by Nancy Finley
This retail version is a folk tale largely invented by the press with the encouragement of Kuhn and the perhaps unwitting complicity of Mike Andrews. The media went along with it because the outrageous behavior of a demon owner made a better story than a team led by an insurance salesman and a high school principal winning its second straight World Series.
A FINE CAREER WINDING DOWN
Mike Andrews, always popular with the fans, had had a stellar career with several teams. He began the 1973 season with the White Sox, but his bat had grown cold and his production was fading fast. Just three years after knocking seventeen homers and sixty-five RBIs, Andrews had no homers, ten RBIs, and an anemic .200 average. On July 16 the White Sox released him. Andrews went knocking on doors to see if another team might sign him. Several other teams expressed interest but never offered a contract because of “roster problems.” When he finally talked to the A’s, Charlie was suspicious that there might be something wrong with him.
He had seen Andrews make a throwing error on television earlier in the season when he was with the White Sox, so he asked Andrews about it. Andrews assured him there was nothing wrong with him. Still, Charlie was not entirely convinced, and he didn’t invite Andrews to sign. Instead, he urged him to follow up with the other teams with whom he had been in touch, and if nothing came of it, to get back to him. I think Charlie was hoping Andrews would just go away.
Having been turned down by several teams and out of options, Andrews eventually called Charlie. Caving in to Dick Williams’s urging, and against his better judgment, Charlie did him a favor and signed him as a designated hitter. Andrews would have a last chance to be part of a winning World Series team. Dad, like Charlie, had his doubts. I overheard him talking to Charlie over the phone:
“Well, he wouldn’t be my first choice, Charlie, but it’s up to you.”
“And you don’t have anyone else for that spot? No one we can call up?”
“I know, it is getting late to go looking. It’s your call.”
Charlie’s qualms were no secret. Andrews later admitted that Charlie told him, “[P]ersonally, I think you’re all washed up, but my manager wants you.”3
THE UNSEEN DRAMA
After Game Two I was wandering the halls inside the administrative quarters. I saw Andrews go into Dr. Walker’s office. Then I noticed Andrews, Walker, Dad, and several other front-office people coming and going from Charlie’s office, and I heard voices rising and falling.
I didn’t think anything about it at the time. I didn’t sense that something unusual had happened until about half an hour later. I had gone down to the after-game party, usually a feast. Ordinarily, Dad and Charlie would come down about fifteen minutes after the game ended to join us for something to eat. But that night, after half an hour had passed, it seemed odd that neither Dad nor Charlie had showed up. Win or lose, Dad almost always came down for the food. Others in the room started asking me what was holding them up. I ran upstairs and saw people still talking in Charlie’s office and returned to the party to report the holdup. Finally Dad showed up. He didn’t eat anything but said to me bluntly, “Come on. I need to take you home now.” We drove straight home, and Dad didn’t say anything on the way.
A couple of days later it “hit the fan,” or as they say in baseball, a brouhaha erupted. Andrews held his press conference, maintaining that Dr. Walker, at Charlie’s insistence, had produced a false medical report indicating that Andrews had a disabling condition. He hadn’t wanted to sign it, he said, but Charlie had pressured him.
I heard Dad talking to Charlie after Andrews’s statement, and he did something unusual—he referred to Andrews as “that son of a bitch.” For several decades that’s all I knew about the episode. I read the same version of the story as everyone else in books and magazine articles. I assumed that Charlie had made a big mistake.
WHAT REALLY HAPPENED?
Years later, Dad told me what Charlie had told him in that phone call. Andrews tried to trade his signature on the injury report for a contract to play with the A’s in the 1974 season. Charlie, by now painfully aware that Andrews was damaged goods, refused. According to Dad, Andrews finally gave in and signed a report that, in Dad’s opinion, was a correct diagnosis, and he chose not to seek a second medical opinion. The Andrews controversy thus appeared to be a case of his word against Dad’s, and I believed my father. That’s where things stood when Dad died in 2002 at the age of seventy-six.
As his health declined, my father gave up his apartment and moved boxes of A’s memorabilia and records to my house. I pulled some collector’s items from the stash for safekeeping, but for years the stacks of papers and documents sat undisturbed. Eventually, my curiosity moved me to start going through the documents, though I wasn’t looking for anything in particular. One day I came across a stack of legal documents that, upon examination, shed new light on the biggest controversy of Charlie Finley’s controversial career as owner of the A’s.
ANDREWS UNDER OATH
The documents I had found were transcripts of three depositions—statements given under oath in connection with a lawsuit—taken of Mike Andrews. The first deposition, dated February 13, 1976, was given in the case of Michael Andrews v. Charles O. Finley, et al. The second, dated June 7, 1976, and the third, dated June 9, 1976, were in connection with a medical board case against Dr. Walker.
The transcripts were full of surprises, and I soon realized that Andrews’s testimony gave a very different picture of his dispute with Charlie from the one I’d gotten from the press. To begin with, Andrews disclosed a long history of baseball injuries: a broken ankle in 1963, a hand injury in 1969, an injury to his right shoulder in 1971 (he threw right-handed), and a broken wrist in 1971. The injury to his right shoulder, he said, “only bothered me as far as throwing the ball went, or being active in baseball. . . . It was just bothering, as I found out, as I would throw.” He sought medical attention for that injury, including cortisone injections.
In his examination of Andrews following the second game of the ’73 World Series, Dr. Walker expressed concern about “chronic shoulder disability” and told Andrews that he had found something wrong with his shoulder. Such injuries are common enough among professional baseball players, but there is plenty of evidence that Andrews was injury-prone. The sports writer Saul Wisnia notes that when Andrews broke his wrist on September 1, 1971, it was “the fifth time that year he had been knocked from a game by injury” (emphasis added).4
Several times in the course of the depositions Andrews acknowledged his poor throwing and “erratic arm.” He disclosed that in 1972, when he was with the Chicago White Sox, the coaches felt there was something wrong with his throwing and attempted to correct the mechanics of his throwing from second. “[I] never had what you would call an automatic arm, but I managed to get by,” he said. He confessed that his performance with the White Sox in 1973 was not good and that in July of that year the team wanted to cut his salary by 20 percent.
In an interview two decades later, Andrews compared his throwing problems to those of several other MLB players, including Chuck Knoblauch and Steve Blass. “They called it ‘throwing yips,’” he said. “Nobody knows why it happens but on balls hit right to me where I had a second or two to think about it, I just couldn’t make the throw.” He referred to that problem in the June 7, 1973, deposition. Asked if he had any type of mental block in connection with releasing the ball, he responded, “Yes. Somewhat.” Asked when he thought this difficulty arose, Andrews explained that during the 1973 season he had not played much and was used primarily as a designated hitter.
Q. So you are saying 1973 this difficulty, mental block more or less came about?
A. Yes, I would say it was more substantial in 1973, than it was in 1972.
Andrews testified that he referred to his mental block in a press interview in early 1973 (about one month before he signed with the A’s). He had told the reporter, “I am honestly starting to think I have a mental block a
bout throwing. And I have got to do something about it soon.” Andrews then made an interesting admission. Referring to his 1971 shoulder injury, he said, “I think as time went on when I was with the White Sox, once a person hurts their arm they become very much aware of not hurting it again. . . .”
The contract that Andrews signed with the A’s on August 1, 1973, stated: “The player represents that he has no physical or mental defects known to him and unknown to the appropriate representative of the club which would prevent or impair performance of his services.” Yet he admitted in his depositions that he never disclosed to anyone in the A’s organization the “mental block” that had become so distressing or the injury to his right shoulder. When a skeptical Charlie Finley had asked Andrews about his condition, the player had replied, “I was perfectly a hundred percent all right.” Elsewhere in the deposition he stated, “I told him I was fine and I was ready to play.”
In light of this history, Andrews’s testimony that he strenuously objected to being examined after Game Two is hardly surprising.
Q. Were you agitated or upset by the fact of the examination at that time?
A. Yes.
Q. Did you express this to Dr. Walker?
A. Yes, I did.
Q. What did you tell him?
A. I told him that I didn’t want to be examined; there was no reason for me to be examined.
When Charlie asked Andrews to sign Dr. Walker’s report about the condition of his shoulder, he resisted, saying to sign such a document would “be a lie” and would end his baseball career. He insisted to Dr. Walker that “there was nothing the matter with me.”
NO NEED FOR A SECOND OPINION
Andrews acknowledged under questioning that Charlie was calm and polite and told him he didn’t want him to lie. When the player protested that signing the report would end his career, Charlie told him he didn’t have to sign but urged him to do so for the good of the team. Andrews said he finally signed the statement under pressure.
In that meeting with Charlie, Andrews testified, the team owner offered to have him examined by any doctor of Andrews’s choosing. He declined the offer, telling Charlie “there’s nothing the matter with my arm, and there’s no need to see a doctor.” He feared that a reported disability would “end” his “promising career.”
Asked if he sought a second opinion during the remainder of the World Series, Andrews said no.
Q. Were you asked to be seen or treated or examined by any physician while you were in New York during the time of the World Series?
A. No, I had no need to be.
Q. Had you made any medical appointments, doctor appointments, prior to the time you rejoined the team in New York?
A. No. I hadn’t; I didn’t need one.
An experienced professional player who supposedly had just been coerced into signing a false medical report declaring him disabled—a report that would end his participation in the World Series and perhaps his career—didn’t seek a second opinion for another three weeks. That’s a story that strains credulity.
KUHN INTERVENES
The commissioner of Major League Baseball, Bowie Kuhn, who admittedly had a visceral dislike of Charlie (the feeling was mutual), intervened to keep Andrews off the disabled list. It’s hard to believe that Kuhn, overriding an owner’s decision that was based on the diagnosis of a respected physician, did not seek a second medical opinion about Andrews’s condition. Perhaps a corroboration of the diagnosis would have been too inconvenient. In any case, Andrews’s own account of his recent injuries makes Dr. Walker’s diagnosis of biceps tenosynovitis more than plausible.
WHO IS THE VICTIM?
Whose fault was the Mike Andrews controversy?
To be honest, Charlie has to share some of the blame. He made the initial mistake giving in to Williams and signing a player about whom he had serious misgivings. Andrews, for his part, concealed his physical and mental problems from both Williams and Charlie. Williams contributed to the disaster by inserting a designated hitter as a fielder late in a tied game. As Sports Illustrated’s William Leggett wrote in October 1973, “Andrews has a faulty glove, very limited range and a throwing arm that has been sore for several seasons. Mike Andrews making an error is not a novelty. The fact that Manager Dick Williams had him in the game at second base from the ninth inning through the twelfth was the basic mistake.” Andrews, Leggett concluded, was “the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
CHARLIE GIVES HIM A GIFT
Charlie offered Mike Andrews an opportunity that few ballplayers ever get: to play in a World Series. Andrews also got what most players don’t get upon retirement—a standing ovation from the fans, in the opponents’ ballpark, no less. It was his last hurrah.
In return, Charlie found himself cast as one of the all-time villains of baseball. It’s hard to say whether that was Andrews’s intention. In my opinion, had it not been for Kuhn’s interference, the whole episode would soon have been forgotten in the commotion of another World Series win.
One of the ironies of this story, of course, is that an owner who was so often criticized for “meddling” with his team ended up in this mess precisely because he didn’t “meddle.” He let Williams’ make the decision to sign Andrews and put him in the game at second base. At least Charlie had the last laugh. His team went on to win its second consecutive World Series.
EPILOGUE
Mike Andrews went 0 for 3 with a walk and two notorious fielding errors in the 1973 World Series. He never played for a Major League team again. Today he is the respected chairman of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute’s Jimmy Fund—the signature charity of the Boston Red Sox—where he raises hundreds of millions of dollars for cancer research.
CHAPTER 24
SWITCHBOARD POLITICS
1973–1974
During high school, I “office-hopped” when needed at the Coliseum. I started hanging out with the switchboard operator in her small office, which had a window with a view of the grandstand’s first deck. It was a cozy room, but it was where the action was in the A’s offices (outside of the baseball diamond).
It was an old-fashioned switchboard like you see in movies. The operator held a cord while answering a call which she plugged into the extension the caller requested. I sat next to the operator one day and watched her deal with the stress of answering the barrage of incoming calls. It was feast or famine—a seemingly endless wave of calls would be followed by a few minutes with no calls at all. In those quiet moments, the operator on duty seemed happy to have someone to talk to. It was a thankless job, with low pay and high stress, so turnover was high.
The close quarters of the switchboard room promoted a feeling of kinship. That little office became almost like a confessional, and the operators told me all kinds of eye-opening stories. I got quite an education just by spending time in that tiny office.
I liked Judy, the third operator I met. She wasn’t the smartest person, but she was friendly. She also was talkative and tended to overshare. She told me that she was a born-again Christian and, curiously enough, had just joined the Mormon Church. Unfortunately, she was slow with the calls coming in, and I had heard that Carolyn Coffin, the office manager, was planning to fire her. I kept quiet about that, but I had learned how to work the switchboard, so I offered to help Judy.
When Charlie met new employees, he liked to test them by saying something off-color or off-the-wall or both. If the new employee was a woman, he unabashedly flirted. One day Charlie called and introduced himself over the phone to Judy. After some small talk, I heard Judy telling Charlie the color of her panties. Soon she was breezily answering what must have been the most intimate and indecent questions. I tried to look like I hadn’t heard anything and buried my head in a notebook, pretending to study. In the course of this agonizingly long conversation, Charlie got Judy to reveal just about everything about her personal life. Finally, he asked to be put through to Carolyn.
About an hour later, Carolyn ca
lled Judy in and fired her. Carolyn had planned it for days, and I don’t think she knew anything about Charlie’s conversation with Judy. She told her she could finish her shift but she wasn’t to come back. Poor Judy had one last hope when Charlie called back. She explained that she’d been fired, and Charlie told her he’d make sure she could keep her job.
I knew right away this would not turn out well. Carolyn, who had a strong personality, exercised unquestioned authority within her sphere and did not need anyone’s permission, not even Charlie’s, to fire people in clerical positions. Now he was about to cross that line by overruling Carolyn on a personnel matter. As soon as Judy got off the phone, she marched into Carolyn’s office and told her that she was not fired “because Mr. Finley said so.” I could hear Carolyn yelling at Judy, ordering her to leave the Coliseum. Now! At that point I fled to Dad’s office and stayed out of the way. Everyone knew Carolyn would prevail. And she did. Charlie barely remembered his exchange with Judy, and he never mentioned her again.
Charlie was spending less and less time on the A’s operations, but he still called in daily to talk with Dad and Carolyn. If I answered the switchboard when he phoned, he would first tease me by speaking with an Irish or Scottish accent, pretending to be a long-lost relative looking for “those Finleys in baseball.” He always made me laugh. But then the conversation would switch to a familiar subject: He wanted to know whether I had read or heard anything about him that day. If I had, he would perk up and want to know every detail. Where did I read it? What was said? Who was the writer? I never wanted to tell him I’d read something negative because I didn’t want to make him upset and I didn’t want to get the reporter in trouble, but he didn’t seem to mind when we discussed critical articles.
Our switchboard operators had a secondary duty. When the phones were slow, they scanned every Bay Area daily newspaper for articles that mentioned Charlie or the team. They would cut out those articles and tape them onto papers placed in a large portfolio. Every month, the updated portfolio was sent to Charlie’s Chicago office. He loved to read about himself, even if it was critical.