by Nancy Finley
But perhaps the thing that most got Ernie Mehl’s goat was that Charlie, unlike Arnold Johnson, had no interest in his advice about how to run the team. His one big concession to Mehl—hiring Frank Lane—ended with Charlie’s firing him because he was rude and disrespectful. Mehl would never forgive him for that.
THE END OF PAYOLA
While going through the team’s financial records, the new owner came across something that didn’t make sense—checks written to Ernie Mehl and Joe McGuff totaling four to five thousand dollars a month. At first, he didn’t grasp what they meant. There were no explanatory notations. Charlie took a shot of J&B scotch and looked at them again. Then it hit him: Johnson had been paying the Star to write favorable articles about the team.
Charlie had not known of this arrangement when he bought the franchise, so the checks to Mehl and McGuff had stopped when he took over. It must have taken a while for the newspapermen to realize that the payments had come to an end. At some point Mehl broached the subject in conversation with Charlie, who made it clear he had no intention of paying for what in his mind amounted to a journalistic version of a “protection” racket.
“Arnold Johnson paid all travel expenses of Mehl and Joe McGuff,” Charlie told the Star and other news media. “The books showed it. I was amazed, being a rookie owner, that this was permitted, and when I asked other clubs about such a situation I was told it was not generally done. So I did not permit this to be continued—to me it was nothing but payola.”
Next, Charlie tried to assure the fans that he was committed to keeping the Athletics in Kansas City. He had inherited Johnson’s lease of Municipal Stadium, which allowed the team to leave if it failed to draw at least 850,000 fans each season. By August 1961, attendance figures were not expected to top seven hundred thousand for the season, and city officials were getting nervous. In front of reporters, Charlie set a piece of paper on fire and said that he was burning the lease, a dramatic gesture to indicate that he wouldn’t hold the city to the attendance clause. No one had to worry about losing the team.
Mehl derided the burning of the lease as a “stunt,” since it had no legal effect. Burning a document in front of the cameras did not eliminate the attendance clause. Charlie knew that, of course. He was simply trying to send a reassuring message to fans. But Mehl implied it was a trick. After that episode, Charlie’s relationship with Mehl, McGuff, and the Star steadily declined.
CHARLIE’S HALL OF MIRRORS
The disclosure of the years of “payola” to Mehl explained a lot. Soon after he realized there would be no more bribe money from the Athletics he started bad-mouthing Charlie and, by extension, the team. On August 17, 1961, Mehl wrote a scathing column accusing Charlie of meddling in the decisions of the team manager, Hank Bauer: “He has had to alter his pitching rotation to satisfy the whim of the owner, make line-up changes against his better judgment. He has had his authority usurped . . . thus making his job all the more difficult.”
Mehl also accused Charlie of refusing to promote the team so that falling attendance would give him an excuse to move the Athletics to Dallas: “Had the ownership made a deliberate attempt to sabotage a baseball operation, it could not have succeeded as well.” He compared watching Charlie’s ownership to “walking through a hall of mirrors, where everything appears to be out of focus. There never has been a baseball operation such as this, nothing so bizarre, so impossibly incongruous.” Charlie’s management was “incompetent and bizarre,” and the owner was a “tyrant” seeking to rob the loyal fans of their team.
The irony here was that the Star’s vendetta against Charlie, which poisoned its coverage of the team, was driving attendance down. Mehl and Johnson, not Charlie Finley, consigned the team to the bottom of the standings year after year and betrayed the Athletics’ fans.
If Charlie had intended “all along” to take the team out of Kansas City, as Mehl charged, why would he start investing in the franchise’s previously neglected farm team? When Charlie took over the team, according to Garrett Smalley, the editor of the Daily Record and Kansas City Daily News-Press, Municipal Stadium was “crummy and decaying.” Would a man who had a secret plan to move the team spend four hundred thousand dollars of his own money renovating it?
Charlie added fun and attention-getting attractions at Municipal Stadium and promotions like “Farmer’s Night,” intended to appeal to the city’s agricultural bent. He made dozens of speeches around the area promoting the team. If he had plans to move the team, he had an odd way of showing it.
Charlie was furious at Mehl’s insinuations. He responded that Mehl had never even asked him to comment on his accusations, and he accused Mehl of demanding kickbacks in exchange for positive press. Mehl and his editor at the Star, John W. Colt, denied the accusations.
It was after being vilified by Ernie Mehl in the Star that Charlie called for the midnight meeting with the prominent Kansas City banker, Crosby Kemper.
BACK AT THE MIDNIGHT MEETING
And so Crosby Kemper found himself huddled in Charlie Finley’s car outside his house in the middle of the night. Charlie told him that he wanted to set Mehl straight, and he wanted to do it in a way that would make the fans understand. In a ceremony at Municipal Stadium, he was going to present the old newsman a “Poison Pen” award.
Kemper was stunned. “Oh, Charlie,” he said, shaking his head. “I really don’t think you oughta do that. It will be a big mistake. You don’t know how influential the Star is in this city.”
“Crosby,” replied Charlie. “I’ve stood up to bigger men than Ernie Mehl.”
“Maybe. But this is Kansas City. It’s not your turf. It’s theirs.”
“We’ll see whose turf it is.”
“Keep in mind, Charlie, that it was Ahab who ended up impaled on Moby Dick’s ass, and not vice versa.” Charlie knew what he was talking about—he had seen the movie. But the conversation was over. Charlie had made up his mind. Kemper got out of the car and went back to bed.
It was Charlie’s great strength that he almost never backed down from a fight, especially when he thought he was right. It was also his Achilles’ heel. If you were a ballplayer who needed a boss in your corner, Charlie’s stubbornness was wonderful. But sometimes his battles—even the ones he won—hurt him more than anyone else. In this battle with the most powerful media voice in town, Charlie would land a punch, but the fight proved costly in the end.
THE POISON PEN
Three days after Mehl’s August 17 column, the Athletics hosted a doubleheader against the Chicago White Sox. The crowd of nearly ten thousand saw the home team lose the first game. Then a flatbed truck appeared at the far end of the ballpark. As it lumbered across left field, the fans grew quiet. Signs mounted on the sides of the flatbed proclaimed “Ernie Mehl Appreciation Day—Poison Pen Award for 1961” and featured a cartoon image of Mehl working over a typewriter. As the truck circled the field, the stadium organist played “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?”
Charlie hoped that the fans would understand that a man who had abused the power of the press had wronged him. But the fans were either indifferent—the strange ceremony drew a confused silence from the crowd—or they sided with Mehl. After all, Charlie had been in Kansas City for only a few months, but Mehl had been a Kansas City reporter for decades. So the public went with the devil they knew over the one they didn’t. Charlie’s gamble hadn’t worked. He failed to win over the public, and he found himself in an all-out war with Ernie Mehl, the most influential figure in sports in Kansas City.
Predictably, there was fallout from the “Poison Pen” incident. The commissioner of Major League Baseball, Ford Frick, called Mehl to apologize personally. True to form, Charlie fought back. First, he convinced Kansas City’s mayor pro-tem, Tom Gavin, and several city council members to send a telegram to Frick in support of Charlie. Frick then called Charlie to the commissioner’s office to sort out the whole affair. After the meeting, Charlie all but declared victory to the press, t
elling reporters that Frick in fact had not apologized to Mehl. Frick declined to comment. It would not be Charlie’s last public conflict with an MLB commissioner.
When Charlie fired Mehl’s friend Frank Lane, Lane returned the favor in an interview with Mehl in the Kansas City Star, ripping into Charlie and sharing his opinion that Charlie was thinking of moving the Athletics to Dallas.
Charlie had Lane’s replacement lined up. Pat Friday, a thirty-seven-year-old executive from the Chicago insurance office who had been working in the Athletics’ front office, would take care of business affairs, while Charlie himself would handle all of the personnel decisions.
Crosby Kemper had been right when he warned Charlie that confronting Mehl in public would backfire, and Charlie knew it. He quickly started working on damage control. Less than a week after the “Poison Pen” ceremony Charlie signed a lease amendment that got rid of the attendance clause once and for all.
CHAPTER 2
A TEAM IS BROUGHT DOWN
1955–1960
DOWN ON THE FARM
Ernie Mehl began preaching the gospel of Kansas City’s new baseball team and its owner, Arnold Johnson, in 1954. The Star sports editor praised Johnson for plunking down $3.5 million to buy the Athletics. The reality, according to an investigative story in the Saturday Evening Post, was somewhat different. Through a series of complex financial maneuvers, Johnson had spent just four hundred thousand dollars to purchase the franchise, and Mehl had promised him that he could “write his own ticket” if he moved the Athletics to Kansas City.
Baseball insiders tended to take a cynical view of Mehl and Johnson. The Chicago White Sox’ owner, Bill Veeck, for example, thought that Johnson had moved the Athletics to Kansas City strictly for the short term. Even during the honeymoon period in Kansas City, as Mehl was touting Johnson as the man who made his town “a big-league city,” rumors already were flying that Johnson planned to move the Athletics to Los Angeles when his lease expired after the 1959 season. The owner himself added to the suspicion. When a city councilman suggested taxing the Athletics to generate municipal revenue, Johnson threatened to move the team to Southern California after the ’57 season, though the prospects for such a move evaporated when the Brooklyn Dodgers moved to Los Angeles in 1958.
Throughout the five years that he owned the Athletics, Johnson, with the tacit approval of Mehl, regularly stripped the team of its best talent and traded them to the Yankees. They made twenty-eight trades with New York, almost all of them lopsidedly in favor of the perennial World Series contenders in the Bronx. It wasn’t long before the thrill of being “in the big time of cities,” as the Star editorialized, faded for Kansas City fans.
In 1957 the Athletics traded Harry Simpson to the Yankees, even though he had been Kansas City’s best player the year before. When Simpson struggled the following season, New York just returned him to the Athletics. “It was like a money-back guarantee,” wrote a Kansas City columnist years later.
The cozy relationship between the Athletics and the Yankees became embarrassingly obvious. When the Athletics acquired the young slugging prospect Roger Maris in 1957, the American League president, Will Harridge—who had supported Johnson’s efforts to buy the Athletics and approved their move to Kansas City—took the unusual step of publicly warning Johnson not to trade Maris to the Yankees for at least eighteen months. Johnson complied, but barely, trading Maris to New York in December 1959. The Athletics got little in return. Batting behind Mantle, Maris’s star immediately soared. He was named American League MVP in 1960 and then broke Babe Ruth’s single-season home run record the following year in one of pro baseball’s most memorable summers.
From 1955 through 1959, while Athletics fans suffered through five straight losing seasons, their best players were shuttled from Kansas City to the Big Apple. Fans and media both started wondering aloud whether Johnson’s tight business relationship with Yankees owners Del Webb and Dan Topping was compromising his position as the Athletics’ owner.
“Kansas City was not an independent major-league team at all, it was nothing more than a loosely controlled Yankee farm club,” Bill Veeck wrote later. He said that he heard the Athletics general manager, Parke Carroll—a former K. C. sports writer—boast openly in baseball meetings that he had nothing to worry about by trading away so many great players because the Yankees’ owner, George Weiss, had “promised to take care of” Carroll in return for his help in making those lopsided trades.
As a new decade opened, Athletics fans’ enthusiasm was muted. There appeared to be no end in sight to the squad’s losing. Then a twist of fate brought about the biggest change of all for Kansas City fans.
In March 1960, the Athletics were in West Palm Beach, Florida, for spring training, and their owner came to watch. The relaxed and optimistic mood of the baseball pre-season was suddenly shattered when Arnold Johnson died of a stroke while driving home from the ballpark. He was fifty-three. After just five seasons in Kansas City, the future of the Athletics again was in doubt.
Ernie Mehl resolved to buy the franchise and keep it in Kansas City. He didn’t know, however, that another Midwestern baseball fan wanted to buy the Athletics. From Chicago, Charles Oscar Finley was carefully watching the complicated dealings of Major League Baseball.
THE CALM BEFORE THE STORM
In 1954, the year that Arnold Johnson moved the Philadelphia Athletics to Kansas City, my family was comfortably ensconced in Dallas, unaware that we were about to begin a journey that would end in the trainwreck of the Kansas City Athletics.
My parents were on the move. They settled in the upper-middle-class Walnut Hill neighborhood in north Dallas. Back then Walnut Hill was right out of Norman Rockwell, with parks, swimming pools, and lots of children’s activities. Professional men in their early thirties to late forties lived here with their families.
After I was born, Mom quit work. She strove, I think, to have the perfect house and family, or so it appeared. Mom’s best friend was Norma Hendrick. I attended the co-op preschool with Norma’s daughter Chris, who became my best friend. In 1959, Dad was promoted to principal of Thomas Jefferson High School, three blocks from our home. At thirty-five, he was young for a high school principal, and he already had a master’s degree in journalism and was working on his Ph.D. in education. He was well on his way toward his goal of becoming the superintendent of the Dallas Independent School District.
I have memories of Dad in those days walking home from work, dressed in a suit and tie, carrying his briefcase. I would wait outside on the sidewalk until I saw his briefcase swinging in the distance. Then I’d run to him, and the two of us would walk together the rest of the way home. Dad may have been the studious type, but his fathering tended to be lighthearted. He loved playing games and demonstrating magic tricks. He had a big laugh and seldom said “no” to me. Mom, pushed into the role of disciplinarian, would get upset with him over this. I could talk with him, more so than with my mother. In the way that young girls often are, I was somewhat smitten by Dad. I sort of remember (and am told) I used to tell Dad that I wanted to marry him when I grew up.
Those were idyllic years for me, the most innocent time of my childhood, living in the cocoon that was Walnut Hill. Mom and Dad seemed happy. I was happy. Then one lovely Saturday morning the phone rang. It was Uncle Charlie.
He had called before. He and Dad were close, and despite the marked differences in their personalities—or perhaps because of them—they got along well. Charlie wanted to know if Dad was interested in working for him with the baseball team. Charlie needed someone he could trust to help run the franchise. The catch was that Dad would have to move his family to Kansas City. Dad politely declined. It was a flattering offer, but he was rising quickly in the Dallas public schools, and he and his wife and young daughter would stay where they were.
The calendar said the ’50s had ended, but in our tranquil neck of the woods, there was no sign that the new decade would be much different. We didn’t kno
w it, but our family had just boarded a train for Kansas City, and the tranquility of Walnut Hill was coming to an end.
CHAPTER 3
NOT INVITED TO THE DANCE
1960
Soon after Arnold Johnson died, his family put his baseball team up for auction. Ernie Mehl hurriedly put together a group of Kansas City businessmen to pool their assets to purchase the team, expecting to become in due course the majority owner of the Athletics.
By the late 1950s, baseball owners formed an exclusive club of oldmoney boys and nouveau riche businessmen, and they looked out for each other. Charlie was a self-made millionaire, but he was just an insurance salesman—not part of the club. When it became clear that Charlie might actually acquire the Athletics in 1960, the other owners assigned the Baltimore Orioles’ chairman, Joe Iglehart, to investigate him. Iglehart reported back to the owners: “Under no conditions should this person be allowed into our league.”
The owners didn’t take the warning seriously, but people in Kansas City worried that the newcomer would move the Athletics out of town, so Mehl and local restaurateur J. W. (“Jud”) Putsch were appointed as co-chairmen of a committee to find local investors. Just six years after Mehl and the Kansas City Star had successfully backed Johnson in bringing the Athletics to town, Mehl had to fight the battle all over again. He felt that they were his team, and everybody knew it. No one had done more than Mehl to sell tickets and cultivate interest in the Kansas City Athletics during the team’s first half-decade in town.
So to save the baseball tradition he had started, Mehl went back to work. By the end of June 1960, Putsch and Mehl had recruited nine local businessmen willing to put up two hundred thousand dollars each, for a total of $1.8 million, and Mehl reported that there were additional individuals and groups inside and outside Kansas City who were interested in purchasing the team.
