Finley Ball Page 10

  In mid-September, the A’s were one win away from earning the franchise’s first postseason appearance since Connie Mack led the Philadelphia Athletics to the 1931 American League pennant. They closed the deal, finishing with a 101–60 record—the second-best in all of baseball.

  THE FIRST CHAMPAGNE

  Charlie and Dad were thrilled when the A’s division championship finally gave them the opportunity to pop celebratory champagne in the clubhouse for the first time in Charlie’s eleven years as owner. Charlie set up American League playoff headquarters at the Edgewater Hyatt hotel on Hegenberger Road, a short distance from the Oakland Coliseum, on the other side of Interstate 880. Charlie O grazed outside the hotel in a specially built pen. Inside, the visiting national sports press ate from a bottomless buffet table of food and guzzled as much free alcohol as they could. There was lobster, ribs, steak, chicken, cookies, salads, beer, and champagne—only the best. Charlie Finley a cheapskate? Not that night.

  DISAPPOINTMENT AND PROMISE

  Nobody’s enthusiasm—not the fans’, not the players, not Dad’s, not Charlie’s—would be enough to topple the Baltimore Orioles in the American League Championship Series. Led by their fiery manager, Earl Weaver, and by twenty-game winner Jim Palmer and several others, the Orioles had too much experience and too much pitching. Baltimore swept the A’s in three games.

  Despite the disappointment of the early exit from the playoffs, Charlie’s brilliant young players were coming into their own. The 1971 season had yielded the success that the team’s talent had been promising, tantalizingly, for years. And the man voted MLB’s Executive of the Year—Charles O. Finley—had already locked up Dick Williams in a two-year extension a few months before the season ended. Williams would be back for the ’72 season. Dad was full of energy, and wore his gentle smile all the time. “Can you believe it?” he asked me. After everything, we were going to be contenders!

  The optimism in the air affected Charlie too. If he could run a baseball team that brilliantly, why not something else? So he decided to expand his realm, acquiring a hockey team—the Oakland Seals—as well as a basketball team. I remember attending A’s games during the day and Seals games at night. Dad told me to offer complimentary Seals tickets to my classmates and teachers, but the only one who was interested was my algebra teacher. I ran into him several times at games, smoking a pipe and looking content.

  CHAPTER 18

  THE SUSPENSE BUILDS

  1971

  In the 1960s and early 1970s, there was much hand-wringing about baseball’s declining popularity. And as usual, the game’s leaders were afraid to do much about it.

  Charlie was constantly calling for rule changes that would produce more offense and speed up the game. He called for a designated hitter long before the American League added it. Today the All-Star game is played at night, as are most of the World Series games. Charlie was the first to call for that. “The kids can’t see the games in the afternoon,” he said. “Neither can the working man in the steel mills or coal mines.”

  Some of his other ideas went nowhere. For example, he talked about having a designated runner, and he wanted a clock to force quicker pitching, and he wanted baseballs to be a more visible orange. But many of Charlie’s ideas were vindicated, despite the initial ridicule by other owners. The first World Series night games were played in 1971. The American League adopted the designated hitter in 1973.

  But in the early ’60s, Charlie chafed at the torpor of baseball’s conservative old guard. “The pathetic, frustrating thing is that all the owners know baseball has slipped, but they don’t do anything,” he complained. “Baseball faces more competition than the owners realize. Times have changed.” A decade later he was still unhappy. Time magazine quoted him in 1975 as saying, “I’ve never seen so many damn idiots as the owners in sport.”

  Charlie lobbied his fellow owners and the American League’s president, Joe Cronin, to try out a new wrinkle in spring practice: the three-ball walk. Employing all the salesmanship for which he was known, Charlie insisted that the innovation would speed up the game and deliver more excitement and higher scores—just the kind of thing needed to capture the attention of younger fans, who were turning to football and rock concerts for entertainment instead of baseball. Just three years earlier, after all, the owners had approved lowering the pitcher’s mound with the same goal in mind.

  Cronin finally agreed to Charlie’s experiment in a spring training exhibition game on March 6, 1971, between the A’s and the Milwaukee Brewers. The final score was A’s 13, Brewers 9. There were nineteen walks and six home runs—perhaps not surprising, since hitters knew that pitchers had to throw strikes lest they walk yet another batter. There was indeed more offense, as Charlie predicted, but the extra scoring made for a longer game. Within that extended game, however, there was more action on the base paths, and there was a better chance for a team to come back from a big deficit. In other words, there was some merit to Charlie’s three-ball-walk idea. But pitchers and traditionalists hated the experiment. It was never tried again, and Charlie was roundly criticized.

  READY TO TRY AGAIN IN ’72

  Charlie had stockpiled four pitchers in his stable who were potential all-stars: Catfish Hunter, Vida Blue, Ken Holtzman, and John “Blue Moon” Odom. Relying on the time-honored principle that you can never have too much pitching, Charlie had ensured that strong starting pitching would return to Oakland even if Chuck Dobson could not come back the following season (he couldn’t).

  Realizing that his team was on the cusp of greatness, Charlie wanted a new design for their uniforms, one that befitted his future champions. Not surprisingly, he was heedless of tradition. The jersey would be kelly green or “Fort Knox” gold with white numbers, “A’s” on the front, and green and gold stripes around the hem of the sleeves. The caps would be kelly green with a gold bill and a white “A’s” on the front. The beltless pants would have a green and gold stripe down the side and be worn with white shoes.

  Charlie knew he would be criticized for the look, as he had been every year since he first introduced gold-colored uniforms in 1963. He didn’t care. “I’m giving them more to snicker over,” he said when he unveiled the ’72 uniforms.

  Marvin Miller, the head of the Players’ Association—the fairly new but unified labor union representing Major League Baseball players—wanted new terms in the collective bargaining agreement between players and owners. Miller had the full backing of his membership, and they were threatening to strike at the beginning of the ’72 season if they didn’t get what they wanted. If they went on strike and the season was delayed or (gulp) canceled, it would be a first in MLB history. The players said they were serious. Some of the hard-line owners wanted to call their bluff.

  Charlie had finally assembled a team that, despite its stumble in the previous postseason, looked to be a sure-fire winner in 1972. The last thing he wanted was a season shortened or tainted by a needless conflict between the two groups. After a decade of mocking Charlie for doing things his own way, the owners now ignored the insurance expert in their midst as they negotiated with the players over insurance and pensions.

  The season was set to start in the first week of April. Would the owners swallow their pride and ask Charlie for the help they so badly needed to save the season from going up in smoke? That would be the intelligent move. But Charlie’s experience with his fellow owners had taught him that that crowd could not be counted on to make the smart play.

  CHAPTER 19

  ANOTHER DIVORCE

  1972

  The tension between Charlie and Carl Finley started back in Kansas City, maybe as far back as 1963, when Charlie had to be reminded of his promise to provide our family with a home. The strain increased in 1967, when Charlie was getting ready to move the A’s to Oakland and most front-office employees did not want to move with the franchise to the West Coast. Dad didn’t want to move that far away either. Dallas would have been convenient for all of us.
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  Dad had known, of course, that Charlie was in regular communication with Oakland city officials since the early 1960s, but he never thought the move would actually happen. He told Charlie it would “have to be worth my time” to move. Dad had already moved once for the A’s, and he had good friends in Kansas City, such as Howard Benjamin.

  Once in Oakland, Dad obtained community college teaching credentials in business and industrial management. He eventually got a real estate broker’s license and became certified to represent taxpayers before the IRS. Part of the reason he acquired all these credentials was that he liked taking tests, but they also made him less reliant on staying in Charlie’s good graces.

  Charlie continued to call Dad very early every morning in Oakland as he had done in Kansas City. It was usually about four o’clock when the phone rang. They talked several times per day but Dad’s mornings always started with this call. They would discuss just about anything—politics, women, movies, the stock market—but eventually, of course, they got around to talking about baseball and the inner workings of the Oakland A’s. Talking to Dad was how Charlie got the inside dope on his team. If there was a labor war brewing in baseball (frequent in those days) or the commissioner was being a pain in the neck (even more frequent) or an important business decision about the ball club had to be made, Charlie knew whom to call. Dad knew it was part of being an A’s executive, and over time the calls made him and Charlie closer, despite Charlie’s near-constant need to be controlling.

  Their work relationship had never been perfect, but Dad was the only man Charlie truly trusted and the only A’s employee who had managed to survive the torrent of change in the front office. (Some also said Dad was the only one with enough patience to absorb Charlie’s temper.) But Dad thought that Charlie was expecting him to manage the hockey and basketball organizations as well as the baseball team, while he was already over-worked with just the A’s. Dad’s frustration came to a head during their regular pre-dawn telephone call one day shortly before the start of the 1972 season.

  I was doing my homework while Dad talked to Charlie, and I noticed an edge in his voice. The conversation escalated quickly, and Dad did something he almost never did—he screamed. I looked up and saw Dad’s face turning red with anger.

  “You can’t fire me because I quit!” he yelled into the phone.

  Dad without the A’s? And just four years after he uprooted his life to move with the franchise to Northern California? Charlie’s owning the A’s without leaning on Dad to run the show? It was hard to say who was taking the bigger risk.

  Just a decade earlier, Dad had left his promising career in education to join Charlie and the A’s in Kansas City, and the change had proved financially detrimental. After he quit the A’s, Dad wrote to a banker friend back in Kansas City about a loan he was having trouble repaying: “I never had problems like this before I entered baseball. In fact, I always paid cash and owed nothing. You can imagine that I would have never left what I had unless I received assurances that my fortune would be much improved. My fortune has been in one steady state of decline.” Without his baseball job and facing mounting debts, Dad went back to education, teaching at a community college near downtown Oakland. He also agreed to a book deal, signing a contract with William Bruns, then an associate editor with Life magazine, to write about his life as a baseball man with the Athletics, ending with the move to Oakland. Jim Bouton, an outspoken former Yankees pitcher, had invented the genre of the sports tell-all with his 1970 bestseller Ball Four. Until Bouton’s book, the press and the players had been discreet about what went on behind MLB clubhouse doors, but Bouton revealed the behind-the-scenes boozing, womanizing, pill-taking, and off-color language indulged in by the titans of America’s pastime. He became, in the words of one sportswriter, a social leper in the baseball world.

  Would Dad dish the dirt on Charlie and the sometimes-ugly inner workings of Major League Baseball? It sure looked that way as the constant tap-tap-tap of Dad’s Smith Corona typewriter sounded through our apartment. Working quietly but persistently on the manuscript throughout that summer of ’72, he must have wondered if his “divorce” from Charlie would be as messy as the one from Mom.

  For the first time in almost a decade Charlie did not have Dad in the front office taking care of everything. That would take some getting used to. Charlie hired Jimmy Piersall, a former Boston Red Sox outfielder, partly to take Dad’s place in the front office. Piersall was as famous for his mental instability as he was for being a two-time All-Star in the mid-1950s. Charlie hired a lot of outcasts over the years, misfits whom the old boys club of baseball owners long had deemed unworthy. The Piersall hire fit that pattern.

  Dad was pestered with phone calls from the A’s front office and clubhouse, because without him everything was in chaos. It was “Do you know what so-and-so said today?” or, “You won’t believe what I have to put up with! Please, please come back!”

  But Charlie Finley and the Oakland A’s would have to get along without him in 1972.

  CHAPTER 20

  REDEMPTION

  1972

  The 1972 A’s season was the kind that baseball fans dream of. They won on Opening Day—a 1–0 nail-biter in eleven innings—lost the next game, and then won eleven of their next fourteen. On May 27, they took first place with a 21–11 record, and two weeks later they had a sparkling 33–13 record. Except for five days in late August, they would not relinquish the AL West division lead. They recaptured first place on August 29 and clinched the division a month later at the Coliseum, defeating the Twins 8–7. A few days later, Ken Holtzman won his nineteenth game, ending the season with a 19–11 record and a sterling 2.53 ERA. Charlie had traded for Holtzman in the winter before the ’72 season, and it turned out to be one of his best moves. The trust forged a year earlier by A’s manager Dick Williams and his hard-edged players paid dividends. The team stayed focused.

  The ball players, of course, continued to fight with each other, recalls the Oakland Tribune’s Ron Bergman. “If I wrote a story about clubhouse fights I saw, they’d have to change my beat to boxing.” It’s hard to imagine a team playing together as a unit, as the A’s did, while frequently breaking out in fist fights in the locker room. Dad worried about players injuring each other, but he rarely intervened. “They just need to let off steam,” he told me.

  The A’s also weren’t afraid to brawl with the competition. One ugly moment during the summer foreshadowed just how tough the journey to the World Series was to be for the A’s. The Green and Gold were playing Detroit at Tiger Stadium on August 21, the first of a three-game series against Billy Martin’s Tigers. Detroit pitcher Woodie Fryman beaned Sal Bando, who charged the mound, sparking a particularly nasty brawl between the clubs. There were no serious injuries, but it guaranteed a bitter October showdown between the American League’s two best teams.

  The A’s ’72 season is remembered for something in addition to great baseball—the players’ facial hair. There are lots of stories in circulation about the origins of the mustaches that became a symbol of the franchise’s ’70s dynasty, many of them centered on a supposed pre-season faceoff with a newly bearded Reggie Jackson. But the facts are less dramatic. Charlie and Dad had seen an old-fashioned barbershop quartet, complete with handlebar mustaches, singing in a restaurant, and Charlie liked the look. Although Major League Baseball had been completely clean-shaven for sixty years, Charlie offered a three-hundred-dollar bonus to players who grew a mustache. Catfish Hunter and Rollie Fingers accepted the offer enthusiastically, and Fingers’s fastidiously curled and waxed whiskers became his lifelong trademark. Other players were more reluctant, but by Fathers’ Day—when the A’s offered free admission to all mustachioed fans—the entire squad (including Dick Williams) had taken Charlie up on his offer.

  THE AMERICAN LEAGUE CHAMPIONSHIP SERIES

  The first game of the 1972 AL Championship Series was played in Oakland on October 7. The A’s drew first blood, beating Detroit 3�
�1. Charlie—and everyone else connected to the A’s—was jubilant. Billy Martin was seething. Back at the bar in the Edgewater Hyatt, the hotel near the Coliseum where visiting teams stayed, he grew more incensed with each highball, replaying in his mind key plays from a game he knew the Tigers should have won. Billy didn’t just want to win Game Two, he wanted revenge.

  By the bottom of the seventh inning, however, Game Two wasn’t going Martin’s way. The A’s were leading by five runs when Bert Campaneris came to bat. He had quickly become a nightmare for Detroit, getting on base four times in eight appearances so far in the series and scoring three of the A’s eight runs. The Tigers tried a new way to stop him. The first pitch from the reliever Lerrin LaGrow was a fastball right into Campaneris’s ankle, knocking him to the ground. The batter got up, incensed, and hurled his bat at the pitcher’s mound, missing LaGrow’s head by inches. It took three umpires to restrain an enraged Martin, who charged out of the dugout after Campaneris.

  When order was restored, LaGrow and Campaneris had been ejected. Campy’s ejection was a formality, as his ankle was too sore to play on for a few days. Though the A’s won the game 5–0, they were furious, accusing Martin of ordering LaGrow to hit Campaneris. He angrily denied the charge, but he had once again shown that he was a master at getting inside his opponents’ heads. Beaning Campaneris not only removed the slugger from the game—it got the MLB hierarchy involved. The American League president, Joe Cronin, suspended the normally sweet-tempered Campaneris for the rest of the ALCS, and it looked like he might be excluded from World Series as well. In the end, Commissioner Bowie Kuhn suspended him from the first seven games of the 1973 season but not from the World Series. As the teams headed for Detroit, the Tigers were down two games to none and on the brink of elimination. I hoped we could end this ugly series with Game Three.