After Counting the Minutes, This Victory Overdue

Bo Jackson gathered the young Angels around and presented Chuck Finley with a bottle of champagne, a touching Mother’s Day gift.

And, oh, had it been one mother of a winless streak. Six starts without victory. Thirty-nine and two-third innings without a victory. Thirty-three days without a victory. Seven hundred ninty-two hours without a victory. Forty-seven thousand five hundred twenty minutes without a victory.

Finley had counted it out himself, usually around 2:30 in the morning, tossing and turning as he went.

“I’d lay in bed, staring at the ceiling,” Finley said. “There’d be this diamond on the ceiling. And I’d be watching guys circle it.”

Counting earned runs didn’t help, either. Finley led the league in insomnia in April, wondering where the forkball went, wondering what he was doing with an ERA taller than himself.

Finley is six-six.

His ERA before Sunday was six-eight.

You’ve heard of the demons that vex a man during the restless hours between midnight and the dawn?

With Finley, those demons had names.

“Jane Fonda. Stupid Bow-Flex commercials. Pay-per-view. I watched ‘em all,” said Finley. “I became an expert on late-night TV.

“You know, I kinda miss the days when you’d leave the TV on and the screen would go blank and all you’d hear was ‘Bzzzzz.’ You could fall asleep to that, but now, with cable, there’s always something on at 5, 6 in the morning.”

Sunday, Finley finally could rest. The Oakland Athletics filled the bill better than any bottle of Sominex could, scarcely making a peep as they lost to Finley, 7-0, lavishing the one-time Angel ace with a passel of season firsts.

First victory.

First complete game.

First shutout.

First friendly post-outing conversation with his teammates.

“The guys on this team were starting to look at me like I was a leper,” Finley said. “I’d stand up and everybody would look the other way.”

This time, the Angels toasted him.

Within reason, of course.

The bottle said champagne, but Finley said, “I think it was prune juice. Bo bought it. It must’ve cost him $4.95.

“Coming from Bo Jackson, you’d have thought it would have been a $100 bottle. But he said one win didn’t mean that much to him.”

Bo should have consulted Buck Rodgers, who has spent the last five weeks trying to manage a baseball team with a starting rotation that has done absolutely nothing so far except rotate.

Mark Langston made one start, then discovered loose bodies partying inside his left elbow. On April 12, he had to have them evicted.

Langston was replaced by Brian Anderson, who made six starts before breaking his thumb. Now Anderson is on the disabled list, expected to be replaced this week by Langston.

John Dopson made five starts, got hammered in four of them and got re-assigned to the bullpen.

Dopson was replaced by the man he replaced, Joe Magrane, who missed the season’s first month while recovering from arm surgery.

With Finley AWOL, Mark Leiter had become the lone constant in Rodgers’ pitching rotation. Now Leiter is a fine fellow, the central figure in a human-interest that continues to inspire us all, but the fact remains that he was released by the Detroit Tigers during spring training. He isn’t supposed to carry an entire baseball team on his back.

Finley, however, was. At least until Langston made it back.

Instead, Finley dropped out.

He insists it wasn’t due to the pressure of the load.

“I just thought that if I did the same thing I did last year and every year, it would be enough. More than enough,” he said. “It’s not like I was going to spend an extra hour in the gym lifting weights so I could add another mile-an-hour to my fastball. I wasn’t going to do leg squats to get ready to pitch 12 innings every time out.”

All he had to do was be Chuck Finley. Yet through the second Saturday of May, he was tied in total victories with Charlie Finley.

Who noticed? Can you recite the entire editions of the north, central and south Orange County phone books?

In the past month, Finley suspects he received advice from every name on every page.

“I felt like I had two stairways leading up to my head,” Finley said. “Fifty guys going up and 50 guys going down, a constant escalator of guys trying to get into my brain, telling me what I’m doing wrong. I thought I was going crazy.”

Finley recounted the ringing in his ears:

“ ‘You’re showing all your pitches.’

“ ‘Too much weight work.”

“ ‘You’re not drinking enough beer.’ Or, ‘You’re drinking too much beer.’ The same person gave me those two. I said, ‘Which one is it?’ ”

Finley even got an earful while he was filling his car with gas.

Guy says to him, “You’re Chuck Finley, ain’t you?”

Finley nods.

Guy says, “What the hell’s wrong with you?”

Finley says, “What, am I pumping the wrong way?”

Guy says, “No, your pitching. You ever thought about throwing a knuckleball?”

Finley laughed as he told that one.

“I’ve got as much chance of winning with a knuckleball,” Finley said, “as Roseanne Arnold has of weighing 150 pounds. She’d have to lose an awful lot of weight.”

Maybe she should try the Chuck Finley Diet.

Pitch nine shutout innings, lose the weight of the world.