by Nancy Finley
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.
I continued to work in the switchboard room, getting to know each operator and filling in when she needed a break or called in sick.
DEATH THREATS AND SERIAL KILLERS
One of my more shocking discoveries in the switchboard office was how many death threats the A’s offices received over the phone. From time to time, someone—usually a man—would call the A’s office and say he was going to shoot a ballplayer. Reggie Jackson once homered during a regular season game at the Coliseum after he had received a death threat. He quickly rounded the bases as his bodyguards anxiously watched from the stands. Most of the time, though, the death threats were reserved for Charles O. Finley. And the number of threatening phone calls increased after his vilification in the ’73 World Series. The calls were disturbing enough in themselves, but they became more frightening when a series of violent, but mostly unrelated, events unfolded in the Bay Area.
On November 6, 1973, about two weeks after the A’s World Series victory parade downtown, a radical group called the Symbionese Liberation Army shot and killed Marcus Foster, Oakland’s superintendent of schools, and seriously wounded his deputy. Within days, rumors emerged that the SLA’s preferred target had been Charles O. Finley, who avoided Foster’s fate only because they couldn’t find him. In fact, Charlie would be hard to find because he was seldom in Oakland in those days. But Dad and I certainly were in town, so Dad pulled me out of school for the rest of the semester and arranged for an independent study program for me at home. “Home,” in this case, meant the A’s offices at the Oakland Coliseum. I did not return to school until after Christmas vacation.
Then things got weirder.
On February 4, 1974, the SLA struck again in the East Bay, kidnapping the newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst from her Berkeley apartment. At the same time, the police were figuring out that several serial killers were on the loose. The first of more than a dozen random killings in a six-month period—what became known as the Zebra murders—occurred the previous October in San Francisco, just over the bridge from Oakland. Two months later, the future mayor of San Francisco Art Agnos was shot twice in the back after he attended a political meeting in the city’s Potrero Hill neighborhood. The bloodshed continued until May 1974, when police arrested seven men in a San Francisco apartment. Four of those arrested were charged and eventually convicted of multiple murders. The killings stopped, and the Zebra case was officially closed.
Around this time I heard Dad and Charlie talking on the phone about “death threats to someone in the Coliseum.” No wonder Dad pulled me from school for a spell. I eventually went back to Oakland High and settled back into a routine, but I—and a lot of other people—would remain a little leery about being out in public for too long at one time.
CHAPTER 25
KISS MY ASS
1974
Ever since Charlie snatched the Athletics from under Ernie Mehl’s nose at auction in 1960, the sports media had excoriated him as incompetent, rude, crude, and meddling. “There never has been a baseball operation such as this, nothing so bizarre, so impossibly incongruous,” wrote Mehl, who denounced Charlie’s leadership of the team as “incompetent and bizarre.” The insurance salesman’s stunning success at building a winning team, however, suggests that much of the criticism was the voice of jealousy.
After making his namesake mule the team mascot, Charlie was fond of saying, “if you want to be my friend, kiss my ass.” He thought that was a cute joke. Now, after back-to-back World Series wins, that line was Charlie’s response to everyone in baseball who had disparaged him over the years. It expressed his new attitude. He was the winner. They were not.
And he wasn’t done yet.
A NEW DARK AGE
Needing a new manager for 1974, Charlie reached into the team’s past and hired Alvin Dark, who hadn’t donned the Green and Gold since August 1967, when Charlie fired him, re-hired him, and fired him again in the row over TWA Flight 85. The players weren’t thrilled by the hire. Dark had developed a reputation for being racially insensitive when he managed the San Francisco Giants in the early 1960s. But the 1974 A’s had so much talent and winning had become such a habit that it was difficult to see how they wouldn’t win the AL West, at the very least.
Reaching into the past again, Charlie picked up former coach Bobby Hofman, who had been with the team from 1969 to 1970. Then he did something really unconventional. Allan Lewis, the “Panamanian Express,” had been Charlie’s first designated runner. Charlie had released him after the ’73 season, and now he replaced him with Herb Washington, a track star who hadn’t played baseball since high school. New manager, new coach, new designated pinch-runner—after the chaos of the previous seasons, the players and fans were used to the trouble and controversy that seemed to accompany everything the Swingin’ A’s did in the 1970s. So was Dad. Charlie liked it that way.
CLUBHOUSE BRAWL
Then a brawl started. As usual, the A’s players weren’t fighting the other team, they were fighting each other. Before their game on June 5, Ray Fosse heard a ruckus. In the A’s clubhouse, that was nothing new, but this time it was between two of the lineup’s stars, outfielders Billy North and Reggie Jackson. Acting on instinct, Fosse ran over and tried to break up the fight. But as fists flew, the peacemaker got the worst of it, suffering a crushed disc in his neck. He was out for three months but returned in September, just in time for the stretch drive and the playoffs. Jackson and North eventually cooled off, but so did their relationship—they warily avoided each other for weeks.
The A’s were used to fights, but this one—which robbed them of their starting catcher—left a hangover. The A’s won only three games, against nine losses, over the next two weeks. After Boston’s Luis Tiant outdueled Vida Blue in a tough 2–1 loss in extra innings, the A’s firstplace lead shrank to just half a game, and they dropped to a mediocre 34–31 record. Was Fosse that valuable? Or did the players miss Dick Williams that much? It turned out that neither was the case.
The team eventually righted itself, churning out the spurts of W’s that these dynasty A’s were known for. They won seven of nine games, lost a pair to Kansas City, then won five in a row. They lost a pair to Cleveland but then ripped off seven wins in eight games, pushing their record to 61–42, giving the squad a dominating nine-game lead by late July. It would be that kind of year. Vince Lombardi said that winning was a habit, and the A’s—two-thirds of the way through their fourth consecutive division-winning season—had become victory junkies. They just knew how to finish games—not that it had made them any more lighthearted. Sal Bando, the team’s captain and third baseman, had little respect for Dark. Ron Bergman reported that late in a game in which Rollie Fingers had put on a few base runners with two outs in the ninth, Dark strolled out to the mound to give Fingers advice. With the rest of the infield joining them on the Coliseum mound, Fingers listened to Dark and nodded his head. But as soon as Dark left, Fingers turned to Bando, “Okay, Sal, what should I really do?” Bando sneaked a look at the batter and muttered, “This guy can’t hit a curve; throw him one and let’s get out of here.” Fingers obeyed his captain and struck the guy out.
A team like the 1974 A’s, whose roster boasted several tough, baseball-smart players who’d been playing together for almost a decade, didn’t really need a hands-on manager anymore. Their success seemed to be for the good of the group, as opposed to the “individual,” as often seen today with free agency. Fortunately, Dark wasn’t hands-on or controlling. Even if he had been, A’s players—including a handful who didn’t care for playing for Dark in the ’67 season—likely would have ignored him. Sal Bando once
said, “Alvin Dark couldn’t manage a meat market.” Even though the dig made its way into print, Dark kept writing Bando’s name in the lineup card, and the A’s kept winning.
Dark may or may not have been able to manage a meat market, but he was proving that he could avoid screwing up a good thing. The A’s kept piling up victories. Nearly all the key players were in the prime of their careers. And the team’s offensive attack, inconsistent in some years outside of Reggie’s heroics, was as balanced as it would ever be.
After each win the entire team would come over to the Edgewater Hotel, which was almost the team’s official hotel, for a big party in the restaurant. Usually all the Finleys were there—cousins, great uncles, aunts, etc.—and Dad was in charge. Some of the parties were inside the Coliseum. On those occasions I liked to go down to our “post-party” room and watch our caterers set up decorations and food. If we lost the game instead, we were still expected to show up for the party, so the food didn’t go to waste. At some of these parties they brought Charlie O in to share the festivities. I would sneak him some vegetables off my plate. I saw other people doing that too.
THE END OF THE BALL GIRLS
1974 was our final year with the ball girls, Debbi Sivyer (later Mrs. Fields) and her school friend Mary Barry. This unique A’s institution was a “very popular innovation of Charles O. Finley’s with fans, spectators, players and umpires,” according to the team’s 1972 yearbook. “It had been traditional to have boys in those positions. Those girls have added chores to their baseball chasing and now even take soft drinks and coffee to the umpires during a break in the game. They wear green hotpants with a gold blouse.” But in November or December 1974, Dad told Charlie that he was receiving numerous complaints from our player’s wives about the ball girls. I remember Dad telling one of the wives over the phone, “Say no more, I’m calling COF.” He explained to Charlie that the girls had to go in the interests of the players’ marital harmony, and that was the end of the Oakland A’s ball girls.
WORLD SERIES NO. 3 VS. THE L.A. DODGERS
After securing the American League championship in four games against the Baltimore Orioles, the A’s faced the Los Angeles Dodgers in the World Series. The opposing teams were both exciting franchises that had built great young teams through rich farm systems. The A’s were going for their third consecutive World Series title, yet they were the underdogs. They’d won “only” ninety games and lost seventy-two, while the Dodgers had a dream season, notching 102 wins and sixty losses.
Game One began on October 12 in front of 55,794 people at Dodger Stadium. In a duel between Kenny Holtzman and Andy Messermith, the A’s won 3–2.
Game Two was almost identical, only this time in the Dodgers’ favor. Vida Blue pitched well enough, giving up three runs after seven innings, including a two-run homer by Dodgers right fielder Joe Ferguson, but Don Sutton gave a masterly performance. Playing in his first World Series, Sutton cruised until the ninth, when he plunked Sal Bando and then gave up a double to Reggie Jackson. Fireman Mike Marshall came in and promptly gave up a single to Joe Rudi, who knocked in two runs. Trailing now by just a run, A’s manager Alvin Dark brought in his designated runner, Herb Washington. This was Charlie’s moment to shine, for the designated runner was one of his innovations. But because success for Washington meant success for Charlie, many people hated him. Washington was a threat to the “fundamentalist” views of the outraged purists (who are endemic in baseball, then and now).
But Washington wasn’t thinking about all that as he took a lead at first. He eyed Marshall and bent his knees, ready to swipe second as soon as he could. Then in a flash Marshall picked him off. Catching Washington leaning toward second, he made a quick throw to first baseman Steve Garvey, who tagged the runner out. The game-tying threat was gone when the A’s needed it most. Marshall made quick work of the next two batters, and the Dodgers won 3–2.
In Game Three, the World Series returned to Oakland, with Catfish Hunter on the mound. His superb pitching made up for the A’s meager offense, and they won by now familiar score of 3–2.
Game Four, in Oakland, was a rematch of Holtzman versus Messersmith, and the A’s lefty got the upper hand by knocking out a homer off the Dodgers ace in the third inning. Then the A’s put the contest away with a four-run sixth inning—a veritable explosion given the series’ light hitting. Claudell Washington—the A’s phenomenal nineteen-year-old outfielder and Berkeley’s best ballplayer since Billy Martin in the 1940s—led the way with two hits and a walk. With a 5–2 victory, the A’s were just a win away from officially becoming a dynasty.
Win or lose, Game Five would be the season’s last in Oakland. If the Dodgers won, the series would head back to L. A. for Game Six and, if necessary, the deciding Game Seven. Game Five pitted two aces against each other: Vida Blue versus Don Sutton, a future Hall of Famer who went on to win 324 games. Sutton had earned nineteen wins in ’74, but he wouldn’t get one this night.
The nearly fifty thousand A’s fans at the sold out Coliseum could smell blood, and third baseman Sal Bando got them going early. He plated Billy North with a sacrifice fly in the first inning. Just an inning later, catcher Ray Fosse got the fans dancing in the aisles with a solo blast to left. Suddenly, the A’s were up 2–0, a score that held until the sixth, when a modest rally that included a sacrifice fly by Jim Wynn and a Garvey single tied the game 2–2.
The Dodgers were desperate. Down three games to one, they needed to treat each contest like Game Seven, and Walter Alston managed like it. He brought in Marshall in the sixth, and let the closer go the rest of the way. The following inning, Rudi made them pay for it with a solo homer that electrified the Coliseum crowd. The score was again 3–2.
Rollie Fingers took the hill in the top of the eighth, and Bill Buckner would be the frame’s first hitter. The orange October sun was fading, and the shadows began to creep onto the Coliseum diamond. Trailing by a run and down to their final six outs the Dodgers desperately needed a base runner. Buckner hit a single to center field, and what happened next is an underrated part of World Series lore. The A’s center fielder, Billy North, simply missed the ball, which rolled behind him toward the outfield wall. Buckner sprinted to second. But then he kept going.
One of the old baseball axioms is that you should never make the first out or the third out at third base. Right fielder Reggie Jackson backed up North, and he ran toward the ball, his back almost entirely turned on Buckner, who made the turn at second base and, his twenty-four-year-old adrenaline trumping common sense, kept running.
Jackson retrieved the ball in right center field and tossed a perfect throw to cutoff man Dick Green, who threw a strike to Bando, who applied a textbook tag to a sliding Buckner at third. Reggie and Green and Bando combined for one of the greatest defensive plays in World Series history because they could rely on each other. Each one knew the other would be there. They just knew.
The Coliseum crowd sprang to its feet when umpire Tom Gorman called him out. Buckner took a second to ponder his mistake—it wouldn’t be his last in a World Series—grimacing while kneeling on the infield dirt. The Dodgers’ threat was dead, and the A’s won the series’ fourth 3–2 decision.
In his autobiography, Reggie wrote of the play: “I can throw hard and accurate. But I never even thought of throwing to third. I made the fundamental play I was supposed to make, and it worked. I never even took a look for Greenie before I threw. I threw where he was supposed to be and he was there. I know he didn’t look for Bando. He threw where third was and Sal was there.”
Reggie thus explains one of the secrets of that A’s dynasty. They were so fundamentally sound, in part, because they had played together so long—going back to the mid-1960s, when they honed their skills in minor league barns from Mobile to Modesto to Vancouver. A decade’s worth of playing together had given the A’s an innate confidence. They knew exactly where the other was going to be, especially when the chips were down. Amidst all the in-fighting and controv
ersy and clutch, highlight-worthy home runs, the truth of the matter is that the dynasty Oakland A’s of the ’70s won on all the little things that rarely get mentioned because they’re not sexy. More often than not, they pulled out a victory on pitching, defense, and fundamentals so strong they didn’t even “need to look before throwing.”
And that was it. The A’s had won the World Series. For the third consecutive time. To this day, that’s something only the New York Yankees have ever accomplished. The A’s, wearing those loud Fort Knox gold jerseys and wedding gown white pants, mobbed Fingers and Fosse in the infield. Fireworks were set off high above center field, and Oakland’s scruffy band of long-haired fans, in full delirium, poured onto the field. It was championship pandemonium at its finest.
Charlie was on top of the baseball world again and, this time he had made history. He had started in 1960 as an outsider, leading the running punchline that was the Kansas City Athletics. Less than fourteen years later, he had beaten the insider’s insider, the Dodgers’ owner, Walter O’Malley, and reached the rarest of rarified air—three consecutive World Series titles.
CHAPTER 26
CATFISH, THE MILLION-DOLLAR MAN
1975
The victory champagne from the 1974 World Series had hardly dried on the Coliseum clubhouse floor before Marvin Miller, the head of the MLB Players’ Association, persuaded Catfish Hunter to let him file a grievance on his behalf. The complaint was that Charlie, by failing to make an annuity payment of fifty thousand dollars to an insurance company of the pitcher’s choosing, had broken his contract with Catfish. Miller and the players’ union attorney, Dick Moss, saw this as an open-and-shut case. The contract provided that once Catfish notified Charlie of the breach, the A’s had ten days to mend it by making the annuity payment. The ten days had passed with no response from the A’s, so the grievance went to an experienced labor arbitrator, Peter Seitz.