Finley Ball Page 7
The MLB Players’ Association’s new executive director was a tough, smart, and respected negotiator with years of experience negotiating labor contracts for the United Steelworkers and the United Auto Workers. His name was Marvin Miller. In 1992, Hall of Fame broadcaster Red Barber called him “one of the two or three most important men in baseball history.”
When Miller took over the MLBPA, his first mission was to educate all of the ballplayers on their rights and the goals of their organization. Miller was the pick of the activist players, but there were plenty of others who, fearful of losing their jobs, were quick to believe the smear campaign that baseball’s commissioner and top officials had started against him. Indeed, Miller found that baseball’s brass was telling some players behind the scenes that he could not be trusted and, even worse, that he was a communist.
Miller always rebutted such talk by saying he wanted the players to make more money for themselves, which required that the franchises turn a healthy profit. What was more capitalist than that? Miller spent the first couple of years laying the groundwork and building trust between the union and the players.
The battles that Miller would fight against the commissioner and the owners, including Uncle Charlie, were still years away. To the casual fan, the business of baseball looked the same as it had for almost seventy years. But changes were brewing. Skirmishes between players and owners had popped up through the years (a young Joe DiMaggio had held out for more money from the Yankees in the late 1930s), but there had been nothing like the rancor that was about to break out. Major League Baseball would have as bumpy a ride through the second half of the 1960s as the rest of America.
CHAPTER 12
TAKE THAT GUN TO THE TRAIN STATION
1966–1967
Among other odd things, 1967 was the year one of the team members, Campy Campaneris, was sued for paternity. That may not have been unusual among professional sportsmen, but Charlie was named as a co-defendant in the suit. The plaintiff sought four hundred thousand dollars in damages from Charlie, alleging that he knew of the paternity claim and helped Campy elude process servers whenever the team played in Anaheim, California.
Amid the theatrics that seemed to accompany Charlie and his team on and off the field, a quiet change had taken place. It wasn’t so much what had happened as what hadn’t happened. The annual pillaging of the Athletics had ended—the best talent hadn’t been traded off to the Yankees! Suddenly, the A’s were everyone’s pick to contend for the pennant in 1967. Sports Illustrated put their manager, Alvin Dark, on its March 12 cover with the caption “Dark’s Outlook is Young and Bright.” Kansas City fans had hope for the future for the first time since the team arrived in 1955.
GUNSHOTS IN THE NIGHT
Lew Krausse Jr. had been pitching in the major leagues off and on since Charlie signed him out of high school in 1961. He was still boyish-looking—lanky, blond, and freckle-faced—but on this squad full of greenhorns, he had become the “old man” on the roster.
He stood out in other ways, too. By his own admission, he drank too much. But that wasn’t anything new in baseball. What made him different was that he could be eccentric, bombastic, and flakey, long before sports fans and the media appreciated those traits. He also stood up to Charlie whenever it suited him. And Charlie appreciated that. He respected people who stood up for themselves, even when he was the guy they were standing up against.
A lot of the players lived in the Bellerive Hotel, a luxury apartment hotel built in 1922 in Kansas City’s Hyde Park neighborhood, not far from my parents’ Janssen Place home. Krausse, who lived on the top floor, said it was an open secret that Charlie paid the hotel manager to spy on players. Despite his suspicion that the team owner was watching, Krausse wasn’t afraid to have a good time, and he had already earned a reputation as a free spirit. He even started a late-night routine that would have fit right in with Kansas City’s Wild West days a century before. Just about every night, Krausse came home drunk, and before going to sleep he fired a pistol out his window into the air. “My uncle, a game warden in Pennsylvania, once gave me a .38 revolver,” Krausse explained. “A lot of the players, we were living in rooms way up high in this hotel, so it became part of my deal, my nightly routine. When I came home, I’d fire a gun out the window and then go to bed.”
Remarkably, this went on for months until the hotel hosted a convention in June 1967 and moved the players down to the second floor. Krausse had pitched the first game of a doubleheader against the Detroit Tigers at Municipal Stadium. He was shelled, chased early from the game, and the A’s lost eleven to one. The pitcher stopped off at a bar to drink off his frustration and became intoxicated as usual. “I came home that night and opened the window and fired the gun in the air twice,” he said. “Obviously, it was goofy, but it was my trademark.” His nightly routine completed, Krausse shut the window and went to sleep. Just like every other “normal” night. The next morning however, was anything but normal.
At 6 a.m. the phone rang in the hotel room. Krausse, tired and hung over, picked up the phone. It was Charlie, and he got to the point quickly. “Do you have a gun?”
Krausse always gave it to him straight. “Yes.”
Charlie replied, “You take that gun to the train station and put it in a box.”
Still shaking off the cobwebs, Krausse suddenly got really scared. “Wait, what? Why? What happened?”
Charlie repeated himself, but more urgently, “Just take it to a train station and put it in a box.”
He did exactly what Charlie told him. He took a cab to the train station, rented a locker, and hid the pistol there. The trench coat he wore to hide the .38 must have made him conspicuous in the Kansas City summer heat. Nervous as hell, the ballplayer knew there was a Phillips Petroleum building across the street from the hotel. He had a sick feeling that he had killed somebody with an errant gunshot.
Krauss returned to the hotel and went to his room, intending to call Charlie. But that proved to be difficult. “I got to my room and there were ten people in there—cops and people from Phillips Petroleum, mostly,” Krausse recalled. “They were dusting the windowsill and I was just waiting to get handcuffed.”
Krausse took Charlie’s advice and said nothing. He learned that striking employees were picketing outside the Phillips building. The company and the police wanted to know if a union picketer had fired the gunshot. When they found that the culprit was a half-crazy pitcher from the home team, the authorities lost interest in the case, especially with Charlie smooth-talking the police and making it clear he supported Krausse. “They didn’t want to press charges,” Krausse said. “It was all over and done with.”
Most sports owners would have been furious and would have cracked down on the ballplayers. Not Charlie. He saw it as an adventure, a game of hide-and-seek of sorts, something that spoke to the adolescent prankster in him. It helped that he was personally fond of Krausse, his first baseball bonus baby. But, there was something about outwitting authority figures that always fueled Charlie. So, instead of seeing the gun incident as a professional headache, Charlie saw it as a chance for fun and games.
“I called Charlie and told him what happened, that all those cops were there. He just started laughing,” Krausse said. “He told me some story that there was a cleaning lady in the Phillips building. He exaggerated and told me the bullet was ricocheting around the room and the cleaning lady had to hit the deck. He made a big joke of the whole thing.”
In fact, a woman staying next door to Krausse had reported the gunshot to the front desk clerk, who called the hotel manager. The hotel manager then called Charlie, who then called Krausse.
“I still have the gun,” says Krausse. “I don’t fire it anymore—well, maybe on New Year’s Eve, but most of the time I can’t stay up until midnight on New Year’s anymore.”
WHAT HAPPENED ON FLIGHT 85?
On August 3, the A’s lost an extra-inning game to the Red Sox in Boston, and the next day they hopped o
n TWA Flight 85 for Kansas City. Stops in Baltimore and St. Louis turned what was normally a two-and-a-half-hour flight into a six-hour ordeal instead.
There weren’t many people on the weekday flight, so the stewardesses passed around alcohol, and some of the players imbibed more than others. As the players told it, the flight was no different from dozens of flights a ball club makes each season—a few drinks, some laughs and off-color stories, maybe a little flirting with the stewardesses, then landing on the tarmac and off to the hotel, whether on the road or back at the Bellerive in Kansas City. But I overheard Dad tell a friend that some players had apparently gotten carried away, pinching and grabbing one of the stewardesses until she fled to the front of the plane and begged for protection.
Two weeks later, the A’s were on another road trip, this time in Washington, D.C. The phone rang at 8 a.m. in Lew Krausse’s room in the Shoreham Hotel. It was Charlie. He explained that he was fining Krausse five hundred dollars for drinking and using profanity on “that flight.” Krausse wasn’t sure what flight his boss was talking about. Once Charlie explained, Krausse started defending himself. “But I didn’t do anything,” he said. Within seconds they were screaming at each other, until Krausse slammed down the receiver.
A few minutes later, the phone rang again. “I’m suspending you immediately without pay for conduct unbecoming of a Major Leaguer,” Charlie said.
“For what? I didn’t do anything!” Krausse yelled again into the phone. This time, Charlie hung up on Krausse.
He wanted the team image to be wholesome, even if his own behavior crossed the line of propriety occasionally. Charlie had the following statement posted on the clubhouse bulletin board:
Effective immediately and for the balance of the season, all alcoholic drinks will no longer be served on commercial airlines to members of the Kansas City Athletics.
The Kansas City Athletics will no longer tolerate the shenanigans of a few individuals who obviously do not appreciate the privilege of playing in the major leagues and being treated like gentlemen.
The attitude, actions and words of some of you have been deplorable. As a member of Organized Baseball, you have certain responsibilities and obligations to yourself, your family, your club and most important of all—the fans. To the vast majority of you who have always conducted yourselves as gentlemen on and off the playing field, I sincerely regret the necessity of this action.
When they saw the clubhouse letter, the A’s players were upset. Some of them, led by Ken Harrelson and relief pitcher and union representative Jack Aker, went to Alvin Dark’s hotel room to complain. They told the manager that they were going to release a statement of their own. Dark said that was okay, but he wanted to see a draft of it first to make sure it didn’t get them into deeper trouble. Aker and Harrelson agreed.
Meanwhile, Charlie and Dad had flown TWA to Washington and checked into the Shoreham Hotel to quell the trouble. They met with Dark and asked him to support ownership regarding Krausse’s suspension. Dark refused. Charlie fired him on the spot, though the three men stayed in the room and kept discussing the ball club. After a few shots of J&B scotch and further conversation, Dark even predicted that the A’s would win the American League pennant by 1971—less than four years away.
It was a typical Charlie episode—reacting swiftly and with some anger but not making it personal. Suddenly Charlie softened. He offered Dark a contract, even though Dad reminded him that he had just fired Dark. “How ’bout two more years? With a raise,” Charlie said.
Deal. Charlie, Dad, and Dark celebrated by liberally sharing more J&B. It was a nice evening—until the Kansas City Star beat writer Paul O’Boynick knocked on Charlie’s door and asked what Charlie thought about the players’ statement. “What players’ statement?” Charlie asked.
Uh-oh.
The players had released a statement, ignoring their manager’s request to show it to him first. O’Boynick read the statement to Charlie:
In response to Charles O. Finley’s statement of August 18, we, the players of the Kansas City Athletics, feel that an unjust amount of pressure has been brought to bear on several members of the club who had no part whatsoever in the so-called incident on the recent plane trip from Boston to Kansas City. The overwhelming opinion of the players is that the entire matter was blown out of proportion. Mr. Finley’s policy of using certain unauthorized personnel in his organization as gobetweens has led to similar misunderstandings in the past and has tended to undermine the morale of the club. We players feel that if Mr. Finley would give his fine coaching staff and excellent manager the authority they deserve, these problems would not exist.
FIRED UP AND FIRED AGAIN
Charlie soon found out that Dark knew about the letter but had not told him about it. The next day, Charlie fired Dark again and replaced him with Luke Appling. That day’s ballgame was rained out, and a reporter called Harrelson for his comments about his manager’s firing. The next day, Harrelson was quoted in the Washington newspapers and on the television news as saying, “Charlie Finley is a menace to baseball.”
Charlie called Harrelson the next morning, asking him if he really said that. “I said everything except you were a menace,” Harrelson said. “What I actually said to the reporter was that I thought your actions of the last few days were bad for baseball.”
Charlie asked him to publicly retract the statement. Harrelson replied that he would retract the “menace” part but he stood by everything else. Charlie called back about thirty minutes later to tell Harrelson he had released him from the A’s. The team could have made fifty thousand dollars by trading the outfielder in a waiver wire deal, but Charlie refused, saying, “It would have been blood money.”
The players, then and now, blamed the play-by-play announcer Monte Moore for “snitching” on them about their behavior on the airplane. When word got around that the players didn’t trust Moore any longer, the announcer told Charlie that he was worried about traveling with them. Charlie assured the players Monte was not a spy, but the players never believed him. Many of the players still blame Moore, but I happen to know that Monte wasn’t the spy on the plane.
Monte had flown numerous times with the players, and what happened on Flight 85 was nothing new. Besides, Monte was the type to “tune out” what was happening. But Charlie’s eleven-year-old son Paul was on that plane, seated in the front row. He told Dad that he had heard some stewardesses in distress. They were trying to be nice, but the abuse became unbearable, and one of them ran to the front of the plane and sat near Paul. She said she felt safe there. The frightened boy’s account of the flight to his father explains Charlie’s uncharacteristically censorious reaction.
GLASSES TO THE WALL
Charlie didn’t spend that entire trip to Washington playing the disciplinarian. One evening he and Dad noticed an attractive airline stewardess stroll down the hall in their hotel and knock on the door of the room next to theirs, which was occupied by a member of the team. The man answered the door and quietly ushered her in. Charlie and Dad hustled back into their room and, with the aid of a couple of empty drinking glasses held up to the wall, joined in the fun, as it were, as unseen and uninvited guests. Dad told me he worried that their amorous colleague would hear their stifled laughter and suppressed snorting through the wall, but nothing was said the next morning.
CHAPTER 13
DON’T CRY FOR ME, KANSAS CITY
1967
Bette Davis in All about Eve says as she goes up the stairs, “Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.” She might have been talking to Charlie and Dad as they arrived for the June 1967 meeting of a lame-duck city council. The newly elected council would take office the next morning, but the councilmen whose terms were expiring called this emergency meeting on their last night in office hoping to finalize a lease agreement with the A’s. Arriving half an hour early, the Finleys walked by the clerk’s desk and picked up copies of the agenda then took seats in the front row. A kind
of electric stress pervaded the chamber. Charlie and Dad spotted writers for the Kansas City Star toward the back.
The Athletics’ 1964 lease of Municipal Stadium would expire on December 31, 1967, but Charlie and Dad were there to try one more time to get a reasonable renewal. The last rent check for twenty-five thousand dollars under the old lease would come due in August. By the middle of the 1967 season, there was little optimism about baseball in Kansas City. The new council wanted a commitment from Charlie that the team would stay in town for at least four more years. Charlie wanted a fairer deal, one like the Kansas City Chiefs enjoyed, with only a two-year term.
As they disposed of the preliminary items on the agenda, the city councilmen’s eyes flitted nervously between Charlie and Dad in the front row and the business at hand. At last the chairman announced the item everyone was waiting for—whether the city and the Kansas City Athletics could agree on a renewal of the lease.
Days of intense negotiating sessions with Charlie and Dad leading up to this meeting had left both the council and the Finleys optimistic about closing a deal, but it wasn’t certain. The city manager gave a brief report and identified some areas of disagreement. The two hot items remaining to be settled were the amount of the rent and the escape clause, but there were two other big issues in the background—the question of a new stadium and the relentless animosity of local sports media—chiefly the Kansas City Star.