Finley Ball: How Two Baseball Outsiders Turned the Oakland A's into a Dynasty and Changed the Game Forever

by Nancy Finley

  Dad had a talent for smoothing things out. It was not uncommon for Charlie to sweep into town and arbitrarily fire someone, and Dad would hire her back in the morning. In the 1970s Charlie began sending Dad as his representative to the annual MLB owners’ meetings, where there was usually lots of smoothing over to be done. Despite his almost universal responsibilities for the franchise, I don’t recall the press’s ever quoting Dad, who avoided the spotlight. The one they quoted was Charlie.

  As I grew older, I came to realize that Dad was the consummate gentleman, but he had a mischievous side as well. He was a card-carrying charter member of the International Order of Dirty Old Men. One of his friends was the “Grand Master,” and several of his other (non-baseball) friends were also “officers.” His membership card gave the headquarters address as “Franklin at First Street, Oakland, California.” A stack of these cards was sitting out when I first arrived at the apartment in Oakland. He quickly hid them, hoping I hadn’t seen them, but it was too late. Dad often carried several fake diamond engagement rings in his pocket, and he had fun “proposing” to stewardesses and waitresses. I don’t know if any of them took him seriously, but Dad enjoyed his little prank.

  CALLING THE INDISPENSABLE MAN

  Carl Finley was as close to indispensable as a man can be, and by early December 1972—several weeks since the World Series had ended—Charlie realized it. It couldn’t have been later than 4 a.m. when the telephone woke me up. Dad answered, frog-voiced and half-awake.

  “I’m sorry, sir, do I have the wrong number?” the caller asked. Dad immediately recognized the voice that had greeted him every morning about this time for a decade. Suppressing a chuckle, Dad played along and answered just as formally: “No, sir, I believe you indeed have the right number.”

  Charlie then half-jokingly fell back into his old sales technique of capturing the other person’s attention by making what sounded like a bold declaration about a fairly trivial topic. He said he believed the state of Indiana had the best ribs—better than Illinois, where he lived; better than New York, and certainly better than California, where he had deigned to telephone his cousin this chilly December morning. Yes, it was clear . . . the Bay Area in particular couldn’t hold a candle to Indiana’s food—didn’t Carl agree? Charlie asked.

  I lay in bed listening to Dad’s reply, faintly, through the walls of our apartment: a big belly laugh, a sound that I adored. I always knew everything would be fine when I heard Dad laugh. I smiled, almost reflexively, and dozed off.

  When I woke up three hours later, Dad was still on the phone. And he was still laughing, as the conversation had careened into even sillier terrain. Now it was Dad talking about which state had the best beans. (Seriously.) In the two years I lived with Dad before his falling out with Charlie, I had become used to tuning out these calls. And now, as they talked again, I realized I had missed them.

  I could tell this phone call had broken the ice, but Dad was a smart man with a long memory, and he would not make the mistake of coming back too quickly or too easily. He remembered the promises Charlie made to him in the early 1960s, promises that took months—in some cases, years—for him to fulfill. When my parents were married, my mom was the heavy, but after the divorce, Dad had to rely on himself to push Charlie for his promises.

  First, Charlie obliquely suggested to Dad that he return. He kindasorta asked Dad to go back to running the A’s front office and everything else in Oakland.

  Then he started begging. And Charlie never begged anyone for anything.

  Charlie didn’t mind being reminded that he had failed to keep a promise. In fact, he liked to see how far he could go without paying a debt. Dad was well aware of this, and now he was vocal about what it would take for him to come back. Dad remained lukewarm, so Charlie upped the ante. He promised Dad a new car (a Chevrolet Caprice convertible), an expense account, and other perks. He also promised a World Series ring and a substantial raise.

  “Charlie, I don’t want to go through all this again. Do you really mean it this time?”

  “Carl, believe me, I really mean it!” There was just one condition: Dad had to agree not to publish his tell-all book.

  Finally Dad relented. But the next morning he told Charlie that he had a non-negotiable condition of his own. Charlie had to unload his hockey and basketball franchises and stay focused on the A’s. If Charlie didn’t know his limits, Dad knew his own, and he wasn’t going to run three teams. Charlie put up a fight, but Dad stood firm. In fact, firmer than I had ever seen him before. And Charlie had the good sense to realize that Dad was right. Either that, or he was just afraid of losing Dad. In any event, Charlie soon dumped the other franchises. He and Dad stayed fully focused on the baseball team, and with that singular purpose they made baseball history. Pushing Charlie to sell his other teams was probably Dad’s most important contribution to the A’s dynasty.

  Dad was excited to be back at the Coliseum and back with the A’s, but he knew Charlie Finley all too well. He continued teaching his evening class at the community college—just in case.

  Amazingly, Charlie made good on all of his promises to Dad, and he even presented me with a gold charm engraved “World Series 1972.” When Dad saw the new car in the stadium parking lot, he just stood there and beamed. He and Charlie had buried the hatchet once and for all. By the end of 1972, Dad was back in the front office for good. It was as if he never left.

  CHAPTER 22

  THE A’S RETURN

  1973

  If Charlie Finley wasn’t a hero in Oakland before the 1972 season, he certainly was after the World Series victory. The championship made people more enthusiastic about Charlie, and it made bearing the Finley name a happier experience for me—for a while, anyway. Some of my schoolmates began asking me what I was doing in an Oakland public school. I didn’t know how to respond. Dad, after all, had been a public high school principal, so it never occurred to me to look down on public schools or the kids attending them. When I told Dad what my classmates were saying, he gave me a typically abbreviated response. “Good,” he said with a tight smile. He was pleased that people were perplexed and perhaps unconvinced of my relation to Charlie Finley. He was kind of hiding me “in plain sight.”

  TICKETS

  One day I stopped by the Coliseum to say hi to Dad. Charlie was there, and he made me an offer I was too excited about to refuse. I had a new job! With the A’s! At the Coliseum! Even Dad didn’t try to stop this one. As the A’s marched toward another American League Western Division title, I was to help Dad administer playoff ticket sales.

  Charlie was growing increasingly mistrustful of anyone but family, and he managed to turn ticket sales into a cloak-and-dagger operation. He had always had a suspicious side, of course. One reason Charlie had hired Dad in the first place was that he wanted a family member he trusted to help him run the ball club. But Dad thought something was different now. He had never seen Charlie so mistrustful of outsiders—he didn’t even want security guards hired or the team ticket manager (an otherwise natural choice) involved in the operation.

  For security reasons, playoff tickets were processed not at the Coliseum office, where there was plenty of room, but at a vacant bank in San Leandro, a working-class town a few miles south of the Coliseum. For half of August and all of September 1973, that empty bank became our home away from home. Dad and I would get up at 4:30, eat breakfast at the café in the Edgewater Inn, stop at the main Oakland post office to pick up the ticket orders—several sacks full—and arrive at our secret work location by seven or eight o’clock.

  AMERICAN LEAGUE CHAMPS

  On August 7, baseball took a back seat for the Finleys when Charlie suffered a major heart attack. He spent two weeks in a Chicago hospital then went to recuperate at his LaPorte farm. Meanwhile, the A’s went on a tear, leaving their AL West rivals the Kansas City Royals in the dust as they went 21–7 from July 31 to August 31. The A’s clinched their third consecutive AL West title after they beat the
White Sox in late September, with a still-recovering Charlie in attendance at Comiskey Park.

  In the AL Championship series, they faced the Baltimore Orioles, who had their own great stable of arms in Jim Palmer, Mike Cuellar, Dave McNally, and Grant Jackson. Like the Tigers the year before, the Orioles gave the A’s all they could handle. Down two games to one, and trailing 4–0 in Game Four, the Orioles staged an incredible comeback. They won 5–4 and forced a Game Five in Oakland. Baltimore seemed to have all the momentum after shocking the A’s the night before. That is, until Catfish Hunter hurled Game Five’s first pitch on the evening of October 11. From that point on, it was all A’s. Oakland scratched out three runs, including RBIs by Vic Davalillo and Jesus Alou, two of the three players Charlie had picked up in trades on July 31. The third man picked up that day, Mike Andrews, hardly played in the series, going 0–1 with a sacrifice. No matter. Hunter did the rest by tossing a complete game shutout. The A’s were back in the World Series. They would face the New York Mets, who had staggered through the ’73 season with a .509 winning percentage.

  TWO IN A ROW

  Game One was in Oakland, and the A’s won it 2–1—yet another one-run decision in the World Series. Game Two the following night went twelve innings. In what Curt Gowdy called one of the “longest and weirdest games in World Series history,” a blinding afternoon sun made catching flies an almost superhuman feat. Two twelfth-inning errors by Mike Andrews at second base led to three runs and a 10–7 victory for the Mets. Charlie suspected—with good reason, it turned out—that Andrews’s errors were attributable to an undisclosed injury, and he had the infielder placed on the disabled list. That decision provoked one of the biggest controversies of Charlie’s baseball career and brought down the wrath of Bowie Kuhn, a story told in full in the next chapter.

  Game Three, two nights later in New York, was another nail-biter, going eleven innings. The A’s won by one run, 3–2.

  Many teams crumble under this kind of pressure. Would the A’s? The Mike Andrews fiasco dominated the headlines, and the Mets dominated the A’s, taking Games Four and Five at Shea Stadium by a combined score of 8–1. The controversy over Game Two had been relentless during the trip east, and it looked like the A’s were letting the series get away from them as they returned to Oakland down three games to two. Coming home should have been the perfect tonic for a club just a loss away from elimination. Both teams wanted to get back to focusing on baseball. But the press was treating the Coliseum like a crime scene with Andrews cast as the victim and Charlie, of course, the villain.

  Catfish Hunter was the A’s Game Six starter. No slouch, he had led the A’s in victories and winning percentage in the regular season, notching twenty-one wins against five losses with a 3.34 ERA. He came through on Saturday with a 3–1 win. If the A’s were going to win another World Series, it would once again be in Game Seven.

  In spite of a week of angry headlines, 49,333 Oakland fans packed the sold-out Coliseum on October 21. They got their money’s worth. The A’s broke the scoreless tie in the bottom of the third, leaning on the October heroics of a couple of guys for whom it was becoming commonplace. Holtzman started the party by hitting a one-out double. Campaneris did the rest by ripping a two-run homer. A few minutes later, Joe Rudi slapped a single and then Jackson swatted one of his trademark big hits—a high, powerful, no-doubt-about-it shot to the right-field alley that he stopped to admire for a second before jogging around the diamond. Smelling blood, the Coliseum crowd shot to its feet, letting out a primal roar. Within minutes, the A’s had raced to a 4–0 lead and now were fifteen outs from being MLB’s first repeat World Series winner since the 1962 Yankees. Mets runs in the sixth and the ninth were not enough, and the A’s held on to win 5–2—World Series champions once more.

  The roar of the Oakland Coliseum reverberated around the East Bay. The team did what most teams do when they win a championship—they hugged and jumped around and poured booze on each other’s heads. Charlie congratulated Williams and individual players, but gone was the joviality and the ear-to-ear grin he had flashed in ’72. There is video footage of Charlie moving through the clubhouse and walking up to Reggie Jackson, who is surrounded by reporters. Charlie congratulates Reggie, who was named World Series MVP, and Jackson somewhat stiffly thanks him in return. Once Charlie walks away, Jackson flashes a sarcastic look at the journalists hovering nearby. It was that kind of “party.”

  Unfortunately, there were several reasons for the bad vibes. Bad feelings from the controversy surrounding Andrews lingered, souring the taste of the victory champagne for some players. So did the knowledge that A’s skipper Dick Williams was leaving. He had told his squad before Game Six, and they had kept the secret. But now that the season was over, Williams announced that he would not be returning to Oakland the following season.

  Some of the players refused to believe it, saying they hoped he’d change his mind. But he didn’t. The media, as usual, ran with a story before checking all the facts, splashing it all over the sports pages that he was quitting because of Charlie. But that wasn’t true. Although Williams was not a “people person,” Charlie had seen something special in him and gone with his intuition. They had made a good pair. But Williams had given Charlie his notice well before the start of the series, and he gave as his reason that he simply wanted to return to the Boston area, which he considered home.

  Most of the fans didn’t care about the controversies. They lined Broadway in downtown Oakland several deep for the victory parade, just as they had done the year before. The postseason had been as rocky as it was victorious. With two titles under their belt, Dad and some of the players hoped the constant off-the-field controversy would diminish for the Green and Gold. But even more was in store for 1974.

  CHAPTER 23

  MIKE ANDREWS’S LAST HURRAH

  1973

  Charlie had suffered a heart attack in August 1973. Watching the second game of the World Series a few months later could not have been good for his condition.

  At the start of the twelfth inning, the game tied 6–6, Dick Williams sent his newly acquired designated hitter, Mike Andrews, to cover second base. Why he would put a DH in a fielding position is unclear, but it would be a fateful decision. With the Mets up 7–6, two outs, and the bases loaded, John Milner hit a grounder directly at Andrews. I watched the ball zoom toward him . . . and then go between his legs! I screamed. Even though Dad was back in the stadium catacombs somewhere, in my mind I could hear him utter his trademark “Goddammit!”

  “I don’t believe this!” I said to myself. A major league player letting a ball go between his legs—in a tight World Series game! The Mets’ lead grew to 9–6.

  The next batter hit a grounder that again bounced toward Andrews. In that moment, I felt like throwing up. But I just knew that he wouldn’t make another error. He fielded the ball and threw firmly to first base. A routine out. But no, the ball was thrown wide, just enough to pull first baseman Gene Tenace off the bag. The runner was safe, and the Mets’ Cleon Jones scored from third. The rest of the game is a blur in my memory. The A’s scored once in the bottom of the twelfth but couldn’t make up for the three runs that Mike Andrews’s errors had allowed.

  But the drama on the field paled in comparison with what happened after the game. Charlie, already apprehensive about Andrews’s ability to play when he was signed, was alarmed by his two errors and insisted on having him examined by the team doctor, Harry Walker, in the Coliseum. Dr. Walker informed Andrews that he had found something wrong with his right shoulder—biceps tenosynovitis—a condition that often follows a previous injury to an arm or shoulder. He was going to recommend that Andrews be put on the disabled list.

  Andrews denied that there was anything wrong with his throwing shoulder. But Charlie’s instinct told him that his initial impression about Andrews was correct, and Dr. Walker’s report seemed to confirm it. Charlie had Andrews sign Dr. Walker’s report, acknowledging his injury, and put him on the disa
bled list. He reminded Andrew of the time the team bus was departing for the airport in the morning, assuming he would be on the plane to New York with the rest of the team. To Charlie’s surprsie, Andrews said he didn’t feel like traveling with the team and wanted to go home to Boston. Charlie, trying to be nice, agreed.

  Dad considered Andrews’s decision a confidential personnel matter, so nothing was said to his teammates. They noticed that Andrews was not on the plane the next day, however, and assumed that Charlie had kicked him off the team. Angry and resentful, the players, led by Reggie Jackson, decided to protest Andrews’s supposed ouster by wearing black arm bands.

  Two days later Andrews held a press conference and issued a statement accusing Charlie of forcing him to sign a false medical diagnosis in order to put him on the disabled list and make room on the roster for Manny Trillo, a younger fielder, for the remaining games in the series.

  Commissioner Bowie Kuhn responded by ordering Andrews back on the roster and fining Charlie. Suddenly Charlie, Andrews, and the whole franchise were embroiled in what the sports writer Bruce Markusen would call “one of the most infamous World Series controversies of all time.”1 Charlie lost the public relations war almost immediately, and to this day he is the official villain in the received narrative of the Andrews affair. Donald Moore’s version of the story is typical:

  Little did Andrews know, Finley was going to use him as a scapegoat for the loss, and try to force him off the roster by making him sign a false affidavit claiming he had a shoulder injury. That way, Finley could add the infielder he wanted on the roster in the first place, Manny Trillo.2