Three weeks ago we looked at Curt Flood’s fight for free-agency that culminated in the Peter Seitz’ 1975 ruling ending the reserve clause and bringing about free agency. Now we’ll examine the case of Hall of Famer Jim “ Catfish” Hunter and his battle with Oakland A’s owner Charley Finley over the terms of Hunter’s player contract. This fight occurred in 1974, a year before the landmark Seitz arbitration.

    
   "Catfish" Hunter at Yankee Stadium      

Catfish Hunter had been a dominant pitcher for the Oakland A’s dating back to a perfect game he pitched in 1968. Hunter won twenty or more games five times between 1971 and 1975, but he saved his career year for 1974 when he won 25 games, led the American League in ERA (2.49), pitched over 300 innings, had 23 complete games , won the Cy Young award, and helped lead the A’s to their third straight world championship.

If you owned a baseball team like the A’s the last thing you would want to do would be to be breach a players contract, particularly if it was 1974 and the player was Catfish Hunter. But what did Charley Finley do?

In 1974, Hunter’s contract called for him to make $100,000.00. $50,000.00 was to be paid to Hunter during the course of the 1974 season, the other half was to go to an investment company to finance an annuity for Hunter for his life after baseball. Of course, this arrangement had tax advantages for Hunter.  As the story goes, Finley found out that, because of Hunter’s compensation package, the A’s couldn’t deduct the $50,000 to be invested as a business expense for the current year. So Finley refused to make the payments as directed by the contract.

Hunter and the Players Association were ready to fight it out with Charley Finley over the interpretation of the player contract. With help from Marvin Miller, the argument would be that Finley had materially breached the contract.

Tomorrow:  the decision and the repercussions