Page 253 - 1975 BoSox

246 ’75—THE RED SOX TEAM THAT SAVED BASEBALL
emergence of the outspoken Hawk persona from the small-town Ken Harrelson, who took care of his mama and spoke with a Southern accent.
However, not everyone was a fan of the ashy façade, and e Hawk ru ed a few people’s feathers and rubbed some the wrong way. Unfortunately, one such person bothered by the out elder’s amboyance was Charles O. Finley, who owned the A’s. Finley tried over and over again to irk e Hawk, and refused him a raise; Harrelson had to call his mother for nancial support.11 In 1966, after 63 games, a series of heated public arguments and angry private exchanges, Harrelson was traded to the Washington Senators, where he played for the remainder of the season and some of the next before he was reluctantly reunited with Finley, who bought him back in the early months of 1967. Harrelson had never seen eye to eye with the eccentric owner, but he liked Kansas City, and thus patiently put up with Finley’s shenanigans. Harrelson had always been co-operative with Finley, even when he was asked to take part in one of the baseball mogul’s more infamous pranks—a donkey named Charlie O. that Finley repeatedly forced Harrelson to ride.12 Finley’s antics were usually rash and impulsive, often causing more harm than good, and Harrelson bore them with tolerance. “Charlie had some good ideas and some bad ideas,” Harrelson says, “but overall he was not a nice man.”
After Finley suspended pitcher Lew Krausse on August 18, 1967, for what many viewed as a trumped-up o ense, Krausse’s teammates, led by Jack Aker, Harrelson and a half dozen other players, read a state- ment criticizing Finley. Manager Alvin Dark revolted, refusing to bench Krausse, instead choosing to voice his support for the pitcher.13 Finley, not known for level-headed decisions, fired Dark, prompting Harrelson to publicly denounce the owner. On the morning of August 24, the Kansas City papers wrote that Harrelson had called Finley a “menace to baseball.” Finley seethed, and all the extra e ort e Hawk had employed to try to appease his boss was wasted when he was put on irrevocable waivers on August 25—
because of his refusal to attend a press conference to apologize for a statement he says he never made.
Because Harrelson was having an excellent year (he had been hitting .273 at the time of his release), he found himself the subject of one of the rst free agent bidding wars in modern baseball history. Among the bidders in the battle for Harrelson were the Boston Red Sox. e Red Sox were in the middle of a pennant race and had started the season with Tony Conigliaro as their right elder. When Conigliaro, a popular and talented local sports hero, was tragically felled by a fastball on August 18, ending his season and curtailing a very promising career, the Sox began searching for a replacement. General Manager Dick O’Connell saw the release of Harrelson as an opportunity to ll the gap left by the injury to Conigliaro. After an intense struggle with several major league teams (and even the Tokyo Giants), O’Connell and the Red Sox nally signed “ e Hawk” for $150,000 on August 28—ap- proximately a $138,000 increase in salary.
In many ways, the signing of Hawk Harrelson marked the end of the age where the owner was boss, and the beginning of the era in which players controlled their own destinies. Harrelson was someone the Red Sox desperately needed, and while O’Connell knew it, so did e Hawk. e end result, an incredibly lucrative contract by the standards of the time period, was what Bill Reynolds called “a sneak preview of free agency” in his book Lost Summer.
e Red Sox and Hawk Harrelson were a perfect t, and it was really in Boston that e Hawk took wing: the Red Sox needed a power-hitting right elder, and Harrelson, who was having a great season, lled the bill perfectly. And not only did Boston love e Hawk, but e Hawk reciprocated that love.
“ e Hawk was really a product of the fans of Boston,” Harrelson says, “ e Red Sox were a great team, but they didn’t have any real personalities up there... after some success, e Hawk evolved, and that is really how it happened. For many reasons, one of them being that, Boston will always have a special place in my heart.”To Harrelson, e Hawk wasn’t just some false