Signing Lifts a Weight Off Bavasi’s Shoulders

Bill Bavasi had two words for Chuck Finley Thursday afternoon after the day had been saved, and quite possibly, the Angels’ baseball seasons of 1996, 1997, 1998 and 1999, too:

“Mr. Angel.”

In a different time, those would have been fighting words. “ ‘Mr. Angel?’ You better smile when you call me that, Pardner.” But Bavasi, having run out of nice things to say about his most valuable starting pitcher on the best day Bavasi has had since early August, intended these as a sincere form of praise.

“If there’s anybody we’ve had who is ‘Mr. Angel,’ it’s him,” Bavasi said. “When you think of players who have been with this team a long time and have really performed, there are two guys you think about. Dean Chance and this guy . . .

“For me, he’s a great representative for our ballclub. He seems to be a throwback. He reminds me of Drysdale and Koufax--they knew how to get the job done. They were tough about it. And they were quiet about it.”

Koufax?

Drysdale?

If Bavasi was beginning to sound a bit overheated, think back to where the Angels’ general manager was this time a week ago.

Near suicidal was Bavasi’s own description, because this time a week ago, Finley was looking less and less like Mr. Angel and more and more like Mr. Yankee or Mr. Blue Jay.

“I was worried,” Bavasi said. “For a couple days, probably around the 29th and the 30th, we really thought we had a good shot at losing him. Chuck’s agents [Alan and Randy Hendricks] are real upfront and honest--if they tell you something’s about to happen, it’s probably going to happen. And from what they were telling us, it looked like we were going to come up a little short.”

The Yankees were offering $5 million a year for the first free-agent left-handed starter to jump aboard--Finley or Kenny Rogers. Toronto and Texas each had $4 million to burn on a starting pitcher for 1996. Bavasi couldn’t compete with those numbers, not if he wanted to re-sign Jim Abbott, which he does, and buy a catcher, which he needs, without imploding the still-tabled sale of the franchise to Disney.

So Bavasi asked Finley to settle for less today with a promise of more tomorrow, tacked on an option year, shut his eyes, plugged his ears and braced for the mushroom cloud.

Finley looked the papers over and, remarkably, agreed to sign them.

If he hadn’t?

“For me,” Bavasi said, “it would’ve been just short of suicide. Probably worse.”

Instead, Finley made baseball history by:

a) Accepting less money.

So that he could:

b) Stay with the Angels.

And for his next act, Finley will pitch back-to-back perfect games and strike out 400 batters en route to a 33-win season.

Finley has been with the Angels for 10 years, so naivete is not an excuse. He watched his old catcher, Bob Boone, gleefully bolt Anaheim for Kansas City when the Royals offered him a $1 raise. He saw his old first baseman, Wally Joyner, hit the free-agent market running and never stopping for breath until he reached Missouri. He knows what happens to ex-Angels once they engineer the prison break--either they win the World Series (Devon White, Dave Winfield, Luis Polonia) or nearly win a league MVP award (Dante Bichette).

Finley knows all this and yet he elected to re-enlist, a 10-year Angel set on becoming a 14-year Angel.

The first 14-year Angel.

Before Finley, only three players in the club’s 35-year history have lasted a full decade, uninterrupted, with the Angels--Brian Downing (13 seasons), Jim Fregosi (11) and Bobby Grich (10).

Finley stayed even though, as he said, “you can look at the market and see a lot of pitchers of my caliber getting $5 million [a year] . . . If it had come a point where Mr. and Mrs. Autry said, ‘Sorry, Chuck, we were misled, the Disney deal’s not going to happen like we thought,’ I’m sure I would have been up around the $5-million market.”

Finley signed for $3 million in ‘96, to be followed by $4 million in ‘97, $5 million in ’98 and a club option that could pay him between $5 and $6 million in ‘99, so he isn’t St. Chuck, accepting a four-year vow of poverty. “He’s getting a lot of money, no question,” Bavasi noted. “To you and me, that’s a ton of money. But it’s all relative to the market. He could’ve got more money elsewhere. But, he wanted to stay here. He made that clear from the start.”

Why?

Finley said he was comfortable with the Angels. “I had been here so long, it would’ve been hard to leave,” he said. “Some guys stay two, three years and leave and it’s no problem. But I was comfortable here. This team is like family. I want to stay here and finish my career here, be one of the few guys in the league who do that.”

Cal Ripken and Kirby Puckett are two others on that same career track, and it’s not a sacrilege to mention Finley’s name in the same breath. Finley is as important to his franchise as Ripken and Puckett are to theirs, representing the supposedly lost-lost values of the game--tradition, continuity, dedication, loyalty.

“It helps all of baseball to see guys like this,” Bavasi said. “He is not a greedy mercenary . . . The fact is, a lot of people, especially early on, wanted him badly. He turned that down, for a long time.”

Finley handled these negotiations the way he handles most of his starts: Don’t flinch, hang in there, grind it out. For years, he has been the Angels’ answer to the question, “If you had one ballgame you absolutely had to win, to whom would you hand the ball?”

Now, body willing, Finley will be getting the ball for the Angels from here to the end of the century. Finley likes the sound of that. Gives him peace of mind.

Bavasi, too.