Finley Ball Read online

  Though I didn’t appreciate it at the time, Muehlebach was the biggest and best hotel in town, a symbol of old Kansas City. Built in 1915 by George Muehlebach, who inherited and expanded his father’s brewing empire, the stately twelve-story hotel has hosted presidents and celebrities, and it was home to Carl and Helen Finley and me when we arrived in Kansas City in August 1963. After our suburban ranch-style house in Texas, I found hotel living fascinating at first. The beds came out of the wall!

  Compared with Dallas, Kansas City was one big party. We’d often visit Uncle Charlie’s spacious suite, which was always filled with people. I remember lots of food. While I walked around, Mom would sit with Aunt Shirley, who had sparkly blue eyes and always smiled. My earliest memory of Uncle Charlie is his bushy eyebrows and commanding presence. He would say, “Come to Uncle Charlie!” But I’d hide behind Mom. At age four, I was afraid of large voices, though once I was a little older, it didn’t bother me.

  Once, before a game began I discovered I could dance on the dugout. Dad was furious. He was afraid a foul ball might hit me. He told me never to do that again.

  Our “neighbors” at the Muehlebach were always changing. And there was a man in a suit, the bellhop, who stood in the elevator and pressed the button for you! I remember being afraid the rickety old thing would stop between floors and we’d be stuck. The hotel seemed dark inside, and busy . . . full of men with cigars and pretty women.

  But life at the Muehlebach soon turned boring for me. There was no backyard, so I could not play outside anymore. I missed my friend Christine, and until kindergarten began the following month, I had no chance to make new friends who were my age. My best companion was my stuffed Cecil the Seasick Sea Serpent, from a popular kids’ show, Beanie and Cecil. We were supposed to stay at the hotel for just a week or two before moving into the home that Charlie had promised that he would buy for Dad. We ended up staying at the Muehlebach for eight months.

  Even though Dad and Charlie were buddies, our extended hotel stay was Dad’s first lesson that when Charlie promised you something, you had to stay on him constantly to get him to deliver. Mom, more anxious every day to get back to a normal life, frequently reminded Dad of Charlie’s promise.

  As an incentive to leave his career in education, Charlie had given Dad a minority ownership in the franchise, and he assumed his first position with the Athletics, in the public relations department, before the 1963 season. Later that year, his title became team business manager, and before long, he became the key member of the front office, performing a wide range of jobs.

  For Mom and me, the stadium became the lone bright spot in our lives. We would go there for almost every home game. From our seats just behind the dugout, always on the first base side, I could see other kids sitting in the stands and I wished I could get to know them. Our outings became a family affair, since Mom and Aunt Shirley were good friends and always sat together at the ballpark.

  There I discovered Harvey the Mechanical Rabbit, who rose out of the ground behind the home plate umpire and provided him with a fresh baseball. When he popped up, Harvey’s glowing eyes were flashing red. I found that terrifying and had to hide my face when he appeared.

  Ever the pragmatist, Aunt Shirley made Kansas City her second home. She was more relaxed about the world of professional baseball and its quirks than my mother was. Maybe Shirley was more flexible because of her many children, or maybe because of the unpredictable nature of her husband. Either way, Mom admired her for it.

  While the games were fun, postgame events were something different altogether. People called Kansas City “Cow Town,” but Charlie’s postgame parties in his suite at the Muehlebach belied that dull and backward image. Mom did not care for these glamorous, sometimes boozy soirées, which drew a much faster crowd than she was accustomed to—ballplayers, front-office employees, business leaders, the occasional Hollywood celebrity, such as Marie McDonald and Connie Stevens, along with a Missouri beauty queen or two, and always a Miss America. And this being Kansas City, local mobsters sometimes attended these parties, which only added to Mom’s anxiety.

  In 1963, Kansas City wasn’t as nearly corrupt as it had been during Prohibition, when Tom Pendergast and Johnny Lazia had a stranglehold on the city. The federal government had since cleaned up a lot of this. But in some ways, new mobster faces had merely replaced the old ones, and “the Outfit”—as Kansas City mafiosi were called in the ’60s—was alive and well. Nick Civella ran the city’s organized crime at this time. After just a short time in Kansas City, Mom and Dad soon learned how entrenched the mob was, and had always been, in the seemingly quiet midwestern city. Mom was alarmed, but Dad was amused. And when Mom realized they were socializing with a mobster or two at Charlie’s postgame parties, she went straight home, leaving Dad to enjoy the party. The network of Mehl, the Yankees, and Johnson had not been connected to the Kansas City mob, which never exercised control over the baseball team.

  My mom and Shirley were scheduled to host a dinner for the Trumans in Kansas City, when suddenly Shirley was called to the bedside of her ailing mother in Chicago. Shirley told mom she was sure she could handle it by herself. A childhood spent picking cotton on the family farm on Mexia, Texas, may have taught Mom self-reliance, but it had not prepared her to host a dinner for a former president and first lady. Mom was never so nervous; she could barely remember which sides of the plate the fork and knife went on. Despite her crash course in high-level hospitality, the dinner came off without a hitch.

  Our baseball home was fun, exotic, and carefree. Nobody realized it yet, but my home in Kansas City would be anything but.

  CHAPTER 6

  WHAT COLOR IS SECOND BASE?

  1963

  While Dad and Pat Friday and I were sitting in the Muehlebach lounge, Charlie popped in. “I’ve got the best-looking uniforms you’ve ever seen,” he excitedly said.

  He went in the back of his suite, and returned with the loudest, most brightly colored uniforms that Dad had ever seen. Dad grinned and said “Beautiful!” Pat Friday whispered in Dad’s ear, “God awful.”

  Dad said he liked the new colors. The baseball establishment did not.

  Uniforms had been the same color in the major leagues for at least sixty years. The home team wore white, and the road team wore gray. The one exception was the Yankees, who wore their famous pinstripes over their white home jersey.

  Now there was a new exception. The Kansas City Athletics’ main color was gold—“Fort Knox gold,” to be precise—save for the hat, undershirt, and stirrups, which now were “kelly green.” Within a year, another color, “wedding gown white,” was added.

  Early in the season, Athletics’ right fielder Gino Cimoli passed a few opposing players who snickered at his uniforms, and he half-jokingly warned them, “Don’t even say a word.”

  Predictably, baseball’s old guard didn’t care for the uniforms. The New York Yankees gave a public thumbs-down to the bright uniform colors. At the 1963 All-Star Game, the American League squad manager Ralph Houk—also the Yankees manager—refused to play the Athletics’ lone All-Star because he felt the new green-and-gold uniforms were so undignified as to be beneath the game.

  Paul Lukas, who writes about uniforms for ESPN.com and UniWatchBlog.com, says that time has vindicated Charlie, praising him for “dragging baseball kicking and screaming into the modern age.” It’s undeniable that he was an eccentric maverick. But he wasn’t trying to be different just for the hell of it. There was a business motivation, too; usually a forward-thinking reason tied to the changing times. In the early 1960s, color television sales were on the rise, and Charlie “was the first to see color TV in terms of the changing color palette in baseball,” Lukas writes. He knew that his bright uniforms would stand out on those new color sets.

  Charlie also was one of the first to add players’ last names to team uniforms. True to form, he didn’t stop there. He started putting players’ nicknames on the back of the uniforms until baseball off
icials made him stop. Charlie understood that increased TV coverage brought players closer to fans, and names on the jerseys helped television viewers to identify players. “He rocked the boat in all kinds of ways,” says Lukas. “In retrospect, Finley did a lot of things that were cool.”

  A year after the new uniforms were introduced, Charlie added white shoes—“albino kangaroo white.” More than forty-five seasons later, despite all of the changes in baseball over the years, the white shoes remain a part of Athletics baseball tradition.

  SYNESTHESIA

  There’s no denying that Charlie was a visionary, but there might have been more behind the colorful uniforms than his ability to predict the influence of color television. Charlie was always fascinated with color, especially bright colors, and years later I finally found out why.

  In 2004, my ten-year-old daughter Taylor wrote a letter to the editor of our local newspaper about a controversy surrounding the Pledge of Allegiance. Her letter concluded, “I see a yellow side to life in the corner of my eyes. I see America.” When her father and I chuckled over this quirky remark, she turned to us and asked, “When you hear a number, do you see a color?” Her father and I both said, “No.” In time, we learned that the association in her mind of numbers or letters with particular colors is real and is a form of a neurological phenomenon called synesthesia. It is thought to have a strong genetic component and is the subject of intense study in the cognitive sciences.

  When I first read about synesthesia, I looked up and noticed the orange Athletics baseball displayed in our home. Next to this orange baseball was a group photograph of our 1973 team, decked out in green and gold. Suddenly it hit me—Charlie had synesthesia!

  SEEING THE GAME IN 3-D

  Charlie, like Taylor, must have inherited this from somewhere in the Finley family tree. Now so much made sense—the colored sheep with their shepherd in his multi-colored robe, the brightly painted walls inside Municipal Stadium, the peacocks, the brightly colored uniforms, the green bats.

  As I learned more about synesthesia in connection with my daughter, I began to understand that Charlie’s synesthesia may explain a whole lot more than merely his fascination with colors. In synesthete brains, there are often cross-connections between different senses, producing unusual associations between numbers, words, physical sensations, emotions, and visual experiences. This connectivity has been described by one psychologist as an exaggerated version of the “cross-talk present in all brains.”

  How could an insurance salesman put together a baseball team that could win three consecutive World Series, at a time, moreover, when automated statistical analysis (as in Moneyball) did not exist?

  My husband, Morgan, believes Charlie viewed the game not in terms of statistics but in three dimensions, like three-dimensional chess. Morgan used to wonder how Charlie, sitting in his office in Chicago and unable to see the field, could place a phone call in the middle of a game and insert a certain player into a certain position at a certain time and have it work. “Charlie could look over the field in his mind’s eye like a chess player who scans the whole board, and simply feels what needs to be done. Logic has little to do with it. It is intuitive, almost subconscious.”

  Typically, when Charlie placed such a call, he had been listening to the game, not watching it. During most of the regular season in Oakland, Charlie remained in his office in Chicago. My mother, at home in Kansas City, would hold the phone receiver up to the radio, and Charlie, on the other end of the call, would listen to the game play-by-play over the phone. Every so often, he would select another line on his office phone and call the Oakland office. Those dreaded calls from Charlie!

  “Perhaps,” said Morgan, “he could still see the field in his mind.”

  Digging deeper into recent research on synesthesia, I came across the following passage (my italics) that was like a lightning strike in a dark sky:

  Beyond the vague assertion that synesthesia might enhance sensory and intersensory processing . . . can synesthesia actually enhance sophisticated and abstract mental abilities? Ramachandran and Hubbard pointed out that many synesthetes with visual-spatial number forms claimed such enhancement did occur.

  Visual-spatial? You mean like imagining a baseball game being played? I continued reading:

  When a number-form synesthete imagines or visualizes a number in front of him he always sees it occupying a specific location in space; the numbers are arranged sequentially along a number line that can be highly convoluted in three dimensions—sometimes even doubling back on itself.

  Intriguingly some of them reported being able to “see hidden relationships” from unusual vantage points geometrically as a result of the numerical landscape. . . .1

  The more I learned about synesthesia, the more it seemed to explain about Charlie. When he chose green and gold for the team’s colors, he probably saw his team in those colors. Perhaps he saw the word “baseball” as gold and green. He didn’t choose those colors because they were outlandish. Quite simply, he couldn’t help it.

  And as for what my husband said about Charlie’s seeing the diamond in three dimensions, many synesthetes “can mentally take on different perspectives, ‘zooming in and out’ or ‘moving around’ the form.”2 Listening to the play-by-play broadcast in Chicago, did Charlie see colors in his head? Did he see a three-dimensional baseball field? Did he see that the pieces on the infield were not positioned well for the situation of the moment? What did he see when he picked up the phone to call Dad, quickly, before the next batter came up? Many people have called Charlie a genius, but I wonder if he was something else—what you might call a “sports savant.”

  A RESTLESS OWNER

  Charlie changed more than the uniforms. After one and a half seasons, he replaced Hank Bauer as manager with Ed Lopat, who led the Athletics for the 1963 season and then was fired himself. Mel McGaha replaced him before the 1964 campaign. The Athletics kept losing. And they kept losing fans. Attendance had dropped to 762,000 fans for the ’63 season, and Kansas City leaders were not doing much to help the team.

  Charlie was growing frustrated. And getting restless.

  CHAPTER 7

  DRAMA WITH THE CITY COUNCIL

  1963

  Charlie was not having much fun.

  The end of the 1963 season, his third as owner, was when his relationship with Kansas City started to unravel. He was expected to sign a new lease for Municipal Stadium in January 1964. Charlie and the Athletics were paying half a million dollars a year in rent to the city, and the end-of-season negotiations with the city council weren’t going well.

  Ernie Mehl and the Kansas City Star continued to hammer Charlie, printing rumors that he had begun talking to Dallas, Louisville, Oakland, and other cities about moving the team. Mehl, of course, coyly refrained from mentioning that his late pal Arnold Johnson had tried to do that for years before the Finley era, with Mehl’s acquiescence.

  Contrary to what Mehl was writing, Charlie was eager to work out a deal to keep the franchise in Kansas City. After all, he had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars less than three years earlier to improve the city’s ballpark.

  After the November 1963 elections, the lame-duck members of the city council met with Charlie, who was demanding a two-year lease rather than a four-year lease. He had threatened to take the team to Louisville, Kentucky, but the owners blocked the move and gave Charlie until February 1, 1964, to sign a new lease in Kansas City. After marathon negotiating sessions, Charlie and the city council finally reached an agreement. With the Athletics’ lease on Muni Stadium extended for four years, the city fathers and the fans were euphoric. Charlie was excited, happy, and relieved not to have to think about moving the team. It seemed that the Kansas City Athletics were entering a new era.

  Then Charlie discovered that the Chiefs, the American Football League franchise newly arrived in Kansas City from Dallas, were paying just one dollar per season to play at Municipal Stadium—the stadium Charlie had paid hundreds
of thousands of dollars out of his own pocket to renovate. Now Charlie was furious. The relationship between Kansas City and the A’s office was at an all-time low. Charlie wanted to keep the team there, but did Kansas City want them?

  SATCHEL PAIGE

  The home of one of the Negro leagues’ most famous teams, the Monarchs, Kansas City had a rich history of Negro baseball. In 1965, Charlie paid tribute to those great Negro league teams when he signed the fifty-nine-year-old Satchel Paige, a former Monarch pitcher, to play one game for the Athletics, an otherwise meaningless late-season contest against the Boston Red Sox. Paige had been Major League Baseball’s oldest rookie when Bill Veeck signed him to the Cleveland Browns in 1948. He followed Veeck to the hapless St. Louis Browns in 1951, retiring after three seasons there at the age of forty-seven.

  Charlie invited several Negro league veterans, including Cool Papa Bell, to the game with Paige, introducing them before the game to the crowd of only ten thousand. Paige, “for effect,” was perched on a rocking chair in the bullpen, attended by a “nurse” between innings.

  Paige pitched amazingly well, tossing three shutout innings. He took the mound at the top of the fourth, when, on cue, manager Haywood Sullivan replaced him with Diego Segui. Paige walked off the field to a warm ovation with a one-to-nothing lead. The lights dimmed, and led by the announcer, the fans lit matches and cigarette lighters and sang “The Old Gray Mare.”

  The Athletics lost five to two, but nobody remembers that. The unforgettable night—a tribute to the promotional genius of Uncle Charlie—was hard to square with the suspicion that the owner was itching to move the ball club.

  CHAPTER 8

  OVERLAND PARK

  1964