Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 11, 1993 TAG: 9307120222
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: E1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Jack Bogaczyk
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
"A lot of people come up and tell me that I should be getting a percentage of everyone's contract," Jim "Catfish" Hunter said. "That's OK. I'm doing all right."
Curt Flood may have been the first to successfully challenge baseball's reserve clause, but Catfish Hunter was the game's first bona fide free agent. The former pitcher is more than a Hall of Famer. He was the game's great emancipator.
When an arbitrator ruled that then-Oakland Athletics owner Charles O. Finley had breached Hunter's 1974 contract for $100,000 by failing to make $50,000 in payments to an insurance annuity, the game's salary structure was altered forever.
On Dec. 31, 1974, Hunter signed a five-year, $3.75 million contract with the New York Yankees. It's been a Happy New Year ever since for the boys of summer.
Hunter, who wore Oakland's colors on the mound in the Salem Buccaneers' Old-Timers Game on Saturday, looks like he could pitch for the Yankees today. The right arm that hurled 224 victories in 15 seasons feels fine. Only the whitening hair and mustache make him look older than 47.
The Yankees still are paying him, although he retired in 1979 after five years in pinstripes. He had that deal spread over 20 years, and he'll get his last $100,000 annual payment in 1994. He'll begin collecting his baseball pension at age 50, and he's leasing his 500-acre farm of cotton, peanuts, corn and beans in Hertford, N.C.
However, Hunter was a money pitcher in a very different way. Pay stubs don't get you in the door in Cooperstown, N.Y.
Although he was only 33 when he retired from the mound, Hunter has no regrets he didn't pitch longer. When he signed with the Yankees, he told them he would be through in five years because he wanted to live on the Carolina shore with his family.
He had survived Finley, George Steinbrenner, Billy Martin, a sore arm, a correcting shoulder manipulation and a diagnosis as a diabetic. He pitched in six American League Championship Series and a half-dozen World Series. He has five world championship rings.
It was pride, toughness and smarts that took Hunter from a teen-age rookie with the Kansas City A's to stardom.
"What I'd like to be remembered for is that I wanted the ball," Hunter said. "Gimme the ball, let me throw it, and you'll never be out of the game. If I didn't have it, then I'll be out of the game.
"I think the players behind me loved it. They were on their toes. I got the ball, I threw it. Heck, I always said I was too dumb to be scared."
He wasn't afraid to make a mistake. Hunter's 374 homers allowed is the AL record. He also averaged 21 victories during a seven-year span (1970-76), had nine postseason victories and gave up only 7.7 hits per nine innings in his career.
Hunter was like the workhorses on his farm, too. In '75, his first season with the Yankees, he was 23-14 with a 2.58 earned run average and an incredible 30 complete games. He's the only pitcher to reach that route-going figure in the past two decades.
"If I had pitched every inning of every game I started that year, I still could have only pitched 18 more innings," he said.
In the Hall, to which Hunter deservedly was inducted in 1987, the cap on his bronze plaque carries no team logo. It was to have Oakland's "A's," but it became an issue with the Yankees.
To Hunter, what mattered most was the new team he was joining.
"I never even dreamed about reaching the Hall of Fame," he said. "I never even thought about it. The first year I was eligible in the voting [1984], I got a lot of votes.
"I said to myself, `It looks like a lot of people think I belong in there.' Still, when it happened, I couldn't believe it. . . . What can I say? It's the greatest honor anyone who plays the game can receive."
by CNB