They tried to do this again in the 1970s but Bowie Kuhn would not allow them to do it, and the team just died.
Charlie Finley tried to sell off Joe Rudi and Rollie Fingers to the Red Sox and Vida Blue to the Yankees at the start of free agency. He was shopping Sal Bando and Don Baylor, too, but commissioner Bowie Kuhn killed the deals. Didn’t much matter–the players all left in the next few years and the A’s collapsed.
I wonder how the Yankees-Red Sox rivalry of the '70s would have played out if the trades had gone through.
From the same cause, but more gradually, the Minnesota Twins unraveled throughout the late '70s.
Well, we’ve drifted from the topic (sorry OP).
Had Finley been allowed to sell a couple of players, he might have been able to keep the others. Kuhn’s stupidity had the precise opposite effect of what he was presumably going for.
Did he want to keep the others? I think he was hellbent on selling all his expensive soon-to-be -Free-Agent vets, and replacing them with (excellent, he hoped) inexpensive rookies. Kuhn was a pompous tool, but I think he sought to nip Finley’s master plan in the bud.
But how did that help Oakland? Finley would at least have been given a chance to retain a few players. Instead, he retained nothing and the team sucked for a few years.
The same thing happens to small market teams now; they still cannot sell players for any substantial amount of money, so they perpetually lose them. Unseemly though it might be for the Rays to cash out a guy like Wander Franco in 2027 for a zillion dollars, that’s clearly better for them than losing Franco to free agency in 2028.
Oh, I don’t think it would have helped the A’s at all. But I think Finley thought very highly of his own judgment in finding younger, cheaper players to replace his stars. After all, he had built a team that was a perpetual doormat into a World’s Champion, and he had underpaid his players for over a decade. He thought he could do it again.
Fun fact; the A’s in the Charlie Finley era were truly the A’s. That was their entire nickname; Charlie Finley hated the name “Athletics.” When Finley sold the team in 1981, the new owner immediately change the team’s official nickname back to Athletics.
1981 also saw the return of the white elephant as the team’s mascot.
They missed out on a really good mascot opportunity.
More recently, the 2021 Atlanta Braves won the NL East and the World Series even though they lost Ronald Acuna to an ACL tear in July. At the time he was batting .283/.394/.596 with 24 HRs and 17 SBs. The Braves made a bunch of real good deals to try to fill Acuna’s spot in the lineup, include getting Jorge Soler, who would be the WS MVP that year.
The Red Sox traded away the “face of the team”, Nomar Garciaparra during the 2004 season, leading to fears the team was giving up on a disappointing season to that point.
Instead, they went on a late tear, dumped the Yankees after falling behind 3-0 in the ALCS and broke their long World Series drought with a championship.
The often-injured Garciaparra ended up having just one more excellent season before retiring.
My favorite Nomar fact is that in his first playoff series, the 1998 division series, he drove in ELEVEN RUNS in four games, and the Red Sox still lost the series 3-1.
The guy was super great and crazy unlucky.