Finley Ball Read online

  Overseeing the sale of the team was Judge Robert J. Dunne of the probate court, who excluded Charlie and other prospective owners and narrowed the field of competitors to two—Mehl’s Kansas City group and a St. Louis syndicate led by the investment banker Elliot Stein. On November 15, Dunne awarded the Athletics to Stein, but the deal fell through three days later, and the team went back into probate court. This time Charlie made the cut, and he began bidding against Mehl’s Kansas City group. At one point Mehl was certain he had won the auction and was said to have been celebrating with his associates, but seemingly out of nowhere Charlie appeared again and raised his bid to $1,975,000. The Kansas City investors finally bowed out on December 19. Within two months, Charlie exercised his option on the remaining interests for an additional $1.9 million. He had snatched the prize from under Mehl’s nose, and for the first time since the Athletics had come to town, the team owner would not be beholden to Ernie Mehl or the Kansas City Star. For Athletics’ fans, news of a new owner wasn’t so bad. A little change might free the team from the Yankees’ clutches and bring it out of the cellar.

  At first Mehl was in shock. Still, he knew no reason he couldn’t manipulate Charlie as he had manipulated Johnson. Surely he could handle the ingénue insurance salesman, and the party would go on.

  BANKING ON KEMPER

  UMB Financial Services, one of the biggest banks in the nation, was founded as City Center Bank in Kansas City. William T. Kemper bought the bank in 1913, and in 1919 his son Rufus Crosby Kemper became the president, a position he held until his son, R. Crosby Kemper Jr., replaced him in 1959.

  A year after taking the helm of UMB, Kemper Jr. joined other city business leaders at a Chamber of Commerce luncheon celebrating the new owner of the Kansas City Athletics, Charles Oscar Finley, whose popularity was sealed when he assured fans that he would not move the team. Kemper was seated right next to Charlie, and the two men hit it off right away, starting a lasting friendship.

  During their luncheon conversation, Kemper asked Charlie which bank had financed his purchase of the Athletics, which cost nearly four million dollars. Charlie’s answer stunned him: “Well, I actually haven’t lined up financing yet.” Trying not to look too surprised, Kemper offered to finance the deal. Charlie agreed, without hesitation. The sale of the Kansas City Athletics was thus finalized on little more than a handshake and a smile between two businessmen who had never before met.

  Being new to town, Charlie looked to Kemper for advice on how things were done in Kansas City. “Charlie never took the advice,” recalls Kemper’s son, Crosby Kemper III, with a chuckle, “but he’d ask for it.”

  Kemper learned that being Charlie Finley’s banker meant keeping unusual hours. Charlie often would call late at night, sometimes even after midnight on a weeknight, to talk business. Kemper III remembers the phone ringing in the wee hours when he was a young child. His dad would head outside in a robe and slippers and sit in the passenger seat of Charlie’s car, discussing whatever was on Charlie’s mind.

  While Charlie liked to do business on the fly, the Kempers were cautious and meticulous. The financing for Charlie’s purchase of the Athletics was the biggest loan they had ever made. Charlie’s insurance company and holding company had nearly identical names, and Kemper placed the collateral for the deal under the wrong company in the contract. So he had to drive from Kansas City to Charlie’s ranch in LaPorte, Indiana—an eleven-hundred-mile round trip—in the middle of the night to get Charlie’s signature on the amended contract.

  Now in his mid-sixties, R. Crosby Kemper III remembers Charlie as a kind and loyal friend to his father. He also recalls Charlie’s intensity, which made him occasionally “unheedful to his surroundings. When he was into something he was really into something.” Kemper’s childhood image of Charlie was that of a showman with natural charisma, white hair, and a long cherubic face.

  “There was something genie-like about him,” Kemper says. “It’s like there was a force field around him, something magical. I always felt like I was in the presence of P. T. Barnum; he was an awe-inspiring figure, like a magician or the master of ceremonies of a three-ring circus. You always expected him to produce something you’d never seen before; he wasn’t distant or cold, he existed in a kind of separate zone. I didn’t feel warmth emanating from him, but I liked being around him. He was fun to watch, always animated, you could just feel his energy.” A Life magazine article about Charlie noted his “erect and jaunty carriage, white hair, a classic profile, heavy dark brows, and burning brown eyes.”

  Charlie’s energy was on display during his honeymoon with Kansas City fans in the early months of 1961. He spoke at 125 civic and business clubs, talking up his determination to give the doormat team new life. He admired the work ethic and the witty, offbeat promotions of Bill Veeck, whose fan-friendly baseball stunts were fun and unpretentious and displayed a flair for theatrics—and the absurd. Veeck is best known for the time in 1951 he sent a midget named Eddie Gaedel up to bat. To baseball’s stodgy and conservative owners, promotional antics were affronts to the game’s dignity. The old guard of baseball disliked Veeck, and they would dislike Charlie.

  BURNING THE BUS

  It was clear from the very first game at Municipal Stadium under Charlie’s ownership that he wouldn’t be part of the old guard. Ernie Mehl, sitting in the upper stands, had no intimation of what was coming.

  The fans were chatting, sipping beer, and waiting for the game to start. Suddenly, they grew quiet. They watched as a beat-up old shuttle bus lumbered onto left field. Exchanging perplexed glances, they wondered what was going on. Then Frank Lane walked out to the bus and splashed it with gasoline. An instant later it was engulfed in black and orange flames. Then an unfamiliar voice came over the loudspeaker. It was the team’s new owner. Charlie introduced himself and explained that the burning of the bus was his way of announcing that the days of shuttling Kansas City’s best talent to the Bronx were over. The Athletics would no longer be the Yankees’ farm team. After a pause, a few fans started clapping, and soon the stadium was filled with applause and shouts of approval. Charlie grinned from ear to ear.

  Ernie Mehl, of course, didn’t miss the subtle jab at himself and Al Johnson, and like the bus, he smoldered as he watched from the stands.

  Charlie was just getting started. He installed a petting zoo behind the right field fence, where a flock of sheep now grazed. The animals were dyed different colors—green, yellow, orange, blue, purple, and pink—and were watched over by a “shepherd” who looked like something out of a Christmas pageant. They were joined by capuchin monkeys in cages, each named after one of my uncles—as in, “I’ll be a monkey’s uncle.” Another one was named after my grandfather. Peacocks roamed the grounds—Charlie loved those birds, with their brightly iridescent plumage—and pheasants and rabbits completed the menagerie.

  Charlie thought Municipal Stadium was rather drab, so as part of his four-hundred-thousand-dollar renovation, he painted the box seats “citrus yellow,” the reserved and bleacher seats “desert turquoise,” and the foul poles fluorescent pink. Then he sandblasted a wall outside the stadium and painted it yellow. He added 1,200 seats in the left-field bleachers, built a picnic area behind those seats shaded by sugar maple trees, piped radio broadcasts of games into the restrooms, installed fluorescent lights in the dugouts so fans could see the players and the manager during night games, and lit up the exterior of the ballpark.

  Municipal Stadium became even more colorful at Easter, when the Finley men, dressed up as rabbits, handed out candy to young fans. Then there was “Harvey,” the mechanical rabbit with flashing red eyes that would rise up out of the grass to the right of home plate to deliver a fresh baseball to the umpire whenever he needed it. As it rose from the ground with a loud ascending whistle, the organist played “Here Comes Peter Cottontail.” A descending whistle accompanied Harvey’s return to his subterranean home. A few opposing team batters have been startled by the Harvey’s sudden e
mergence from the ground, and one batter jumped a foot in the air the first time he experienced Harvey.

  Another innovation at home plate was “Little Blowhard,” an automated device that blew dirt off of the plate, a task otherwise performed by the umpire with a whisk broom.

  Charlie was the first to use an electric scoreboard to deliver interesting information about the game and individual players—he called them “Fan-a-Grams.” Today, it’s standard procedure for scoreboards to communicate more than the box score, but Charlie started it all fifty years ago.

  No one in baseball had ever done these things at a Major League Ballpark. They revealed the little kid in Charlie—the wide-eyed, funloving boy who got a kick out of the smallest things. Charlie saw baseball and entertainment through the eyes of a little boy. “Today’s children are tomorrow’s fans,” he explained.

  A CHICAGO SERENADE

  The night of December 19, 1960, was cold in Chicago, but the strains of Frank York’s Strolling Violins gave a warm glow to the Porterhouse Room of the Hotel Sherman in the Loop. Just as the maestro was cuing his players for their next number, in walked a group of chilled but happy men, led by Charlie Finley, the new owner of the Kansas City Athletics baseball club.

  The musicians quickly regrouped, and a few minutes later they serenaded Charlie’s party with Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Everything’s Up to Date in Kansas City.” Transforming his string ensemble into a Dixieland band, York followed up with a jazzy version of the “Missouri Waltz.”

  Charlie was so enthusiastic about York’s renditions of these songs that he asked him to record them for the baseball fans of Kansas City. Two weeks later, Charlie had his “Official Theme Song of the Kansas City Athletics.”

  ROMANCING KANSAS CITY

  Writing in Sports Illustrated in the summer of 1961, Rex Lardner described Charlie’s efforts “to charm reluctant Kansas City fans.” Those efforts seemed to be paying off in that first year. Kansas City Mayor Roe Bartle gushed that “Finley has put more spirit into the city than anyone in the past decade. He holds the heart of Kansas City in the palm of his hand.”

  Lardner reported that Charlie was paying attention to the players as well, taking them out to expensive restaurants, giving them gifts, and entertaining them and their families at his home. “He wants a happy team . . . and he has shown himself to be the kindliest owner in baseball.” Charlie seemed to be winning everyone’s heart. “It is doubtful,” Lardner wrote, “if any owner or part owner has ever been so solicitous about the comfort of the fan or the peace of mind of the players.”

  That first year, Charlie poured his heart and soul into the team. At the urging of Ernie Mehl, he hired as general manager Frank Lane at the highest salary ever paid for a G. M. But signs of trouble emerged early on. “Lane thinks Finley’s solicitude toward the team is absurd,” wrote Lardner. When Charlie announced that there would be no more trades to the Yankees (and emphasized the point with the burning bus), Lane publicly responded that, to the contrary, he would make deals with the Yankees or any ball club if he felt it would help the team. Charlie overruled some of Lane’s trades, which surely rankled.

  All honeymoons come to an end, some sooner rather than later.

  CHAPTER 4

  KANSAS CITY, HERE WE ARE

  1961

  FRIENDLY PERSUASION

  Charlie needed someone on the ground in Kansas City right away to look after his baseball interests—someone he could trust. In 1961 he brought in his brother, Fred Finley, to handle the club’s promotions, but that didn’t work out.

  In the fall of 1961, Charlie started romancing Dad. It began with that Saturday morning phone call. Soon, however, he started calling Dad every week to say that a roundtrip airline ticket on Braniff Airlines had been purchased for him to come up to Kansas City on a Friday night and return to Dallas on Sunday. To Mom’s chagrin, Dad began traveling there on weekends, the only days he had off from his responsibilities at Thomas Jefferson High School. Once he began traveling, my parents’ bridge parties stopped.

  As Dad’s travel increased, I missed him more and more. It felt to me as though we practically lived at Love Field. I kept his picture with me and cried every time after we returned home from driving him to the airport for another flight to Kansas City.

  To maintain family time, Mom and I began to visit Kansas City two weekends a month. Sometimes we traveled by train, which I enjoyed. Whenever we flew, it was always on Braniff. I liked Braniff because its planes were yellow, orange, lime green, or blue. The stewardesses wore uniforms that matched the color of the plane. If the aircraft was blue, they all wore blue. But Braniff’s use of color was fairly pale compared with what Uncle Charlie would do in Kansas City.

  When I first laid eyes on Kansas City Municipal Stadium, I was just four years old. It was the perfect age to be enthralled by the bizarre attractions behind the outfield walls. While Mom and Charlie’s wife, Aunt Shirley, visited, my cousins and I made the ballpark our playground. David, Uncle Charlie’s and Aunt Shirley’s youngest son, was my age, and we loved roaming the grounds together.

  Baseball had never been a big part of our lives—Mom was not a fan and I was more interested in my stuffed animals than in a team whose logo was an elephant. But now Dad was increasingly involved with what was going on in Kansas City, which, it turned out, involved much more than the game of baseball. In Dallas, my parents had always seemed to get along well, but Dad’s work in Kansas City created tension in their relationship.

  The first argument over the Athletics I heard between my parents took place when Dad came home from Kansas City with an eight-by-ten photograph of a blonde woman signed by “Cricket Blake.” Cricket was the role that Connie Stevens played in the television series Hawaiian Eye. When the starlet visited Kansas City, Charlie had asked Dad to show her around Municipal Stadium. Dad didn’t realize that the autographed photo would make Mom angry. It would not be the last argument that baseball sparked between my parents.

  All through 1962, Charlie pleaded with Dad to move to Kansas City, going so far as to promise he would buy our family a home there. Charlie had always heard his parents brag about Dad’s intellectual powers and his education. I believe this is why Charlie wanted Dad in Kansas City so badly—he knew Dad would understand the business and legal ends of the business. He also would watch Charlie’s back.

  At the same time, Charlie, who never went to college, was jealous of Dad’s academic success. He must have grown tired of hearing his own father hold up Dad as the ideal son. I heard that as a child Charlie had a speech impediment, which is why he spoke slowly at times. Years later, when he owned the Athletics, sports writers mistook his deliberate and careful way of talking for arrogance or condescension.

  Charlie applied his powerful salesmanship on Dad, but Dad held out, refusing to commit to the Athletics full-time. The lingering job offer divided our close-knit extended Finley family. Everyone seemed to have an opinion. Grandmother Finley begged Dad to refuse Uncle Charlie’s offer. Mom was against it, too, anticipating how uncomfortable she would feel in the world of sports and entertainment. Granddad, however, urged Dad to join his favorite nephew and accept the offer.

  Dad held out for nearly a year, but Charlie eventually wore him down. He walked away from the career he loved for an uncertain life in professional baseball. In the summer of 1963, Dad put our Texas house up for sale.

  Mom began to pack for the move to Kansas City. She said good-bye to Norma Hendrick, her best friend and neighbor, and I said good-bye to Chris. I was saddened by the idea that I would not be able to visit my Finley grandparents and cousins regularly. I worried that my cousin Tommy might forget what I looked like. As things turned out, that would be the least of my worries in Kansas City.

  A HANDS-ON OWNER

  Uncle Charlie went to West Palm Beach in early 1961 for his first spring training game as owner of the Kansas City Athletics. Almost from the beginning, Charlie got involved with the general manager’s duties, making many
of the personnel decisions. And he was good at it. It took a while for his best decisions to pay off, but for a man who had never played professional baseball, he became quite good at judging who possessed the ability to be a Major League star and who didn’t. Nevertheless, Charlie’s hands-on style was difficult for the team’s general managers and managers, and he went through many front-office men over the years.

  That first season in Kansas City set the tone. Charlie’s Athletics began the year with Joe Gordon as manager and Frank Lane as general manager. Before season’s end, Gordon and Lane were gone.

  And something else would be gone, as well—the selfish, hypocritical, and cruel grip of the sports media clique that had trapped the franchise in failure. And thus began the long sail back to greatness.

  But headwinds were rising.

  CHAPTER 5

  LIFE AT THE MUEHLEBACH

  1963

  As a five-year-old girl enthralled with her new surroundings, I was having a wonderful time, especially at the ballgames at Municipal Stadium, an exciting place where we were expected to socialize with fans. One of the most dedicated Athletics fans was Harry S. Truman, the former president and, like Dad and Charlie, a thirty-second-degree Mason. He came to almost every A’s home game. Mom, Dad, and I often visited with him, and I remember sitting in his lap during a game. Once he gave me a box of lollipops, which I handed out after the game to anyone we came across: stadium ushers, the Muehlebach Hotel bellboy, the elevator operator, and our housekeeper.

  Away from the ballpark, Charlie’s suite at the Muehlebach Hotel was the center of his world whenever he came to Kansas City. It was where he conducted business for his thriving Chicago insurance firm, where he negotiated contracts with ballplayers itching for a tiny raise, and where he hosted his well-attended postgame parties. Mom, Dad, and I would get to know the hotel quite well.