Finley Ball Page 8

  When the city manager finished his report, the chairman invited Charlie to address the council. The councilmen’s faces betrayed their worry. They wanted to keep the franchise in Kansas City. If the A’s moved out, it could be years before they got a new team. But there were lots of others in town who wanted Charlie gone. Charlie spoke in his typical deliberate manner, fixing his dark brown “talon-like” eyes (as Bowie Kuhn would call them) on his audience. His occasional smiles didn’t seem to relax the apprehensive councilmen.

  Throughout the negotiations on the renewal of the lease, the Kansas City Star sports writers had relentlessly criticized Charlie, trying to discredit him with rumors that, despite the huge sums he had spent on improvements to Municipal Stadium, he intended to move to Dallas, Louisville, Oakland, or some other city. Ernie Mehl in particular, now half-retired, continued his vendetta against Charlie, who could do nothing right. The effect of the constant bad press could be seen in the team’s annual “Official Score Book.” The 1965 edition carried display ads for TWA, the Hotel Muehlebach, the Shoreham, the Leamington, and Hamm’s beer. By 1967 the ads for the major hotels had been replaced by ads for “Cat Balleu—featuring Strip-O-Rama,” Lorillard Cigarettes, and Quick & Easy Loans.

  Charlie brought up his key issues. Under the 1964 lease, the A’s were paying fifty thousand dollars a year, but the city now wanted five hundred thousand dollars a year. Charlie was willing to compromise. He knew that for political reasons the council was unlikely to renew the 1964 terms, and he offered $250,000 a year for rent. Even that number would be a strain on franchise cash-flow. Dad, who handled the books and the ticket sales, paid the bills, signed off on the lineup for each game, handled public relations, and owned a minority share of the franchise, squirmed imperceptibly when Charlie uttered the figure.

  Charlie then proposed virtually the same escape clause that was in the 1963 lease and from which former owner Arnold Johnson had benefited. If attendance dropped below a certain figure, Charlie would be released from the lease and free to move the franchise out of town. Attendance had been poor since 1963. A council member spoke up, objecting that attendance was virtually certain to come in under the figure in the escape clause. But Charlie optimistically suggested that attendance could be improved with the city’s help. Several of the council members cautiously nodded their heads.

  As Charlie spoke, an exaggerated cough could occasionally be heard. Dad looked over his shoulder and saw Ernie Mehl, who smirked at him. Always the gentlemen, Dad replied with a slightly sardonic smile.

  When he concluded, Charlie answered a few perfunctory questions about less important terms. The council thanked him, and he resumed his seat. The councilmen then discussed the matter among themselves at great length. Dad could hear the wall clock ticking behind him. Every twenty or thirty minutes Charlie leaned over and, tapping his wristwatch, whispered in Dad’s ear, “When will this be over?” Dad did not reply. They were determined to stick it out to the end. Tonight it would finally be settled—would we or would we not stay in Kansas City? Charlie kept his gaze fixed on the councilmen, alternately smiling and scowling. Sometimes he nodded yes and sometimes no as he listened to the discussion.

  Several times Charlie stood up and approached the lectern to clarify something he thought the council didn’t have quite right. Each time he did, the tension in the room rose. He did, after all, have a reputation for being impatient and excitable. But thanks to Dad’s calming influence, he remained civil.

  Much of the council’s deliberations focused on Charlie’s demand for a new ballpark. With Oakland offering a brand new, and empty, coliseum, would Charlie keep the franchise in Kansas City? They hoped so. They also talked about the possibility of the team’s remaining in K. C. but without Charlie. He wasn’t surprised. Life magazine quoted him as saying, “They wanted to starve me out and keep the team.” Would Charlie be inclined to sell the franchise to a local group if the city council turned down his proposed terms? Nothing they were talking about was new—these questions had been hashed out ad nauseam for weeks. But until tonight, final agreement had seemed unattainable. Now, as Charlie liked to say, it was time to swing or go take a shower.

  Finally, just after 2 a.m., the chairman moved that the city approve the lease with the terms Charlie Finley proposed: two years at $250,000 a year in rent with a promise to build a new stadium. After a long, suspenseful delay, another member seconded the motion. The chairman called for the vote, and one by one the councilmen said “aye.” Dad told me he didn’t realize he hadn’t been breathing while the vote was being taken. He let out a big sigh and looked at Charlie. They beamed at each other. The two of them found a bar open and gulped J&B to celebrate.

  The next morning, however, the newly elected city council met, and the first thing it did was tear up the previous night’s agreement. All the negotiations had been for nothing. The council demanded five hundred thousand dollars a year in rent and a four-year lease. Charlie, Dad, and the whole Finley family were heartbroken. Somehow Ernie Mehl had “flipped” the incoming members. For us it was the last straw.

  By noon Charlie announced that he was moving the team offices out of Municipal Stadium. Under the existing lease, if the offices remained at the stadium past December 31, 1967, a one-year lease extension was automatically triggered. The mayor called Dad offering to extend the cutoff date to January 10, 1968, in hope of further negotiations. Dad passed the message on to Charlie, but Charlie did not return the call.

  It was over. We were going to Oakland.

  The main reasons Charlie and Dad were ready to go to Oakland were obvious: relentless media vilification, unreasonable rent, and the uncertainty of a new stadium. Another important reason, less publicized, was that the team’s television and radio revenue in Oakland would be around a million dollars a year, as compared with fifty thousand dollars a year in Kansas City.1

  MOVE THE LAWNMOWER—THE FRONT OFFICE IS MOVING IN

  In mid-December 1967, Charlie got Dad on the phone. “Carl, we don’t have a lease. What do we do with the front office in January?” By the end of the month, everything was boxed up and carted out to several pickups borrowed for the occasion. The solution they came up with was to move the front office to the home of Joe Bowman, a team scout and front office executive, in the suburb of Leawood, Kansas. Dad, Bowman, Hank Peters (the player personnel executive), and their secretaries set up their desks in Bowman’s two-car garage and stayed there for seven weeks.

  There was only one phone for the house and the franchise office. Bowman recalls, “They used the phone here in the kitchen. [Charlie] got mad when the wife would be talking to her friends. I tried to tell him one day, ‘Charlie, you want a telephone that no one’s on, you put one in. But as long as that phone is in my kitchen, and my wife is paying for it, she’s going to talk on it, and you’re not going to tell her how long.’ He didn’t say any more about it.”

  The Bowmans soon were exposed to Charlie’s unorthodox working hours. When Joe was scouting on the road, his wife received calls from Charlie at one or two o’clock in the morning asking her to find documents in the garage. She usually grumbled but complied. Still, Charlie tried, in his own way, to be considerate, paying for new bluegrass to replace the lawn that his employees trampled.

  Sam Gould, the owner of the stadium parking lot, remarked how strange it was to drive by the Bowmans’ house and see the whole front office, complete with desks and file cabinets, packed into the garage, the doors usually open to the street.

  Dad and Rick Monday moved to Oakland in late 1967 to promote the team’s upcoming season, make arrangements for the office’s move, and find a stable for Charlie O. The coliseum board had assured the Athletics that the structure would be completely finished in time for the 1968 season, but Dad discovered on his arrival that the walls of the executive offices were still bare cinder block. The board again promised that the offices would be completed, but when the team moved in, the cinder block was still there, giving the executive off
ices all the charm of a prison cell. After spending a fortune on the stadium in Kansas City with little to show for it, Charlie refused to put any money into finishing the Oakland Coliseum, and the executive office walls were still unfinished when Charlie sold the team in 1980.

  To this day, Kansas Citians blame Charlie for moving the A’s out of Kansas City. But a closer look at the facts shows that Charlie did all he could to stay in town and make the fans happy. He spent half a million dollars to renovate Municipal Stadium in 1961. He pledged $150,000 to lure the Beatles to Kansas City in 1964. He put on every kind of promotion he could think of to draw fans to the ballpark. He pushed MLB to have night games so workers could watch the games. And he gave the team Charlie O as a mascot. He really tried.

  The civic and political leaders of Kansas City, especially Ernie Mehl and his newspaper, could have made all the difference. With a little good faith on their part, Charlie Finley and the Kansas City A’s probably wouldn’t have left.

  The bad press continued even after the move to Oakland. On the floor of the U.S. Senate, Stuart Symington of Missouri famously declared that “Oakland is now the luckiest city since Hiroshima.” After three

  World Series championships, Oakland probably did consider itself pretty lucky.

  Ernie Mehl got what he wanted—Charlie Finley was gone from Kansas City. Charlie, for his part, freed himself from uncooperative city authorities and a toxic public relations environment. He headed to Oakland and into baseball destiny.

  End of story.

  PART II

  THE OAKLAND A’S

  1968–1982

  CHAPTER 14

  GAME ON

  1968–1969

  After thirteen seasons in Kansas City, the Oakland A’s were scheduled to make their debut on April 9, 1968, against Baltimore, and Governor Ronald Reagan was to throw the first pitch. But Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on the fourth, and the game was postponed. Reagan threw out the first pitch on April 17 in front of a sold-out crowd of 50,164. Oakland was now an official major-league city (though the Orioles won the game).

  The Oakland–Alameda County Coliseum along the Nimitz Freeway in East Oakland had opened in 1966. The financing and construction of the stadium was the work of a private, non-profit corporation led by the real estate developer Robert T. Nahas. When the project was completed, ownership of the Coliseum was transferred to the city and county, though Nahas and the other members of the original corporation (including Senator William Knowland and the industrialist Edgar Kaiser Sr.) constituted the governing board, keeping the day-to-day operations and decision-making power away from the Oakland and Alameda County politicians.

  PLAYERS GROW (AND MANAGERS GO)

  Rick Monday, the No. 1 pick in MLB’s first-ever player draft in 1965, was supposed to be the A’s big slugger that first season in Oakland. Charlie and the A’s had gotten the first draft pick after finishing the ’65 season with the worst record in baseball—59–103—and they took Monday after he had led the Arizona State Sun Devils to the 1965 College World Series championship. After posting a gaudy .359 batting average, Monday was named an All-American and college player of the year. He was so good that he overshadowed his highly touted teammate, the freshman outfielder Reggie Jackson. But Jackson caught the A’s front office’s eye. A year after drafting Monday, the A’s used their 1966 first-round pick to get Jackson, and by the end of the 1968 season he had grabbed the spotlight from Monday.

  At the end of the final game of 1968, Bob Kennedy, the A’s manager, changed out of his uniform into his street clothes and walked upstairs to the executive offices to meet with Charlie. He was sure that he had done enough to keep his job. In his first year as team skipper, he had led the A’s to their best record in sixteen years—not a bad way to start the Oakland era.

  A few minutes later, Charlie fired him. Kennedy left the Coliseum without talking to anyone, walking right past the newspaper reporters and even some good friends who had been waiting for him, recalls the Oakland sports writer Ron Bergman in his book Mustache Gang. The team’s public relations director, Val Binns, followed him and read a prepared statement to the sportswriters, announcing that Kennedy indeed had been let go. His replacement was Hank Bauer.

  Hank Bauer was the first manager that Charlie ever hired, replacing holdover Joe Gordon halfway through the 1961 season in Kansas City. Bauer, who was an outfielder for the Athletics at the time, learned of his new job during a game when it was announced over the Municipal Stadium PA system, “Hank Bauer, your playing days are over. You have been named manager of the A’s.” His first stint lasted through the 1962 season, and now he was back for ’69.

  The A’s first season in Oakland was a winning one: eighty-two wins and eighty losses—a twenty-win improvement over 1967’s miserable 62–99 record. Lew Krausse Jr., the hometown Kansas City hero who had shown so much promise in 1961, had a solid season in Oakland. He won ten against eleven losses with a solid 3.11 ERA. His teammate Chuck Dobson, a twenty-four-year-old hurler who had grown up in the shadow of Kansas City Municipal Stadium, went 12–14 with a good 3.00 ERA. The A’s were loaded with talent that Charlie and Dad had patiently accumulated, but they were about learn that the baseball seas could be as stormy in Oakland as they had been in Kansas City.

  WORKING WITH CHARLIE

  In the late ’60s someone described the A’s as a dysfunctional family. That was a pretty fair comparison. The team and the front office were awash in hurt feelings, and Charlie butted heads with nearly everyone.

  Charlie enjoyed a honeymoon with the local press in 1968, but as in Kansas City, it was short lived. When he arrived in Oakland to finalize the move, city leaders were singing his praise. But the shadow of Ernie Mehl stretched farther than anyone expected. He let the Bay Area sports writers know what he thought of the Athletics’ ownership before they set foot in California. When it came to the press, Charlie never had a chance.

  Dad and Charlie were starting to have disagreements, too, on a number of fronts. For one thing, Dad often believed the players should get a higher salary than Charlie was willing to pay, and he warned him that he risked alienating his top players. Before free agency, the players didn’t have much leverage. Holding out at the start of the season was the only way to force an owner to pay attention to a player’s salary demands. When this happened, the sports writers were quick to wring their hands, calling it a sign of the times and blaming the “modern ballplayer.” In fact, holding out was as old as the double play. Even Joe DiMaggio did it once in the late 1930s. Dad worried that players would hold out or play half-heartedly if they thought they weren’t being paid fairly.

  Dad recognized that Charlie, like a lot of bosses with a healthy ego, liked an idea a lot more if he thought it was his own. He wasn’t the type of guy you told what to do. The best way to persuade Charlie to do something was to not persuade him at all. Dad would start by hinting at something that he thought Charlie should do, gently inserting the idea into a conversation, especially during their daily morning phone calls. “Can you believe what Bill Veeck did for a promotion yesterday?” he’d say, or “I’ve always been a fan of Billy Williams of the Cubs. A class act and a real Chicago guy.” He’d plant the seed and let Charlie’s subconscious work it over a bit. Often, in a few days or a few weeks, the idea would become Charlie’s “own.” As long as he didn’t mind never receiving any credit, Dad was a perfect fit that way with Charlie.

  The move to Oakland was hard for a lot of front-office employees. With family in Kansas City and deep ties to the Midwest, most of them didn’t want to move to a distant, unfamiliar place. A number of them stayed behind, preferring to change jobs than change homes. Carolyn Coffin, who pretty much managed the front office and was especially important to the franchise, did not want to leave Kansas City, but Dad convinced her to come with the team.

  Dad himself wasn’t sure he would go. But in the off-time after the 1967 season, he looked at his life. He had changed professions, left his hometown
and family, and gotten a divorce. He was forcibly estranged from his only child by an ex-wife who was increasingly unstable and erratic. What else did he have in his life except running the A’s franchise? So he decided to go to Oakland, but only with several conditions. Charlie had to buy out his minority interest in the franchise, and he had to get rid of his other sports franchises. Charlie agreed.

  Dad refocused on the team when the franchise arrived in Oakland in early 1968. Charlie was around less, preferring to run things from his Chicago office or his ranch in Indiana, so he relied on Dad even more to be his eyes and ears around the franchise. Like a lot of wealthy people who came from humble means, Charlie seemed to have a nagging fear that his wealth would be taken from him, which might explain his occasional stinginess. That fear even made Charlie a little paranoid at times, putting more pressure on Dad to ease his concerns. My husband, who got to know Charlie later in life and came to admire him, says, “There are some things about Charlie that we’re still trying to figure out.”

  One of the bigger misconceptions about Charlie is that he cared more about money than winning. Not true. In the early years in Oakland, when Charlie was making nearly all of the player personnel decisions, he burned with the desire to make the A’s a World Series winner. The franchise hadn’t won a title since Herbert Hoover was president, and the so-called experts thought Charlie’s ambition was laughable. But to anyone paying attention to the astonishing level of young talent that Charlie (and Dad) were quietly stockpiling, the idea wasn’t so ridiculous.