Kuhn's move seems disastrous for the A's in retrospect, but free agency was new at the time and I don't think anyone other than Marvin Miller had any idea what was going to happen at year's end. It appeared at the time as an attempt to save A's fans from a greedy owner and a miserable rest of the season.

It was no secret that Kuhn hated Charlie Finley. I believe it was his intent to, with his ruling, make sure Finley could not keep a winning team together. Kuhn had often mentioned that he wanted to have baseball return to his native Washington D.C. after the Senators left in 1971. He wanted to move the A's. I can remember the Oakland Trib writing stories about the "impending " move.
Finley stuck with it, but the team was not very good. Somehow he still posted a profit, except for 1979, he lost about $50,000.
Baseball continued to implode with the strike of 1981, loosing almost half a season. I think Finley was right, he was the village idiot.

The man was many things, a lot of them bad, but he built a winner. 15 of the 23 A's to see action in the '72 World Series, were drafted by the team. That seems pretty impressive to me. And that doesn't include Reggie, who was out with an injury that year. So really it's 16 players, three of whom are in Cooperstown.

Time that Finley joins them.

that Kuhn deserves quite as much blame as I'm seeing above for the breakup of the 1970's A's.  Finley was really only able to succeed during the brief era when the amateur draft existed but free agency did not.  Would Bando, Campaneris, Tenace et al have stuck around if Finley had the $3.5M to spend?  I think they were all sick to death of working on the Finley plantation and were ready to move on.  The A's probably would not have become the "Triple-A's" of 1977-1979 but the glory days were clearly over.

The legacy of Kuhn is that he presided over a period when the NFL blew past major league baseball as the most popular sport in the country.  Pete Rozelle was brilliant at marketing the NFL, getting every game on network television.  Meanwhile baseball continued to live in the past.  Most teams had about 25-30 games per year on local television.  Home games were virtually never televised...good grief, that was giving the product away for free.  Baseball made much more progress in marketing itself during Peter Ueberroth's relatively brief reign as commissioner than it did during the entirety of Kuhn's lengthy tenure...but by that time the NFL had clearly established preeminence as the country's top spectator sports franchise, and it has continued to pull away over the subsequent two decades.

And whatever his other failings (and they were many), we should all wish to again have an independent Commissioner.  Kuhn voided the sales for cash (not trades) of Rudi, Blue and Fingers "in the best interests of baseball."  He was right--allowing wholesale cashing out by owners would have been horrifying.  Remember, owners then were even more likely than now to take profits out of a team than to re-invest them into talent.  Can you imagine for one moment any Commissioner since Kuhn making a unilateral decision against ownership for the better interests of the game?  Would that it were so.

Finley was trying to actually sell his players, not to use the money to improve the roster, but as part of a plan to strip mine the franchise of assets in advance of a free agency era he saw coming and knew he couldn't (or wouldn't) afford to operate under the new paradigm.   He was prescient, in fact, when he suggested to MLB that what they really ought to do was make players free agents every year, thus bringing in a pay-for-current-performance ethic in which a sharper owner could compete with fewer resources.  MLB ignored him, fighting their rearguard losing battle against Miller and the MLBPA for a few more years before losing all leverage over the new system to come.

Kuhn was mostly a lousy Commish, and Finley an underappreciated foresighted owner in many respects, but the fire sale you cite was one of Kuhn's greatest moments, and one of Charlie's weakest.

Man, what I didn't realize was that Joe Rudi missed twelve games (I believe Finley purposely held him out of games once the sales were nixed). Don Baylor played left in his place and went something like 6-for-36. For a team that finished two games out, who knows what having Joe in there would have done. As it was the A's were 7-5 w/o him.

I still have the newspaper clippings from that night. The Trib had two pics: one with the caption "Goodbye Joe and Vida" with the two of them shaking hands. And the other one said "Goodbye Rollie" with Fingers suiting up for Boston, who just happened to be in town that night! Neither Fingers nor Rudi actually played for the Sox that series before being returned to the A's.

That and the Mike Andrews fiasco were probably two of Finley's worst moments.

and the "pinch hit for all second basemen" order to Dick Williams is probably the worst example of meddling ever by an owner. When Mark Ellis broke his finger in the playoffs, I figured it was Mike Andrews putting a curse on the A's.

...that Finley actually intended to use the money to keep/rebuild the team.  I've always suspected that he was already getting tired, saw the writing on the wall, and was looking to cash out.