Hairs vs. Squares Read online

At the meeting Miller reviewed the negotiations with the owners and suggested the strike be delayed until 1973, when the Players Association would be on a more firm footing.

  There was a great stirring in the room as numerous hands instantly shot up. The players were more determined to accept management’s challenge not to strike than Miller had realized. They were, he thought, “positively militant.”

  The union boss played the role of devil’s advocate. The Players Association didn’t have a strike fund, didn’t have a public relations staff to battle a hostile press. None of that mattered. Player after player stood and expressed his dedication to the cause. Of the forty-eight player reps, forty-seven voted for the walkout.

  On April 1 MLB players initiated a “lightning strike.” When the strike was announced, much of the national press turned hostile. The Sporting News editor C. C. Johnson Spink said the walkout marked the “darkest day in sports history.” The press in Cincinnati was particularly virulent. It was no surprise, Miller thought, since Reds owner Francis Dale was also the owner of the Cincinnati Enquirer. Among those at the forefront of the firestorm of criticism was California Angels owner Gene Autry. The owners, he angrily declared, “ought to close baseball down forever!”

  Many fans felt the same way. With the average U.S. income in 1972 at $11,800, most paying customers had little sympathy for the financial plight of players earning an average of $30,000. In New York City angry cabbies told passengers the players were spoiled. “Why are they striking now,” some asked, “in the baseball season? It isn’t fair.” Time magazine captured the sentiment of many baseball fans when it led its coverage of the work stoppage with a poem:

  There were saddened hearts in baseball for a week or ever more;

  There were muttered oaths and curses—every fan was clearly sore.

  “Just think,” said one, “how much we missed with no one up to bat,

  And ballparks closed throughout the land by an owner-player spat.”

  As far as many Americans were concerned, unions were in place to protect employees and provide a counterbalance against employers who might abuse their powers. The idea of a major league baseball union was odd to many since making a living playing a game seemed to the public to be a privilege. Certainly being a ballplayer was less rigorous than being a coal miner and more rewarding and glamorous than being a grocery clerk. That the athletes would go on strike and risk losing the favor of their fans was a notion too foreign to many to even entertain.

  Reds players were so concerned with negative blowback from fans and the media that team player rep Jim Merritt asked Miller to address the squad on April 5. Roberto Clemente contacted Miller and asked if the union chief would visit the Pirates following his meeting with the Reds. Dave Giusti was Pittsburgh’s player rep, but as Miller noted, Clemente was the real leader of the reigning champions’ clubhouse.

  At the urging of Baltimore player rep Brooks Robinson, Miller followed his visits with the Reds and Pirates by meeting with the Orioles. After the walkout, Orioles owner Jerry Hoffberger called a team meeting and proceeded to rip the players at length. Manager Earl Weaver warned his team the strike would ruin their chances of playing in a fourth straight World Series. Orioles ace Jim Palmer said Miller had brainwashed the union.

  Despite the charges emanating from Baltimore, it was clear to keen-eyed observers that the Players Association had been right all along. Roger Angell, an author and writer for the New Yorker magazine, is arguably the most passionate and elegant essayist of the American pastime. It was Angell’s opinion that from the beginning of negotiations the Players Association had been willing to compromise or submit to arbitration its main point of difference with the owners: the use of accumulated funds in the players’ pension plan to increase the benefits being paid out.

  The owners, Angell noted, had declared any accommodation to be an absolute impossibility. He blamed the hard-liners, the “more dedicated Cro-Magnons among the owners,” whom Angell identified as Busch, Dale, the New York Mets’ M. Donald Grant, and the Kansas City Royals’ Ewing Kauffman. Minnesota Twins owner Calvin Griffith fit into this group of conservatives. Some said swimming was invented when Calvin Griffith first came to a toll bridge. This group of owners, Angell said, saw the strike as an opportunity to strain, and perhaps crack, their young employees and to discredit their leader, Miller.

  Other members of the press came down on both sides. Young used the strike to decry unions. Fellow New York sportswriter Phil Pepe thought the players were getting a bad rap and wondered why the continual citing of the players’ salaries was not balanced by a mentioning of the average length of a player’s career, which in 1972 was four-and-a-half seasons.

  Fans found it hard to bleed for grown men playing a kid’s game, but it was the players whom people paid to see. No one, it was noted, ever went to the stadium to watch old Connie Mack wave his scorecard around.

  The owners told fans they were standing fast for them, that it was the players who were ruining the game. But many believed the fate of the game rested, as it always had, with the kids. If America’s youth devoted its time and energy to baseball, the sport would thrive. If they were playing football or basketball instead, baseball would suffer.

  On the scheduled Opening Day, stadiums across the country were fronted by signs reading “No Game Today.” New York sportswriter Larry Merchant covered kids in Central Park, East River Park, and Washington Square playing baseball. CBS-TV carried a picture of Blue, Oakland’s young southpaw ace and reigning Cy Young winner-turned-toilet fixtures executive, and declared him to be MLB’s lone employed player. An Associated Press photographer snapped a picture of an Orioles clubhouse employee disconsolately playing solitaire in a Baltimore locker room filled with uniform tops hanging neatly in their stalls.

  To paraphrase the poet Robert Burns, big league baseball had become a world of gathering brows and a gathering storm. One prominent player thankful for the strike was Mets player rep and staff ace Tom Seaver. The sudden death of skipper Gil Hodges in spring training had rocked the Mets. Seaver’s roommate on the road, All-Star shortstop Bud Harrelson, said Seaver saw the strike as “a blessing in disguise.” The Mets needed time to recover from Hodges’s passing before the season started.

  At the same time that Jack Nicklaus was about to grab headlines by claiming the fourth of his eventual six Masters titles with a three-stroke victory among the azaleas in Augusta and the New York Knicks and Los Angeles Lakers were on an East-West collision course in the NBA playoffs, American League president Joe Cronin ordered major league stadiums closed to players during the strike.

  In Oakland the owner of the A’s defied the order and demanded that the Coliseum be kept open so his players could keep fit. Charles O. Finley was about to become the voice of reason in baseball.

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  He was, according to the Los Angeles Times, “a self-made man who worshipped his creator.”

  Charles O. Finley—the “O” stood for “Oscar,” but Finley told one of his managers, Dick Williams, the “O” really stood for “Owner”—was a slick salesman, an innovator, and his own general manager. He was baseball’s answer to his NFL counterpart in Oakland, the Raiders’ Al Davis, and a forerunner to Dallas’s Jerry Jones. In its 1975 cover story Time magazine called Finley baseball’s Barnum, the sport’s “Super Showman.”

  A’s All-Star catcher/first baseman Gene Tenace remembers Finley as a “hell of a general manager.” Hall of Fame slugger Reggie Jackson said Finley would do anything to make his team better. Jackson allowed that Charlie O. could also be a lot of fun. Finley, he said, knew how to raise a little hell and have a good time. Jackson thought Charlie O. would be a great guy to have as a buddy—if, Reggie added, you didn’t have to work for him.

  Those who did work for Finley found he could also be a tyrant and a miser. From 1961 to 1975 Charlie O. churned through sixteen broadcasters, twelve team managers, ten publicity managers, seven farm directors, and five scouting directors. He sent his ove
rworked staff scurrying with round-the-clock phone calls and kept tabs on everything from his players’ baseball bat orders to press room food in the Oakland Coliseum. A’s equipment manager Frank Ciensczyk sometimes took as many as six calls a day from Finley. When Tenace asked for a new pair of uniform pants, Ciensczyk balked. “I’ll have to check it with Charlie,” he told a startled Tenace.

  Alvin Dark, who succeeded Dick Williams as the A’s skipper in 1974 and helped guide Oakland to a third straight World Series title and consecutive Western Division titles in ’74 and ’75, recalled that Finley was tough to work for. Charlie was rough and tough, Dark said, and at times seemed cruel. A’s skippers complained that the boss called them in the dugout, in the clubhouse, and at home. He would make them explain every move and never seemed satisfied with their explanations. He told them whom to play, where to play them, and when to play them.

  Still Finley was a winner, and Charlie O. made that plain to his players, who at times benefited from his generosity but also had to fight at times for every penny. By the mid-1970s Finley seemed to be gaining as much satisfaction from winning arbitration battles with his stars as he was from winning world championships. In 1974 Jackson, Bando, and Holtzman won salary increases from Finley. The following season, Bando produced 24 game-winning hits and Holtzman was a 19-game winner, yet neither received a raise.

  “Sure, Bando had some clutch hits,” Finley said then. “Don’t I deserve something for $100,000? As for Holtzman—hell, he won 21 games in 1973. What am I supposed to do, give him a raise for having a worse year?”

  When Jackson had held out for higher pay in 1970, Finley had humiliated his twenty-three-year-old star by publicly ridiculing his athletic ability and salary demands. Later that summer Jackson slugged a grand slam, and as he crossed home plate, he looked toward Finley and raised his fist in defiance. An angered Finley responded the next day. Jackson was ordered to write a formal apology in the presence of then manager John McNamara, four coaches, and Bando. Reggie wrote the apology—in tears. Finley, Jackson said later, wanted to show who was boss.

  In time A’s players came to hate Finley. “Screw that bastard!” they would exclaim with great venom. They grew tired of torn pants and two-year-old shirts serving as uniforms, no stamps for answering fan mail, no free telephone in the clubhouse for local calls, commercial flights instead of charter flights, and cheap hotels on road trips. “Charlie Finley,” one A’s player told Time in 1975, “is the cheapest son of a bitch in baseball.”

  Finley angrily refuted each charge. The A’s, he declared, stayed in the same hotels as other major league teams. The commercial flights were all first class; there was no phone in the clubhouse because it was against major league rules to have a phone handy since gamblers could call. As for stamps, Finley said the players could have all they needed if they brought their fan mail up to the club office. “I know one thing,” he told Time. “They’re so selfish and lazy they won’t answer any fan mail. Hell, there’ll be so few letters I’ll lick ’em myself!”

  Charlie O. called the charges against him “ridiculous.” To him, his champions had become “a bunch of spoiled brats.”

  Finley, meanwhile, was seen by some as an insufferable self-promoter. He liked to slip into his chauffeured sleek black Cadillac and order driver Howard Risner to “Get this crate rolling.” As the car nosed into traffic, Finley would tell Risner, “Shoot the works.” Risner would hit a button and city streets would reverberate to the sound of the Caddie’s musical horn. “Now the siren,” Finley would say, and a loud wail would startle drivers steering frantically toward the curb. Charlie O. would then switch on a loudspeaker hidden beneath the Caddie’s hood and regale pedestrians with his chatter.

  Finley was likely the only owner in major league baseball at the time whose bio in the team’s media guide took up more pages than those of his star players. He had always wanted to be a player, he said once, but had never had the talent to make the big leagues. “So I did the next best thing: I bought a team.”

  Charlie O. had charged into the gray-suited world of baseball owners and general managers wearing a dazzling green blazer and matching ten-gallon hat. In 1964, while owner of the Kansas City Athletics, Finley promised the local citizenry he would bring the Beatles to Kansas City’s Municipal Stadium during the British rock group’s first tour of the United States. He met with Beatles manager Brian Epstein in San Francisco and offered $100,000 if Missouri were added to the Fab Four’s itinerary. Epstein declined, telling Finley that the Beatles’ lone available open date was September 17, and the group had planned a day of rest in New Orleans.

  One week later Finley encountered Epstein again, this time in Los Angeles, and upped his offer to $150,000. For their one-night performance in Municipal Stadium the Fab Four earned a then record $4,687 per minute for the thirty-two-minute concert. The show was billed with the slogan “Today’s Beatles fans are tomorrow’s baseball fans.” On the back of each concert ticket—prices ranged from $2.00 to $8.50—was a photo of Finley in a black wig. Charlie O. had made himself the fifth Beatle.

  Finley created his own brand of baseball—Day-Glo orange—and labeled it “The Charles O. Finley Alert Orange Baseball.” He also put forth a request to use green bats.

  Born in 1918 in Ensley, Alabama (near Birmingham), Charlie was just twelve years old when he organized his own sandlot baseball team. Naturally he installed himself as the manager. He promised himself at the time he would someday either be a major leaguer or own a big league club. Charlie’s wheeling and dealing in his boyhood days was not limited to baseball. He would buy rejected eggs for five cents a dozen, carry them to office buildings, and sell them for fifteen cents a dozen. He won prizes for selling thousands of magazines door to door. Baseball and salesmanship ruled his boyhood years. When he was fifteen, his poverty-ridden family moved to Gary, Indiana, where Finley took part in sports. He played baseball and football and was a Golden Gloves boxer. He was a batboy for the Birmingham Barons, receiving fifty cents and a used baseball per day, along with an occasional tip for providing chewing tobacco to players. Charlie loved being close to the game. He saw Dizzy Dean pitch for Houston against Birmingham in the Dixie Series and was awed by the colorful character. “What a pitcher Dizzy was!” Finley exclaimed years later.

  To help his family Finley worked as a theater usher and in a butcher shop, and he was considered by classmates the most gentlemanly dresser in school. He met Shirley McCartney, a regular customer in the butcher shop, and Charlie became, in his words, “sweet” on her—so sweet, in fact, that when Shirley came to the shop with three dollars, Charlie would go back into the icebox and wrap up fifteen dollars’ worth of meat. The transactions had her father believing she was a great shopper and the butcher believing she was a valued customer.

  Upon graduation from high school Finley toiled for six years in Gary’s steel mills, following in the footsteps of his father, who spent forty-seven years in U.S. Steel Company mills, and his grandfather, an Irish immigrant steelworker. While earning a starting rate of forty-seven cents an hour, Charlie developed a formula: “S plus S = S.” It stood for “Sweat plus Sacrifice equals Success.” Shirley Finley would later claim it actually stood for “Shirley plus Sharon [the couple’s oldest child] equals Success.”

  At age twenty-four Finley became an insurance salesman, a job that would change his life and ultimately lead to his dragging the game of baseball kicking and screaming into the modern era.

  In his spare time Finley was manager and first baseman for a semipro team in northern Indiana, the LaPorte Cubs. His part-time baseball career ended due to a severe bout with tuberculosis. Hospitalized for twenty-seven months in Parramore Hospital, a Crown Point, Indiana, sanitarium, Finley devised a plan to sell disability insurance to doctors. Here he was, Finley recalled thinking, just a guy in an ordinary job and selling insurance as a night sideline. When TB hit him, Shirley had to work as a proofreader in a Gary newspaper to help make ends meet.

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harlie figured it was a bad enough situation for the average guy, but what a calamity it would be for a fellow with a big income who suddenly found himself without money to meet his high standards of living. Finley asked himself what group of people had such high standards and would be interested in such an insurance program. He thought of doctors. Suppose a surgeon lost a finger or got crippled? His expenses continued, but his income dwindled.

  He left Crown Point with an idea that seemed to him “a natural,” as he told The Sporting News in 1972. The insurance companies weren’t buying any such suggestions, but Finley was stubborn. He had practically exhausted the list of companies that might underwrite his program, so he went back and sold it to the first company that had turned him down—Lake County Medical Society.

  Finley was among the first to write group medical insurance policies for those in the profession. His big break came in 1951, when Continental Casualty handled his first national plan for the American College of Surgeons (ACS). He borrowed $2,000 for two suits, a manicure, and a plane ticket to the ACS convention in San Francisco. With insurance premiums rolling in, Finley’s idea made him a millionaire before the age of forty.

  “He was a master salesman, a very persuasive gentleman,” Curt Gowdy said.

  Finley also prided himself on being an excellent chef. But as Gowdy wondered, “When did he find time to cook?” One other thing about Finley: he never forgot his roots or those who helped him along the way. During the 1972 World Series he would be up until 5 a.m. arranging entertainment and distributing tickets to old friends. A high school classmate from Gary who became a banker and helped finance some of Finley’s early investments said Finley always told him he’d be among the guests when the A’s reached the World Series. In the Series aftermath a testimonial dinner was held in La Porte, Indiana. Finley insisted that the cost of dinner tickets be just two dollars—he wanted prices within reach of working men and women and children. Christmas at the Finley household would find Shirley shopping for their ever-growing family and Charlie telling her the sky was the limit on funds. When the Christmas bills came due in January, however, Charlie usually hit the ceiling. “I really think,” Shirley said then, “that he believes in Santa Claus.”