The Millionaires Strike Out

Never tell a baseball fan that money cannot buy sappiness. By the time two of the game's richest teams and its most eccentric owner were through with what is already in the record books as the Tuesday Night Massacre, the only question was who was making a sap of whom.

The sequence of events began to unfold at an appropriate venue, DiMaggio's restaurant (Joe and Dom own small interests) on Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco, where Dick O'Connell, the general manager of the Boston Red Sox, got a message to telephone Charlie Finley, the exasperated (and exasperating) owner of the Oakland Athletics. For days Finley had been trying to trade or sell seven premier players of the A's who had refused to sign contracts; now he hoped to arrange a package deal that O'Connell could not decline. The spring trading deadline of midnight Tuesday, June 15, was only hours away and properties worth millions of dollars would soon be worth -to Finley -exactly zero, since at season's end his recalcitrant seven could sign, at no profit to Finley, with any team they chose.

Two Was Enough. Finley's proposal was a shocker, but no bigger one than O'Connell's acceptance of it: Boston would pay Finley $1 million for Outfielder Joe Rudi, 29, and $1 million for Relief Pitcher Rollie Fingers, 29. O'Connell was not, however, willing to spend a third million on the flashy lefthander, Vida Blue, 26.

It was a blatant effort to buy the Red Sox a World Championship, and one not without pathos. For 43 years the team's benevolent millionaire owner, Thomas Yawkey, 73, had spent lavishly -and unsuccessfully -to bring Boston a World Series winner. The closest he came was last year when his underdog Red Sox lost to Cincinnati in the ninth inning of a seven-game Series. Now Yawkey is seriously ill.

O'Connell decided, without even informing Yawkey of the details, that considering the circumstances Fingers and Rudi were worth $2 million. The pair would seem to ensure that the Red Sox at least would win the American League's East Division, where a slow start had them six games behind the team that has tormented them for decades, the New York Yankees. When the sale was announced early Tuesday evening, Boston Manager Darrell Johnson said: "We'll show them something in Yankee Stadium." He spoke too soon.

The Red Sox assumed that a deal was set to sell Blue to the weak Detroit Tigers or, that failing, perhaps to the Minnesota Twins. When word leaked of Boston's purchase, in stepped an even higher roller than Yawkey, Yankee Owner George Steinbrenner. Finley jacked Blue's price to $1.5 million, which did not faze the Yankees. At 8 p.m. they bought Blue, and then in the waning minutes before midnight made a nine-player trade with the dispirited Baltimore Orioles to get yet another unsigned ex-Oakland pitching star, troublesome Ken Holtzman, 30.

It was a dealing day unmatched in baseball history. The implications were enormous and the reaction violent. Successful legal attacks on baseball's reserve clause, which binds players to teams, were now proved to have precisely the most feared consequences: rich teams would buy the stars and ruin competition in the sport.

Finley said he had been forced to sell because of "astronomical and unjustified" player salary demands. Angry fellow owners called it "a terrible thing," "a dark day." White Sox Owner Bill Veeck's telling summary: "It destroys the illusion ... that this is a game for the fans." The fans knew it, too, even in Boston and New York. Of the first 20 calls to a Boston sports talk show, not one defended the Sox deal. New York Times Columnist Dave Anderson wrote: "A sense of embarrassment dominates what the Yankees did."

As the protest rose, baseball suddenly got support from an unanticipated source, the game's own commissioner. Heretofore known primarily for his timidity, Bowie Kuhn ordered the principals in the sales to New York for a meeting and listened to their explanations. Finley, decked out in gala canary yellow, left laughing, and Steinbrenner gave a thumbs-up sign.

A Test of Power. For 24 hours Kuhn brooded. Then came his answer, one of the strongest actions taken since the founding of the commissioner's office 55 years ago. Saying the sales "gravely undermined" public confidence in the integrity of the game, Kuhn ordered that Finley's three players remain with Oakland. He said he could not view the "spectacle" of the sales as "anything but devastating to baseball's reputation," and that if he did not have the power to prevent "a development so harmful to baseball as this," then the game's system of self-regulation was a "virtual mirage."

Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, baseball's first iron-fisted commissioner, could hardly have put the case more toughly. Left unmentioned in Kuhn's decision was a major worry. Some 55 players, many of them the game's most valuable, will be free agents once the season is over. The wheeling and dealing then could make the Tuesday Night Massacre look like a taffy pull.

At week's end Blue, Fingers and Rudi belonged back in Oakland's green and Finley was out $3.5 million of the long green. He also was heading straight for court as were the Yankees. Finley's characterization of Kuhn: "He sounds like the village idiot."

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