past the Orioles, as the Yankees did in '76, '77, '78 and '80 (but not '79, when the California Angels beat the Royals out for the AL West title), the Royals would have faced a more troubled and possibly weaker New York or Boston team.

So, after the '76 season that we know, in which the weakened A's won 87 games, and finished 2nd in the AL West behind the Royals, came the first off-season in which free agency came into play in more than the infrequent example, such as Hunter in '74 and Ken Harrelson in '67 -- both let go by Finley, interestingly enough.

Fingers and Gene Tenace signed with the San Diego Padres, owned by Ray Kroc, the man who built McDonald's. Rudi signed with the team then known as the California Angels, owned by Gene Autry, the movies' former "Singing Cowboy" who had made millions buying and operation radio stations.

Like Steinbrenner and Yawkey, Kroc and Autry had no issue with spending big bucks, if they thought it would bring them big results. They both ended up doing better than Jean Yawkey did after Tom died. But neither did as well as Steinbrenner. A's team captain Sal Bando signed with the Milwaukee Brewers, and Bert Campaneris signed with the Texas Rangers.

In 1977, with only Blue and Bill North left from the '74 World Champs, the A's lost 98 games, and finished dead last, half a game behind the expansion Seattle Mariners.

In '78, having finally dumped off Blue (to the San Francisco Giants) and North (to the Los Angeles Dodgers), it was 93 losses.  In '79, 108 losses -- the most by an AL team since the 1939 St. Louis Browns lost 111. Even the AL expansion teams of 1961, 1969 and 1977 hadn't lost that many. Attendance at the Oakland Coliseum was 306,763. That's not for a weeklong homestand, that's for an entire season, 81 home games. That's 3,787 per game. I've been to a high school basketball game with a better attendance than that. The place became known as the Mausoleum.

In the 1977-78 off-season, fed up with baseball, Finley came very close to selling the A's to Marvin Davis, who wanted to move the team to Denver and Mile High Stadium, but the deal fell through. A year later, he tried to sell them to a group that would have moved them to the Superdome in New Orleans. In 1979-80, again, he tried to sell the team to Davis, but it didn't happen.

Finally, in 1980, having hired Billy Martin as manager, the A's fortunes turned around, and Charlie O found a buyer, Levi Strauss heir Walter Haas, who kept the team in Oakland, saving the team for the East Bay for the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s and 2010s.

UPDATE: In 2024, A's owner John Fisher, unwilling to do what it took to get a new ballpark in or around Oakland, announced he was moving the team to Las Vegas. The new domed stadium there is on schedule to open for the 2028 season. In the interim, they're playing in the Class AAA ballpark in West Sacramento, California.

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June 18, 1976 was a Friday. Country singer Blake Shelton and FBI actress Alana de la Garza were born.

These games were played in Major League Baseball that day:

* The New York Yankees beat the Chicago White Sox, 3-2 at Comiskey Park in Chicago. Roy White won the game with a sacrifice fly in the top of the 14th inning. making a winning pitcher of Grant Jackson, in relief of Holtzman. No home runs, but Mickey Rivers went 3-for-7. Bucky Dent, who would be a Yankee 10 months later, went 2-for-5 with an RBI for the South Siders. This was the only extra-inning game of the day.

* The New York Mets beat the San Francisco Giants, 3-2 at Shea Stadium. John Milner and Ed Kranepool hit home runs in support of Tom Seaver.

* The Los Angeles Dodgers beat the Montreal Expos, 6-5 at Jarry Park in Montreal.

* The Philadelphia Phillies beat the Cincinnati Reds, 6-5 at Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia. Dick Allen and Mike Schmidt hit home runs. George Foster hit 2 homers for the Reds, Pete Rose went 2-for-3 with 2 walks, but Johnny Bench went 0-for-5. Joe Morgan only appeared as a pinch-runner.

* The Chicago Cubs beat the Atlanta Braves, 6-4 at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium.

* The Baltimore Orioles beat the Texas Rangers, 9-4 at Arlington Stadium in the Dallas suburb of Arlington, Texas. The O's got home runs from Reggie Jackson, Lee May and Andres Mora. Brooks Robinson did not play.

* The Pittsburgh Pirates beat the Houston Astros, 7-3 at Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh. Willie Stargell hit a home run off J.R. Richard.

* The Kansas City Royals beat the Cleveland Indians, 5-3 at Cleveland Municipal Stadium. They did this despite George Brett going 0-for-4. Manager Frank Robinson did not put 41-year-old veteran outfielder Frank Robinson in the game.

* The Detroit Tigers beat the Minnesota Twins, 4-2 at Metropolitan Stadium in the Minneapolis suburb of Bloomington, Minnesota. Rod Carew went 1-for-4.

* The St. Louis Cardinals beat the San Diego Padres, 8-4 at Busch Memorial Stadium in St. Louis. Lou Brock and Dave Winfield hit home runs. Randy Jones, who came in 12-2 and, as Sports Illustrated put it a "Threat to Win 30," was outpitched by future Met Pete Falcone.

* The Boston Red Sox beat the California Angels, 3-1 at Anaheim Stadium (now Angel Stadium of Anaheim). They didn't need either Rollie Fingers or Joe Rudi, because, in the top of the 9th inning, they got a single from Carl Yastrzemski, an RBI double from Jim Rice, and a single by Rico Petrocelli.

* And the Oakland Athletics? They lost to the Milwaukee Brewers, 3-2 at the Oakland Coliseum. All 3 Brewer runs came on solo home runs: By George Scott, Bernie Carbo and Hank Aaron. It was the 750th round-tripper of Hammerin' Hank's career. There would be 5 more.