CHARLIE O. : If the Courts Had Not Changed the Rules of Baseball on Finley in the Middle 1970s, His A’s Might Still Be on Top of the World

One summer in the 1970s, the Oakland A’s best player, Reggie Jackson, was contributing only an occasional home run during a long batting slump.

Finally, owner Charles O. Finley called him in, reasoning that he needed Jackson to win another World Series.

Defiant, Jackson asked: “You want something?”

“Yes, Reggie,” the owner replied patiently. “I’m going to tell you what your problems are. Your big problem--you’re not going to like this, Reggie--but you think you’re God.

“Reggie, you’re all wrong about that,” Finley continued, his voice rising. “I’m God.”

Years later, Jackson, asked for a comment, said: “I’ll always believe he meant it.”

There isn’t much doubt that Finley, who at 69 still runs an insurance business in Chicago and lives on an Indiana farm, owned baseball’s largest ego in the era when his club won three straight World Series in 1972-73-74.

Then, as now, a big, restless, abrasive dictator type with white hair and bushy eyebrows, Finley had talked himself into believing that he knew a great deal more about baseball than anyone else. And he probably did.

Finley’s record supports a notion that aside from the people who built the old New York Yankees, this guy might have been the greatest of all baseball executives.

“But nobody realizes it,” a former employee, George Costa, said recently from Oakland, where he is director of stadium operations. “Charlie O. is the most underrated champion of all time.”

The facts:

--Finley’s team is the only one that has ever won five consecutive divisional titles.

--His is the only club--aside from the Yankees--that has ever won as many as three consecutive World Series.

--Today, his living monuments are the designated hitters of the American League and baseball’s World Series format--night games and weekend openers--all of which have affected the nation’s pastime, and all of which he promoted.

--Even more significant is the way it ended for him in Oakland. The mid-1970s A’s, with a hammerlock on baseball, seemed headed for a long run at the top when Finley was suddenly overtaken and crushed by an unforeseen sequence of revolutionary procedural changes in the game.

“For sure, the old firebrand wasn’t beaten on the field,” said one of his high school classmates, Tom Harmon, the Michigan All-American.

The evidence is substantial that Finley was only beaten by the weight of arbitration, free agency, central scouting and the draft--the four great game-altering forces of the middle 1970s.

These are the changes that have, in effect, made it a new game, with millionaire players as well as millionaire owners.

As a baseball man, Finley was well off but hardly wealthy--the possessor of a neat little fortune that he had dredged up selling insurance. He could win when the game was table-stakes, but not when it was no-limit.

Not in Oakland--a football town where the A’s only filled the stadium on Hot Pants Night.

Thus the bitter end for Charlie Finley, whose story could be seen as a Greek tragedy if the leading character weren’t Irish.

Here was a maverick owner--a one-man gang--who made himself the master of a game once dominated by the big, glossy organizations of the Yankees, St. Louis Cardinals and Dodgers.

As of the 1960s, when Finley bought in, there had been no basic changes in the rules and regulations and by-laws of baseball for three-quarters of a century.

He played and won by the same rules that governed the Yankees in the years when they were winning four and then five World Series in a row. These rules included an inflexible reserve clause and other restrictions on the players that had enslaved them in every baseball generation since the beginning.

Finley was in his 50s in the ‘70s. And his grasp of major league baseball--as played since 1884--was so sure-handed that none could predict the end of the Finley era.

Then, in the middle of the game, they changed the rules.

Under the old rules, he could have won for, conceivably, 20 years. Under the new, he couldn’t win at all.

The landmark date was 1973, when baseball’s owners, taking an unexpectedly different view of their world, agreed to install a system of arbitration with their players.

Two years later, Finley became the first victim. A few weeks after the A’s won their third straight World Series, an arbitrator stripped him of his best pitcher, Jim (Catfish) Hunter.

“We got to the (1975) playoffs without Catfish,” Finley said, recalling the A’s fifth straight division-winning season. “We got to them but we couldn’t get through them.”

It misses the point to suggest that Finley may have been at fault in the Hunter case. The point is that he was the first smart baseball man who’s had to tell it to an arbitrator.

The old Yankees were never in danger of losing Joe DiMaggio to arbitration. They could never have lost Lefty Gomez or Yogi Berra.

Yet, within months, Finley lost not only Hunter but the rest of his extraordinary team to the new rules of the game. Free agency--a phrase that Babe Ruth never heard--cost the A’s such World Series stars as Jackson, Sal Bando, Joe Rudi, Rollie Fingers, Ken Holtzman and Bert Campaneris, among others.

The draft completed the destruction of the A’s, who, like the old Yankees, had been put together by clever bush-beating scouts, including Finley himself.

Although the draft technically began in 1965, Finley’s competition didn’t know how to hurt him with it before central scouting arrived in the ‘70s.

There was the day in 1966, for instance, when Finley, as usual, identified the year’s No. 1 prospect but had to sweat him out in the second year of the draft.

Not to worry. The New York Mets, drafting first, chose one Steve Chilcott, a catcher who has yet to play a big league game. The A’s, drafting next, chose Reggie Jackson.

“The draft was the beginning of the end of free enterprise,” Finley said.

And of Finley.

THE FARMER

That barn over there set him back a million dollars.

--ROLAND KUHN, La Porte, Ind., contractor

In a hotel dining room the other night in Chicago, the waiter appeared in due course at Finley’s table and started taking orders.

“I’d like the prime rib,” his companion said.

“I’d like to see the chef,” Finley said.

And with that, the 1970s owner of the A’s was off for the kitchen.

Returning a few minutes later, he explained: “I always tell the cooks what to do. It’s easy to screw up Lake Superior whitefish.”

It was in that spirit that he ran his ballclub, and he still runs his life that way. He is a tyrant. He is a gourmet. And also a gourmet chef.

“My two hobbies are cooking and eating,” said Finley, who looks it.

Happily for him, he can spend much of his time on a farm, where he raises most of the entrees--Blue Channel catfish, chicken, wild duck and deer.

The farm, in a manner of speaking, saved his life. When the A’s and his marriage crashed at the same time 10 years ago, the farm was an outlet for Finley’s astounding energy.

He doesn’t, be advised, ride any tractors, but he has a heck of a lot to say to the men who do.

He came to this end down a strange road. As a success story, the Rise and Fall of Charlie Finley is, well, quaint.

One of three children of a Birmingham steel worker, Charlie worked with his dad in the mills for many years after the family moved to Gary, Ind.

On the side, he managed semi-pro baseball teams and sold insurance, putting away a few dollars before marrying his high school sweetheart. They were to have seven children.

Pretty conventional stuff, you say, but . . .

In his 20s, when Charlie fell ill and went into a sanatorium for two years with tuberculosis, his wife kept body and soul and the children together with a job as a proofreader on a Gary, Ind., newspaper.

In his 30s, when Charlie recovered, he became a millionaire overnight by selling group disability insurance to doctors.

At 42, in 1960, he had enough to buy the worst team in baseball, the old Kansas City A’s, for $1.9 million.

He struggled in Kansas City for seven years, then moved and began struggling in Oakland.

“It’s a long way up when you see it from the absolute bottom,” he said. “You can’t possibly average more than one or two new World Series (quality) players a year. It takes a long, long time to reach the top.”

He was 53 when he got there, but after winning his first divisional title in 1971 he knew he could stay there.

“When you get the foundation right, hard work will keep you going,” he said. “All you need to win forever is one good, new acquisition a season.”

But, at 57, he was through, beaten by arbitration, free agency, central scouting and the draft.

Then his wife left him. She has since remarried.

“I sacrificed my wife to the A’s,” Finley said. “Had I not been such a baseball workaholic, I’d have my family with me today.”

His last move in Oakland was to sell the A’s--for $12 million--but he got to keep only a little of that for himself.

“For tax reasons, Charlie had put two-thirds of the club in the names of his wife and children,” said his Chicago banker, Fred Sack. “And they wouldn’t give it back. They outfoxed him and kept it all. All Charlie got was one-third, less taxes.”

In addition, his wife was awarded one of the Finley farms near La Porte--the 1,200-acre, $500,000 spread edging the west side of town.

Thereupon, depressed but still fighting, Charlie went home and threw himself into his 640-acre north-side farm, which picturesquely rolls along both sides of Highway 35, a stone’s throw from Pine Lake.

He converted the house into a white-pillared Southern mansion, and, among other things, commissioned a large, unique painting of Reggie Jackson.

It’s more than a painting, actually. It’s a stained-glass window, with Jackson at bat, nearly life size, in radiant color.

Close by are several other magnificent stained-glass windows. Finley is particularly fond of one that is an enlarged full-color reproduction of a 1975 Time magazine cover featuring Finley, no less, in a big green hat.

The windows would be strange enough if they were in his 10-room mansion, which was built in 1860 by a friend of Abraham Lincoln’s. But Finley wouldn’t, of course, put them in a house. They’re on the outside walls of Finley’s barn, reportedly one of the world’s few barns with stained-glass windows.

Any way you look at it, this is the craziest barn in Indiana. And doubtless the most expensive--having set the owner back an estimated $1 million in a county where you can put up a real nice one for $25,000.

In the melancholy aftermath of his estrangement from baseball and family, Finley, no doubt sublimating, poured much of his time and resources into the construction of this curious building.

In addition to stained glass windows, the barn has a front porch--a long, cool front porch, which is furnished with no fewer than six swings. On any given Sunday, he swings in the one with the most breeze and best view of Pine Lake.

Not to stint the upstairs, Finley put a ballroom in the barn’s hayloft, complete with grand piano.

Perched above the ballroom is a press box with a sweeping view of much of Finley’s acreage. And above the press box, there’s a gold-roofed bell tower.

Downstairs, the stalls for the horses are each fully lined in one or another of five kinds of solid hardwood--oak, maple, walnut, birch or cherry. The hardwood is all at least two inches thick. The tack room in a corner is lined in two inches of mahogany.

Why a walnut stall?

“If you were a horse, wouldn’t you want a nice place to stay?” Finley said.

Why a press box on a farm?

“I always wanted my own,” he said.

Near the hayloft, there is even a master bedroom with all the amenities, including what Finley calls a shower for two.

“He asked us to design and construct the barn,” said an old friend, La Porte contractor Roland Kuhn, whose son Steve is an architect.

The day they reported with the completed blueprints, Finley took one look and said: “This is just what I wanted, Rollie. But, let’s see, I think we should make this wall here 20-feet longer. And while we’re at it, let’s put a kitchen in the tack room, and move the tack room there.”

Smiling, Steve Kuhn slowly tore up the blueprints.

“I don’t think we’ll be needing these, Mr. Finley,” he said.

And building a barn for the ages, Finley, who in baseball had served as his own general manager, served as his own architect.

THE CHAMPION

Charlie is living three or four years ahead of his time. Other owners are just not as sharp. --JIM (CATFISH) HUNTER, A’s pitcher, talking with reporters in 1973

One year during the All-Star break, Charlie Finley moved about with a platoon of Playboy bunnies, not because he liked their company, particularly, perhaps, but because they were promoting his newest idea: orange-colored baseballs.

The young women, wearing A’s caps, distributed samples and said there would be more action with an orange ball because it would be easier to see and hit.

At the game, they even delivered one to a prominent spectator, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger--after it had first passed security. The Secret Service people tapped the ball, shook it, bit it, and listened to it closely to make sure it wasn’t ticking, then handed it over.

When Kissinger had it at last, he stood up and tipped his hat to Finley.

As an idea, the orange ball is still bottled up somewhere in the commissioner’s cellar. But Kissinger isn’t the only sports fan who has tipped his hat to Finley.

“Charlie’s night-game idea has made it possible for thousands of working men to see the World Series every year,” said a Gary, Ind., banker, Jack Morfee.

“People tell you he did it for the (extra TV) money, but I know better. I know him. His dad worked next to my dad in the (Gary) steel mills for 30 years. Charlie was thinking of them.”

Finley’s arsenal of farsighted ideas plus his studied flamboyance--hiring bunnies and mules, for instance, or abrasively badgering players, commissioners, writers and other owners--have created a public image of him that is partially true.

But it is far from the whole truth. And, worse, it obscures the main truth: that in his mastery of the art and science of baseball--in Oakland, of all places--Finley proved to be something of a genius.

If there’s a Hall of Fame somewhere that will have him, he’ll honor it.

Though luck was a factor in the rise of the A’s, it wasn’t luck that took Finley in the early ‘60s to the Macon, Ga., home of a high school pitcher named John (Blue Moon) Odom.

Making friends with the Odom family, Finley accepted their invitation to stay overnight. And the next day, adding to his reputation as a gourmet chef, he came up with a chicken dinner for the whole gang.

“There was a Boston Red Sox scout there, too,” Finley remembers. “Blue Moon’s mother gave him one room and me the other--and I fed him, too.”

But that’s all the Red Sox got. It was the A’s who got Odom.

About the same time, they also reeled in Catfish Hunter after Finley moved into the Hunter home in Hertford, N.C., to stay a night or two during the Carolina state high school tournament.

“Nicest curveball I’d ever seen from a high school arm,” said Finley, who, in a pre-draft era, combined salesmanship with an eye for talent to build the team of the ‘70s.

Among other true free agents that he and his scouts found and signed in similar ways--in those last productive years before the draft--were infielders Bert Campaneris and Dick Green, outfielder Joe Rudi, catcher Gene Tenace and pitcher Rollie Fingers, each, eventually, a star on World Series teams.

Moreover, in the early years of the draft, before central scouting, the A’s found such players as third baseman Sal Bando on the sixth round and pitcher Vida Blue on the second.

They also worked an occasional blockbuster trade, once dealing Rick Monday for pitcher Ken Holtzman.

Finley was destined never to equal the success of the old Yankees, who won four straight World Series in 1936-39 and five in 1949-53.

But it required brilliant Yankee committees to outdo him.

There have been at least three Yankee geniuses--George Weiss, a general manager; Casey Stengel, a manager, and Bill Essick, the scout who signed Joe DiMaggio. And, in one mind and body, Finley, who had the smallest front-office staff in baseball, came close to matching the three of them.

One expert who thought so was a former Finley employee, Frank Lane, the veteran general manager, who once said: “Finley’s a no-good s.o.b. . . . but he has made himself a thorough student of player talent. He calls all the shots (on the A’s) and he’s become a damn good manager. . . . That’s right, I said manager.”

Asked about his baseball background, Finley said:

“I managed my first (sandlot) team when I was 12 and played semipro ball until I was 32, and that’s more than it takes to learn all there is to learn about baseball.

“I’ve sat in the stands with grandmothers who know baseball. That isn’t the secret. . . . There are three secrets. You’ve got to be lucky, you’ve got to outwork the other guy 365 days and nights a year, and you need the courage to make a decision.”

To his highest-ranking employee, John Claiborne, who left the A’s for the St. Louis Cardinals in mid-1975, Finley was “one of the hardest workers I’ve known, and he’s got a lot of guts. Put those two elements together, and that’s why he wound up with all those winning teams.”

The courage often seemed more like arrogance. One of Finley’s Chicago friends, banker Fred Sack, remembers that he was shocked by the players’ attitude toward the owner.

Walking with Finley through the A’s locker room after a 1973 defeat, Sack sensed hostility in every face.

“It was like walking among enemies,” he said. “But for the first time, I realized that he criticized them on purpose. It was a motivation technique.

“He knew baseball so well that he knew exactly what they’d done wrong (that day). They didn’t want to hear it, but he told them anyway.

“And the next day they went out and took it out on Charlie. Every time they hit a home run, they were swinging at Charlie’s head.”

As Finley remembers it: “I got along well with the guys who played for me. The only arguments we ever had were over money.”

The players, looking back, see it about the same way. Few knock him.

Tenace: “He was a hell of a general manager.”

Jackson: “He changed the game as no one else has.”

Holtzman: “He just wanted to win. Sure, the players didn’t like him, but it never hurt their performance.”

Finley only detested two kinds of players: those who played below their potential and those who asked him for more money.

In 1971, stung by Finley’s insults, Jackson retaliated publicly after a grand slam. Looking up as he rounded third, he gave the owner what Jackson later called a fist of defiance.

This so angered Finley that the next day he demanded--and got--a written apology from Jackson. On Finley’s orders, the apology was made in front of the manager, the team’s four coaches, and the captain.

Humiliated, Jackson broke down and cried.

Finley, it’s clear now, was born 20 years too late. He was one of baseball’s slave drivers in an era that wouldn’t tolerate them much longer.

Nobody ever knew more about the old game, the reserve-clause game, than he did. And nobody has understood less about the new. The rules that made millionaires of his players made a farmer of Charlie Finley.