Hairs vs. Squares Read online

  In the 1950s Finley used his accumulated wealth to try and purchase a major league franchise. His first attempt to buy the Kansas City Athletics fell short by one hour. Finley had a 9 a.m. breakfast date with Connie Mack, and Charlie believed there was every indication a deal would be made. But another investor, Arnold Johnson, had an 8 a.m. meeting with Mack that same day, and it was Johnson who wound up with the club.

  Finley then bid for the Detroit Tigers and twice came close to acquiring the Chicago White Sox, first from Dorothy Comiskey Rigney and then from the troika of Bill Veeck, Hank Greenberg, and Arthur Allyn. Charlie also pursued the Angels’ expansion franchise in Los Angeles. In December 1960, following Johnson’s untimely death, Finley bought a controlling interest (52 percent) in the Kansas City Athletics for $1.975 million. Now the principal owner, he also named a new chairman of the board: Charles O. Finley.

  “I wanted to get into baseball in the worst way,” he joked to banquet audiences when the Athletics were perennial pushovers. “And that’s exactly what I did.”

  To generate interest in his sad-sack squad, which had endured four straight dreadful summers since moving to Kansas City from Philadelphia prior to the 1955 season, Finley formulated publicity stunts. He had a herd of sheep grazing in a zoo beyond the outfield wall, and the team mascot was changed from the symbolic White Elephant of Connie Mack’s dynasty teams to a live mule named Charlie O. The mule was given the run of Kansas City’s Municipal Stadium, parading around the outfield, hotel lobbies, cocktail parties, and media dining rooms.

  When catcher/outfielder Johnny Blanchard was traded from the imperial Yankees, where he had played on clubs that had gone to four straight World Series, to the cellar-dwelling Athletics in 1965, he was disgusted to find a game at Municipal Stadium being delayed so that Charlie O. the mule could be walked, ever so slowly, through the center field fence to home plate, where the Kansas City players were expected to surround the mule and sing happy birthday to him.

  This is a long way from the Yankees, Blanchard thought. No way am I going to sing happy birthday to that damn mule. The players weren’t the only ones expected to sing to Charlie O. the mule. Catfish Hunter recalled Finley commissioning two team songs, one of which Hunter said was a country and western number titled “Charlie O. the Mule.” Finley also demanded A’s announcer Harry Caray change his famous “Holy cow!” call to “Holy mule!” Charlie O. the mule was also used to transport Kansas City pitchers, bareback of course, from the bullpen to the mound.

  In 1972, after letting Charlie O. the mule meander around the organization for years, Finley demanded Charlie O. join the team. The mule went from grazing in hospitality suites deep in the Oakland Coliseum to grazing in foul territory in left field. The mule had a habit of, in Williams’s words, “taking a big crap” down the left-field line. It got so bad that the A’s skipper would have to tell the opposing manager during pregame meetings at home plate at the Coliseum, “The mule shits out there, and we can’t always be cleaning it. So if a ball rolls in shit, it’s still in play.”

  Charlie O. the mule was just one of the promotions that sprang from Finley’s fertile mind. Grounds crews at Municipal Stadium performed their duties dressed in space suits; the fence in right field was moved in to mirror the famed short porch in Yankee Stadium; and “Campy Campaneris Night” was held so that the versatile shortstop could play all nine positions in a single game. Finley’s promotions included Bald-Headed Night, Hot Pants Day, Farmers’ Night, etc. The A’s sponsored Back-to-School Days, Finley buying several thousand dollars’ worth of rulers to give to children in attendance.

  Like fellow maverick owner Bill Veeck, whose promotional gimmicks included an exploding scoreboard, nameplates on uniform jerseys, and the sending of 3-foot-7 Eddie Gaedel, whose uniform number was “1/8,” to bat—Finley bucked tradition at every turn.

  Charlie despised major league baseball’s bland uniform colors—“eggshell white and prison gray,” in his words. To take advantage of the country’s switch from black-and-white to color television Finley persuaded the league to allow the Athletics to change the color of their uniforms to a flamboyant green and gold. Critics ridiculed the new uniforms, but Charlie O. didn’t care. He knew the trend was to color. He remembered the days when almost all telephones and automobiles were black and TV screens were black and white. Then the switch came to color. He thought the A’s attractive uniforms were eye-catching on color TV.

  In 1967 Finley outfitted the A’s in white cleats rather than the traditional black. He said the cleats were made of kangaroo skin so that the A’s could “get a better jump on the ball.”

  The players were embarrassed by their new accoutrements. They felt like clowns in a circus, and opposing players taunted them by singing the Barnum and Bailey theme song. When New York Yankees great Mickey Mantle first saw the gaudy green-and-gold outfits and white cleats, he suggested the A’s come out of their dugout “on tippy-toes, holding hands and singing.”

  When Williams first put on his A’s uniform, he noticed that the coaches’ caps were white with a green bill while the players’ caps were green with a gold bill. Some of us, Williams thought, have been given the wrong uniforms. Ultimately he realized the mismatched uniforms were another of Finley’s innovations. Charlie wanted members of the coaching staff to be able to quickly spot each other. Williams understood that more than he understood what he called the “styrofoam surfboards on my feet—white shoes.”

  Despite his nonstop promotional gimmickry, diminishing attendance in Kansas City caused Finley to seek relocation more than once. Proposed moves to Dallas in 1962 and Louisville in 1964 were blocked by fellow owners. When Finley did finally move the franchise to Oakland prior to the 1968 season, he was serenaded out of town by irate Missourians. Senator Stuart Symington labeled Finley “one of the most disreputable characters ever to enter the American sports scene.”

  Charlie O. laughed all the way to the bank. Funded by his giant insurance brokerage and his fertilizer company, he owned the Athletics, and in time would also own the NHL’s California Golden Seals, whom he also outfitted in colorful uniforms and white skates, and the Memphis Tams of the American Basketball Association. He got college basketball legend Adolph Rupp to work for the Tams.

  Finley ran the A’s with a small staff—the smallest, he boasted, in the majors. But that didn’t stop him from signing some of the game’s best young talents. In 1962 he got future All-Star shortstop Bert Campaneris for just $500. Two years later he landed eighteen-year-old Catfish Hunter. Tenace, fellow future All-Star Joe Rudi, and future Hall of Famer Rollie Fingers were signed fresh out of high school within a year after Hunter.

  Finley’s tireless pursuits weren’t limited to baseball. A football enthusiast, he put out feelers to purchase the Chicago Bears and also the Miami Dolphins. He had season tickets to Bears’ games and was an admirer of George Halas, Pittsburgh Steelers owner Art Rooney Sr., and San Francisco 49ers boss Lou Spadia. His college football cronies ranged from Notre Dame’s Frank Leahy and Ed “Moose” Krause to Alabama’s Paul “Bear” Bryant.

  Tenace recalls Finley being so enamored with Bryant that he wore the Bear’s famous plaid fedoras and houndstooth hats to A’s games and once invited the legendary coach to give the A’s a pep talk during a team slump. “We didn’t know what the hell was going on,” Tenace laughed. “But, hell, he was Bear Bryant and he had some good things to say.”

  Finley was so obsessed with football that Shirley once stated that if her husband thought it was possible to purchase Notre Dame, “he’d give it a try.”

  Colorful and controversial, Finley enraged and entertained the baseball establishment. He championed change in a sport that in many ways had stood still for half a century. He campaigned for night World Series games to replace afternoon games so that the working man and schoolkids could see the game. Also there was the benefit of prime-time television and increased revenue from the networks. He lobbied to have the World Series and regular season
openers start on Saturday rather than weekdays for maximum exposure. The designated hitter was another Finley folly that was ultimately adopted by American League owners. In 1997 the Lords of the Game would also begin interleague play, some twenty-five years after Finley had first pushed for it. His proudest promotional accomplishment, he said at the time, was Mustache Day. It gave the A’s a look and style unique to their sport.

  Change was necessary, Finley stated at the time, to keep the game modern. He embraced the role of the prophet in the desert. “If anyone asks me what’s wrong with baseball,” he said in 1972, “I’d say stupidity on the part of the owners. I’ve always been aggressive in my thinking regarding baseball, and any time that you become a little aggressive in your thinking you’re bound to step on a few toes. And I have no apologies whatsoever for that. If it’s necessary to step on a few more, I’ll step on ’em!”

  Baseball is a great game, he said, but it’s faced with a lot of competition, and the people in baseball had to do everything possible to keep the game the nation’s number one sport. He pointed to the NFL, NHL, and NBA and said the thing that kept those sports so interesting was the balance between offense and defense. Football matched 11-on-11, basketball 5-on-5. But baseball was nine fielders against one batter. It was time to give the hitter some help.

  “We in baseball are like this,” Finley said, spreading his hands wide. “The defense has great advantages over the offense. They say pitching is 75 to 80 percent of the game and how true that is. We’ve got to take some of the advantages away from the defense.”

  The average pitcher, he declared, couldn’t hit. So the pitcher went into every game facing eight hitters instead of nine. Use a designated hitter, Finley reasoned, and now the pitcher would have to face nine hitters. That would put more action in baseball. The same went for a designated runner, three-ball count, and a twenty-second clock on pitchers. Every other sport had a clock, he reasoned. Why not baseball?

  Action—that’s what the game needed, Charlie O. declared. “Let’s get some action in this sport!”

  NFL owners, Finley said, were aggressive in their thinking. They were continuously making rules changes to keep their sport interesting. Get a list of NFL rules changes, he said. “It’ll be enough to choke a cow.”

  He recalled a time in football when a player had to be five yards behind the scrimmage line before he could throw a pass, and if he threw two consecutive incomplete passes, his team was penalized. He remembered when he played high school basketball, and every time a basket was scored, there was a jump ball at center court. “After every damn basket!” he said. If the final score was 23–21, headlines in the paper referred to it as a “free-scoring match.”

  His point was that while other sports adapted, baseball didn’t. “We haven’t had one major rules change in 86 years,” he said in ’72. “Eighty-six years, not one major change.”

  Three years later Finley was still singing the same tune. He had never seen so many “damned idiots” as the owners in the sport. Baseball, he declared, was headed for extinction if the owners didn’t make changes.

  But change had come to baseball in the spring of ’72. Finley initially stood with his fellow owners in the early days of the strike, even issuing a sound bite that sounded like an ominous warning to his players: “Pigs get fat and hogs go to market.”

  He soon saw the folly in the owners’ position. Finley realized his colleagues didn’t know a surplus existed in the pension fund until the players disclosed it. Along with that, the owners hadn’t had enough time to properly digest an actuarial report given to them in a meeting in Chicago. Finley understood it, but despite his obvious qualifications given his background, the insurance magnate wasn’t a member of the owners’ pension committee. Realizing the Players Association had valid points, Finley reversed his hard-line stand.

  “The owners didn’t understand what it was all about,” he said later. “I was adamant in standing pat on our original offer but I was standing pat only because I hadn’t been presented with the facts.”

  Feeling he was better informed than his fellow owners, Finley took charge. A maverick-turned-moderator, he contacted his colleagues via a flurry of long-distance phone calls and, using his gift for salesmanship, convinced them to accept a compromise settlement.

  Sportswriter Ron Bergman wrote later that the “voice of reason was heard throughout the land. And the voice belonged to Charles Oscar Finley, owner of the Athletics. And the populace fell over each other in surprise and disbelief.”

  No one fell harder or faster at the thought of Finley being the voice of reason than one of Charlie O.’s own, his young fire-balling phenom, Vida Blue.

  While Finley assumed a conciliatory stance in the players’ strike, he stood fast and firm in his contract dealings with his holdout, Blue. Vida was one of the game’s great young stars in 1971. Having gone 24-8 with a 1.82 ERA and 301 strikeouts in 312 innings, he was the starting and winning pitcher in the 1971 All-Star Game in Detroit. At season’s end, the twenty-two-year-old from Mansfield, Louisiana, had earned both the American League Cy Young award and Most Valuable Player honors. In so doing, he became just the fifth man in major league history to that point to record the rare double.

  Blue was, according to Williams, “so smooth and so rough he resembled a jewel.” Bando compared Blue’s 1971 season to Bob Gibson’s record-setting 1968 campaign. Reporters likened Blue to great flame throwers of the past—Bob Feller, Sandy Koufax, et al. “I find it astonishing,” Vida said of the heady comparisons.

  Blue was also astonished by all the attention he was receiving. Vida, Hunter once recalled, didn’t like it. To Blue it was “a weird scene.” He wins a few baseball games, and all of a sudden he’s surrounded by reporters and TV men with cameras asking things about Vietnam and race relations. I’m only a kid, Vida thought. I don’t have a whole philosophy of life set down.

  What Blue did have was an elaborate and unique windup; “all pretzeled up” was how Sports Illustrated writer Roy Blount described it. Blue hid the ball behind a high knee pump of his right front leg. Like the celebrated hurler in Bruce Springsteen’s Glory Days, Vida could throw his speed ball by you, make you look like a fool. “The way we heard it,” New York Yankees All-Star outfielder Bobby Murcer said after facing Vida for the first time at Yankee Stadium, “was that we wouldn’t even be able to see the ball.”

  When the Yankees finally faced Blue, they still weren’t sure they had seen his fearsome fastball. Yankees star outfielder Roy White told Time magazine that a pitch from Blue “seems to speed up on you and then disappear.” The Yankees weren’t alone in issuing effusive praise. Kansas City Royals third baseman Paul Schaal swore Vida’s heater was otherworldly. “It jumps,” he said.

  Oakland catcher Dave Duncan believed Blue to be the hardest thrower in baseball. “His ball is on top of a hitter almost before he sees it,” Duncan said. Baseball historian and statistician Bill James calls Blue the hardest throwing lefty of his era and the second-hardest thrower of that period behind Nolan Ryan.

  Eyewitnesses claimed Vida’s blue darter alternately popped, hopped, tailed, sailed, skipped, swooped, sunk, smoked, and whooshed. Some opponents were confident they could catch up with Blue’s fastball. “We’ll get him,” they would say before taking the field. After another dominating performance by Blue, those same opponents would be heard muttering, “Well, we’ll get him . . . next time.”

  Blue’s success in ’71 wasn’t totally unexpected. In 1968 he led the Midwest League in strikeouts and in ’69 the Southwest League, and in 1970 he topped the American Association with 165 Ks. He joined the A’s for the final month of the ’70 season, and on September 21, in just his fourth major league start, he no-hit eventual Western Division champion Minnesota. Eleven days earlier he had been four outs away from no-hitting Kansas City when outfielder Pat Kelly singled. Blue finished with a one-hitter.

  Vida took the sports world by storm in ’71. He was Mark Fidrych before “the Bird,” F
ernando Valenzuela prior to “Fernandomania,” Dwight Gooden before he became “Dr. K,” and Tim Lincecum before he became the Freak.

  “Instant phenomhood,” is how New York Post sportswriter Larry Merchant described Blue’s summer. The young gun’s name was a headline writer’s dream. Baseball writer Roger Angell thought “Vida Blue” was the kind of name conjured up by Ring Lardner or Damon Runyon—Lardner or Runyon, Angell wrote, “on a good day.”

  Blue’s surname lent itself to all kinds of possibilities: Rhapsody in Blue; Blue Streak; and in a play on the famous “Spahn and Sain and Pray for Rain,” Hunter and Blue and Pray for Dew.

  Finley loved colorful nicknames. “Who the hell,” Finley would say, “ever paid to see George Ruth?”

  Early in the 1971 season the boss called Blue into his office. “I’ll give you $2,000 if you have [your name] changed legally to ‘Vida True Blue.’ We’ll have them take the name ‘Blue’ off of your uniform and have them use ‘True.’ I’ll tell the broadcasters to start calling you True Blue.’”

  Blue could barely contain his anger. He told Finley he would never consent to changing his name and told a writer he was “humiliated” by the request. “I couldn’t believe he was serious,” Blue said. “Vida was my father’s name. I loved him very much. He was a good, good man. Vida means ‘life’ in Spanish. I enjoy being Vida Blue. Why would I want to be called ‘True Blue’?” If Finley likes it so much, Blue said then, “why doesn’t he call himself ‘True O. Finley?’”

  Vida’s success on the mound granted him access to avenues off limits to all but the superstars of sport. En route to leading Oakland to its first division championship and the A’s franchise to its first postseason berth since 1931, Blue would do TV ads for milk and aftershave lotion; be cast in the 1972 movie Black Gunn, which starred retired Cleveland Browns great Jim Brown; and appear on the TV show What’s My Line? He was featured on the cover of national magazines; Time featured a splashy artist’s rendition accompanied by the words “New Zip in the Old Game.” President Nixon arranged for the A’s to visit the White House so that he could meet the man who was on track to become baseball’s first 30-game winner since Detroit’s Denny McLain had won 31 in 1968.