Controversial Finley Had His Charms
The voice on my answering machine was sizzling. Only the center of the sun ever got this hot. The voice belonged to Charlie Finley, the former owner of the Oakland Athletics, and Finley threatened to whack me farther than a Reggie Jackson home run, from Atlanta to LaPorte, Ind., the site of his 1,280-acre farm near Chicago.
Finley could get like that. In fact, Finley nearly always was like that, which was part of the charm of the man who died Monday in Chicago at 77. Charles O. Finley was a combination of George Steinbrenner, Al Davis and Jerry Jones times three during his two decades of running the A’s in Kansas City and later in Oakland. In fact, controversy was just another conversation away for Finley, whether it involved feuding with his players or manager of the moment, or referring to baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn as “the village idiot” for not allowing Finley to sell A’s players like the chicken and pigs on his farm.
Like Steinbrenner and Davis in the past and Jones in the present, none of this affected the bottom line for Finley’s teams. They won. There was even that stretch in the early 1970s when the A’s captured three consecutive World Series titles, and they won them, along with several divisional championships and American League pennants, in the midst of Finley-created turmoil. Once, Finley even tried to fire second baseman Mike Andrews in the middle of the World Series for botching a play.
With encouragement from Finley, his players were rebels. They fought amongst themselves. They spat at the game’s right-wing image by growing handlebar mustaches. Not only did they have uniforms resembling something you’d wear while playing over a keg of beer, they pranced around in white spikes and dared you to say something about it. All of this occurred while Finley wanted his peers to do baseball’s equivalent of asking your grandmother to shave her head. He wanted walks after three balls instead of four. He wanted orange baseballs. He wanted designated runners. Of all the things he wanted, his peers eventually held their noses and adopted two of them: (1) the designated-hitter rule and (2) night World Series games.
Anyway, Finley and I discussed all of this in the summer of ‘85, when I went to his farm for an interview. Around sundown, we sat on a swing in his yard. I told him that I was a Cincinnati Reds fan in 1972, and that I was miffed when Finley and his wife jumped on top of the dugout at Riverfront Stadium and danced after the A’s beat the Reds in Game 7 of the World Series. Finley laughed, then sniffled.
He said that a year later, he and his wife got a divorce. Then he added through misty eyes, “I was so wrapped up in baseball that I even lost my happy home.”
That’s what I wrote. That’s why there was smoke coming from my answering machine a few days later. Said Finley, when I returned his call, “You (censored). I oughta come down there and kick your (censored).” I’d tell you more, but this is a family newspaper.
He simply wasn’t pleased that I exposed a myth. In other words, Charlie O. did have a heart.