Finley Ball Page 5

  Four years into their quarrel, Ernie Mehl liked to harass Charlie with a special weapon: the Associated Press. Newspapers around the country that otherwise never would have bothered with Charlie or the Athletics ran Mehl’s articles right off the AP wire. And these articles always put Charlie in a bad light.

  On May 23, 1964, a San Antonio newspaper ran an AP story headlined “Another Setback for Finley & the A’s.” The incident that occasioned the article was trivial—the city had prevented Charlie from shooting off fireworks after home runs—but the headline contributed to Mehl’s campaign to brand Charlie as a loser.

  MOVING WITH THE MOB

  When Uncle Charlie was wooing Dad to join the Athletics’ front office, he promised that he would buy us a house when we moved to Kansas City. But once we made the move, that promise seemed to be forgotten. The months passed, and to Mom’s dismay we still had no house, camping amid uncertainty and consternation at the Meuhlebach Hotel.

  In early 1964, we made a move on our own. We left the hotel and rented a home in the Hyde Park district. We lived on Janssen Place, a wide, picturesque street with a gated entry in the heart of Kansas City. Bisected by a grass island in the middle, the street was dotted with beautiful mansions on both sides. Three of the large homes had been converted into duplexes, one of which we rented. At the other end of Janssen Place was that rarity in Kansas City—a hill, which we used in the winter for sledding.

  The move, which took place on a snowy day in January, did nothing to reassure my mother about Kansas City. I was at school. Dad left work early, picked up Mom at the hotel for the last time, and headed out to Janssen Place. They met two young movers, who brought in our stove, ice box, and dining room furniture. Mom noticed a third man—handsome, dark-haired, and dressed in white coveralls. He caught her attention mostly because he never lifted a finger to help the other two movers. Instead, he sat at the table chatting with Mom and Dad and sipping coffee. His name was George. “He seemed amazed and so happy to meet me,” Mom recalled many years later.

  After the movers had left, Dad told Mom the punch line about their chatty visitor. George was a mobster, he said with amusement—the second-highest mafia “don” in Kansas City. A few years later, Dad told me that he knew people in Kansas City who would professionally “assassinate” someone. I don’t think he was joking, and he said he never told anyone else about it.

  A HOME OF OUR OWN

  More than a year after we had left Dallas and nine months after we had moved to Janssen Place, Charlie finally made good on his promise to buy us a house. We were delighted to move into a suburban ranch-style home like the one we’d left in Dallas. It was in a pretty, tree-lined neighborhood in Overland Park, Kansas, a thirty-minute drive southeast of downtown Kansas City, just across the state line. The house had a large basement and an unfenced backyard. To my delight, I had my own television in my fully decorated bedroom, along with my own bathroom.

  A block away was a new elementary school, to which I transferred soon after starting first grade. There were only three houses on our new street, which ended in a circular green. Here I learned to ride a bicycle and finally found some children my own age to play with.

  Mom had made a few friends among the front-office wives and my schoolmates’ mothers while we were living in the city, but she was lonely when we moved to the suburbs. Looking back, it all seems like an episode of the TV show Mad Men—couples doing everything that society said would make them happy, like having a child and moving to the suburbs as soon as they could, only to find out that it didn’t make them happy at all.

  LIVING WITH A HOUSEHOLD NAME

  The name Finley didn’t mean anything special in Dallas, where we lived in quiet anonymity. That changed when we moved to Kansas City. The word about our connection to the Athletics spread quickly through our new neighborhood, and in the spring teenage boys began to appear outside our house. They weren’t there for me; I was just five years old. Those boys were there hoping to be seen by my Dad. They would stand outside our house and play catch, tossing a baseball back and forth, hoping Dad would “discover” them.

  Sometimes they would greet Dad or Mom outside, saying, “Mr. Finley, my mom wanted me to show you how I pitch,” or, “Mrs. Finley, would your husband consider letting me show him how I can throw?” This went on for months until, one day, two boys of thirteen were playing catch in the field next to our house. Perhaps they thought that if I participated, Dad would pay attention, so they asked me to stay in the field with them until Dad got home. I watched for a while, and then a baseball hit me in the chest. It hurt terribly. The boys ran over and apologized. I never told Mom, but somehow she and Dad found out, and no teenage boys came near our house again. Dad was easygoing and warm, but when he didn’t like something, he put an end to it right away, especially if it involved his only child.

  At school, kids started asking me how it felt to be a Finley. Because Charlie was rich, they assumed that Mom and Dad were wealthy, too. They weren’t. “I’ll bet you have everything you want,” one classmate said to me. Or the boys would ask, “Have you met the ballplayers?” Sometimes I felt scrutinized by the parents of these children. The increasing questions, as well-meaning as they might have been, made me feel different, as if I wasn’t part of the normal pack of kids. For a little girl in a new city, it wasn’t a good feeling.

  An incident in the second grade taught me that celebrity is a two-edged sword. For a history project, my teacher assigned each of us a classmate as a “partner.” My partner and I worked on our project for several days and decided to sing a song. But the day before our presentation, my partner suddenly threatened me. She said if I did not bring her a popular Kansas City Athletics sticker for her notebook, then she would make me do our presentation alone.

  It was my worst nightmare. Here I was, a six-year-old desperately trying to fit in at a new school among classmates who already viewed me as different because of my famous uncle. I often went out of my way to not make waves, and I rarely stood up for myself with my peers. But for some reason I decided this was the time to dig in my heels. I stood alone in front of the class and nervously sang On Top of Old Smokey. Somehow I got through my first experience with extortion.

  Still yearning for acceptance from my peers, I began to use my baseball connections to attract friends. Uncle Charlie was the king of promotions, and Dad often came home with boxes of what was given out that day—caps, baseballs, and those coveted stickers. One evening, Dad brought home a box of kelly green Athletics baseball hats. I ran out to the front yard and gave these caps away to the kids in my neighborhood.

  This year Charlie lost his beloved aunt Rose Marie, my grandmother. She was a kind and gracious woman, and Charlie adored her. Her death set him back for several months.

  CHAPTER 9

  BREAKING BARRIERS AND BEATLE MANIA

  1963–1964–1965

  Each spring, Charlie would summon George Toma, the Kansas City Municipal Stadium groundskeeper, to his office. Charlie would make some small talk about the condition of the field, which was always impeccable. A diminutive man, in contrast to the elite athletes who played baseball or football on his well-maintained field, Toma was nevertheless a giant in his profession. He would soon become known as the best groundskeeper in the nation, and in the 1970s, the National Football League made him the official groundskeeper of the Super Bowl. But even in 1965, he was respected in the Athletics organization and throughout Kansas City.

  Charlie liked him, too, and if anyone besides Carl Finley had job security with the Athletics, it was George Toma. So he was relaxed when he was told to report to the team owner. Toma found Charlie at his desk in an uncharacteristically quiet mood, almost humble.

  Toma took a seat, and after a bit of chatting Charlie asked Toma about the teenagers on his staff, the part-time employees who worked on the grass and around the stadium. He then wrote a check for hundreds of dollars to pay for suits and ties for them so they would look sharp on their graduation da
y in June. Charlie, who was born in rural Alabama and worked in a steel mill as a teen, wanted to give the teenagers something he didn’t have as a youth. It was the kind of generosity for which he rarely got credit. But Toma remembers.

  “Charlie always took care of those kids,” he recalled more than forty years later. “People like to say things about him, but I remember Charlie writing those checks and making sure those kids had what they needed.”

  Few Athletics fans were allowed to see that side of Charlie. One of the few in town who knew the truth was a lifelong Kansas Citian named Sam Gould. He owned the parking lot at Municipal Stadium when Charlie acquired the team in 1960. When Charlie infamously set the old “Yankees shuttle bus” on fire, it was parked temporarily in one of Gould’s parking spaces.

  Gould got along well with Dad and Charlie. “It was easy to work with Carl,” he said. “He was a gentleman. A good man.” Charlie, on the other hand, was more complex but still fair. One day, Gould received a phone call from Charlie, who thought that the fifty-cent parking fee might be preventing some fans from coming to games. He wanted to cut the price in half. Gould talked him out of it, persuading him that a price that low would hurt the team and put his parking company out of business. But Gould never forgot that conversation—it was the only time he could recall a sports owner asking to lower prices on anything for the fans.

  Knowing that no ball club could survive on ticket sales to baseball purists alone, Charlie wanted to attract the casual fan and build baseball’s popularity among a wider population. He still went in for novel promotions, especially if they involved bright colors. The team kept the controversial green, gold, and white uniforms introduced in 1963, but for 1964 they added two new shades: “sea foam green” and “wedding gown white.” Charlie installed horns and flashing green and gold lights in Municipal Stadium, which went off whenever an Athletics player smacked a home run. And he officially changed the name of the team from the “Athletics” to the “A’s.” He wanted the name to sound more contemporary, and he thought “A’s” was easier to say and write.

  THE BEATLES

  In February 1964, the Beatles made their famous American debut on the Ed Sullivan Show. Charlie got swept up in the ensuing Beatlemania and wanted to bring it to Kansas City. John, Paul, George, and Ringo performed all over the United States that summer, but Kansas City was not on their tour. Charlie decided to change that. Their usual performance fee was twenty-five thousand dollars, but the Liverpool lads demanded $150,000 to add Municipal Stadium to their tour on September 17, one of their few open days. Charlie announced that if he turned a profit from the concert, then he would donate a hundred thousand dollars to Children’s Memorial Hospital in Kansas City.

  Charlie was criticized then and now for his promotions, but he really believed that the future of professional sports depended on this kind of big entertainment event. His signature was printed on the tickets to the Beatles concert with the tagline “Today’s Beatles fan is tomorrow’s baseball fan.” Charlie did his best to promote the concert.

  A few weeks before the concert, Charlie persuaded Angels outfielder Jimmy Piersall to walk up to home plate wearing a Beatles mop-top wig for an at-bat, and Charlie himself was photographed in one. Dad and the rest of the front office were excited. As young as I was (six years old), I could sense my parents’ anticipation. The day of the concert I came down with the measles, but it was such a big event that my mom took me anyway. I was quarantined in a team office with an open window facing the stage, partly because of my health and partly because of Dad’s concern about the frenzied stadium crowd. Dad and Charlie hobnobbed with the band and their manager, Brian Epstein, in the team’s executive office while girls outside screamed for the Fab Four before the concert. Dad commented that John, Paul, George, and Ringo were a “polite group of young men.”

  The Beatles sent the hometown crowd into a tizzy by kicking off the show with a Little Richard medley, “Kansas City/Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey”—a tip of the hat by the world’s biggest pop stars to a legendary breeding ground of jazz and blues musicians. That had to have felt good to Kansas Citians. It made Dad happy. The Beatles played twelve songs in the thirtyone-minute concert. Dad’s concerns about security proved well-founded when frenzied fans swarmed the stage, stopping the show.

  None of this excitement apparently mattered to Mehl and the Star. Carrying its grudge against Charlie to new extremes, the paper refused to promote the concert and even refused to take Charlie’s money for a paid advertisement, even though a well-attended performance would be a pop-culture coup for a city yearning for national respect, as well as guaranteeing Charlie’s hundred-thousand-dollar donation to a hospital serving kids. Mehl blamed Charlie for the empty seats in Municipal Stadium that night, though the crowd of 20,280 was the second-largest in the Beatles’ tour. Charlie himself was disappointed by the turnout (and remembered the experience when it was time to renegotiate the lease on Muni Stadium a few years later). He did not turn a profit but still donated twenty-five thousand dollars to the children’s hospital.

  The Beatles concert was yet another example of how Charlie and Dad were ahead of their time. So much of what they did was about growing the sport and trying to appeal to kids and the casual fan. Today, sports franchises pay consultants enormous fees to expand their markets and increase TV ratings and ticket and merchandise sales, but Charlie and Dad came up with these ideas themselves.

  BETTY CAYWOOD

  On September 18, 1964, the Athletics were in New York to play the Yankees. The worst team in baseball was playing the best, and the game looked like it. The Yanks blanked the Athletics 6–0 in front of 16,094 fans in the Bronx. But regardless of what happened on the field that day, the Athletics made history up in the announcer’s booth when Betty Caywood made her debut with the Athletics’ play-by-play team. Charlie had hired the thirty-two-year-old TV weather analyst from Chicago, making her the first woman to broadcast a Major League Baseball game. It was no accident that her debut was in New York City, as Charlie wanted the maximum exposure in the nation’s biggest market for the pioneering event.

  For the final fifteen games of the ’64 season, Caywood provided color commentary while Monte Moore and Bill Bryson did the play-by-play. An attractive young blonde, Caywood was bound to appeal to Charlie, and she was actually a pretty good announcer. She had received her master’s degree in speech from Northwestern University. When Charlie met her in Chicago, he learned that they shared a baseball connection with Athletics past and present—Betty knew Connie Mack III and had befriended the Kansas City Star’s sportswriter Joe McGuff and his wife, Kay. In a moment of inspiration, Charlie offered Betty a job. She accepted.

  Still, Charlie was an enigma to her, as he was to so many others. In general he treated her well, she said. He covered her moving costs from Chicago to Kansas City and the costs of her childcare. But he did one thing Betty really didn’t like—he tried to tell her what to wear during her broadcasts. Specifically, he wanted her in a gold-colored blouse and a green skirt. “I replied, ‘When you have your male broadcasters wear green and yellow, I’ll be happy to do so, too,” Betty recalls. Like Dad and other A’s staff, Betty was the recipient of Charlie’s middle-of-the-night telephone calls. She handled them by hanging up.

  It turned out that a broadcasting career did not appeal to Betty, and she quit when the season ended on October 3 with—what else?—a loss. “I love baseball today because of that short period in my life,” she says. “But for all the money [Charlie] spent on me, why, it was ridiculous.”

  PICKING UP THE PACE WITH THE PITCHOMETER

  Charlie understood that the American attention span was getting shorter and shorter and that it led to complaints about the slow pace of baseball games. If baseball was to survive the competition against constant-action sports like football, hockey, and basketball, it would have to pick up its pace. Taking a cue from Bill Veeck’s Comiskey Park, Charlie installed a “Pitchometer” on the scoreboard to time pitchers. A rarel
y enforced MLB rule gave the pitcher only twenty seconds after receiving the ball from the catcher to make his throw if no one was on base. Veeck’s Pitchometer had been disallowed as soon as it was put up in 1960, and the device was never used in a Major League game.

  That is, not until the 1965 season, when Charlie tried it. The Pitchometer on the Municipal Stadium scoreboard was actually used for a few weeks in April, the announcer urging fans to monitor it, before league officials squashed it. Once again, MLB’s old boys club didn’t appreciate Charlie’s innovations, and they went out of their way to try to put him in his place. The obscure twenty-second rule was enforced for the first time in anyone’s memory against the Athletics’ Diego Segui—twice—the umpire adding a ball to the count each time. The Pitchometer had already been taken down, but league officials were determined to punish Charlie for even trying the innovation.

  A NEW MASCOT

  Charlie and Dad appreciated the power of animals to capture the public’s attention. Charlie decided it was time to replace the team’s elephant mascot, which he had inherited from the previous owners.

  Toward the end of the 1964 season, Charlie, Aunt Shirley, Dad, Mom, and all of us young cousins gathered at the Muehlebach after a game to discuss the possibilities. Charlie suggested a skunk. Dad smiled and chuckled. “Well,” he said, “it would get us a lot of attention.”

  “Yes!” exclaimed Charlie.

  “You know the other team will trot from the dugout holding their noses. And just imagine the headlines when we lose a game; ‘A’s Skunked Again!’”

  Charlie look a bit crestfallen. The skunk idea was never mentioned again.

  One thing we all agreed on—we did not want the elephant. The previous owner had gone with an elephant, and we wanted to distance the franchise from the old regime. And elephants are fat, clumsy, and slow—not the image we wanted for our A’s.