by Nancy Finley
Charlie look a bit crestfallen. The skunk idea was never mentioned again.
One thing we all agreed on—we did not want the elephant. The previous owner had gone with an elephant, and we wanted to distance the franchise from the old regime. And elephants are fat, clumsy, and slow—not the image we wanted for our A’s.
Nothing final was decided, but it triggered my imagination. At home, in my bedroom, I began drawing different animals—some clad in green and gold, some not—to see how they might look. We went into the offseason after the ’64 campaign still in search of a mascot. Then, a few weeks before the ’65 season opening, Governor Warren Hearnes made the choice for us. He gave Charlie a Missouri mule.
THE MOST FAMOUS MULE IN THE WORLD
A symbol of stubbornness, mules are popular in the Show Me State. Charlie was delighted with the creature and immediately realized he had found his mascot. Sportswriters and the other owners, as usual, found something to complain about. But even the most cynical players were amused by it, and the fans loved the mule. Nearly fifty years later, it still is one of the first things that people associate with the Athletics’ Finley years.
Charlie named the mule after himself—Charlie O. “I thought we should name this mule after an ass,” he’d bellow with a big laugh. His jokes never stopped. “Do you want to be my friend? First, kiss my ass.” One day Charlie’s friend Ed Daly, the former president of World Airways, jumped on the mule before the start of a game and rode around the field. Watching the game on TV in Chicago, Charlie called the dugout and had them take a message to Daly. “Hey! Get off my ass, will ya?”
Having finally found his mascot, Charlie went into overdrive with his promotional ideas. He got the mule an air-conditioned trailer equipped with a phonograph to play songs like “The Mule Train.” He had a baseball hat made for the animal, complete with ear holes, and gave it a green and gold blanket imprinted with “Charlie O.” Charlie built a special stable in the petting zoo behind the left-field wall, next to the picnic area, and the mule moved in with the monkeys, sheep, rabbits, and pheasants.
On Opening Day Governor Hearnes officially presented the mule to Charlie, who donned a cowboy hat and rode his new namesake around the ballpark. Charlie O’s duties would not be confined to Municipal Stadium. He went on the road to every American League city, spending the night in a trailer behind the players’ hotel. Before games, Charlie would ride his mule through the city streets, sometimes ending up in the hotel lobby, to the chagrin of hotel employees and the shock of local sportswriters.
When the Athletics were in New York City to play the Yankees, for example, Charlie proudly rode his Missouri mount through Times Square, then to a barbershop for a shave, and into his hotel lobby, where Charlie O demonstrated that he was not housebroken. Wherever Charlie O showed up, people were charmed. Women, in particular, found him irresistibly cute. He created a sensation everywhere he went.
The only place Charlie O was not welcome was Chicago, where the White Sox’ co-owner, Arthur Allyn, refused to admit the mule to Comiskey Park. Uncle Charlie responded in the way most people did in the 1960s when they felt wronged—he staged a protest. He held a luncheon at the Sheraton-Chicago Hotel for Charlie O and hired attractive young women to picket Comiskey Park. Meanwhile, a squad of police officers had been dispatched to the ballpark for the sole purpose of keeping the mule out. While the policemen kept their eyes fixed on Charlie O, the A’s sneaked a baby mule into the back of the park, and outfielder Ken Harrelson triumphantly rode it onto the field in the middle of the game. The umpires called time and kicked the mule—and Harrelson—off the field. Meanwhile, Uncle Charlie—having exacted his revenge—pointed to Allyn and laughed.
Back in Kansas City, some of the older denizens of the petting zoo suffered unhappier fates (this is long before society took an enlightened approach to animal welfare). One sheep died after a home-run ball landed on its head, while another passed away from a heart attack while being chased around the zoo by an Athletics player. The pitcher Moe Drabowsky would use a fungo bat to hit the animals with a baseball before games, while young hurlers Catfish Hunter and Lew Krausse found a way to drug the monkeys. They would capture grasshoppers in the outfield, stuff sleeping pills in the grasshoppers’ throats, and then feed them to the monkeys. Catfish and Krausse would howl with laughter when the animals jumped around the cages while under the influence. Something like that today would get players suspended and fined, of course.
But Charlie O never received that kind of abuse. In fact, it became a pregame tradition of sorts for a player to ride the mule onto the field near the grandstand so fans could pet it as it made the rounds. Charlie O would then take a bow and be led away.
Charlie O once found himself in a fist-fight with the player who was leading him around the field for the fans. The animal stepped on the player’s foot. The player let out a yelp and punched Charlie O on the shoulder. The mule, with eyes bulging, jumped back before the player could release his hold on the lead rope, leaving him flat on the ground. Then Charlie O began to walk slowly but directly at him. Everyone familiar with the mule knew he didn’t have a mean bone in his body. He was simply perplexed to see a man in that odd position. When he approached the fallen player, the man jumped up and ran a few steps away, brushing off his derriere and giving an angry look at Charlie O. The scene caused a stir in the stands, some spectators laughing and some shouting advice. Eventually he picked up the rope again and led Charlie O off the field.
Dad and Charlie eventually decided to keep the mule at Benjamin Stables, owned and managed by Howard Benjamin, with whom Dad had a warm friendship. Howard gave me my own pony, Tom Thumb, a black horse with white markings and just the right size for a seven-year-old. Riding Tom gave me my love of horses and all things Western. When Mom took me to Benjamin Stables to ride my pony, I would visit Charlie O too and feed him sugar cubes or carrots that I smuggled in.
CHARLIE’S FAST CROWD
One evening in April 1965, while the two families were dining out together, we ran into a woman whom my parents and the Benjamins knew. A striking sometime model in her late twenties, she had a sultry air that made it hard not to look at her. She was part of the fun-loving baseball crowd that Charlie led, a group Mom grew to loathe—with good reason, it would turn out.
CHAPTER 10
SEEDS OF SUCCESS
MID-1960S
Three years after Charlie acquired the Athletics—and despite Ernie Mehl’s efforts—he began to receive credit for some of the changes he had made.
The readers of Bob Mussman’s sports column in the Chillicothe Tribune lived a hundred miles northeast from Kansas City, but in 1963 he urged them to go take in an A’s game: “The beautiful stadium alone is worth the trip. It combines a muted shade of green, coral orange and cream in the seating area. The well-tended field, the envy of any ardent lawnman, is surrounded by red shale track.” But the stadium wasn’t the only attraction. Mussman noted that “under controversial Charles Finley, the A’s have been making strides toward the goal of building a winning ball club.” He continued, “The A’s have given up their policy of trades with the Yankees, and now are doing some effective building through a well managed farm team.” He credited the organization with “what appears to be an expert managerial and coaching staff” and declared that “this is no longer a team of losers.”
Despite Charlie’s spending and his never-ending promotions, the Kansas City Athletics in the mid-1960s were still a joke in baseball circles—on the field, in the standings, and at the box office. Charlie and Dad, proud and competitive men, desperately wanted to change that. They knew that the best and cheapest way to build a winner was through the franchise’s farm system. That idea wasn’t revolutionary. Finding and developing young talent and then letting it mature in the minor leagues was a time-honored strategy. But if it were easy, then every franchise’s farm system would be brimming with talent. Few actually were. Executing that plan took good scouts, a smart general manager
and player personnel executive, a little luck, and—perhaps most importantly—a generous owner.
If you asked any team owner or manager, he would say, sure, his farm teams were important. But everyone seemed to treat the farm teams as an afterthought. Charlie’s main focus was finding and signing up prospects, and after years of quietly going about “watering the plants,” his farm team was perhaps his best-kept secret. He did not look for quick and easy ways to build a competitive team. “I have to think about the next ten years,” he said.
Charlie elaborated in an interview in 1968: “I decided a long time ago that we’d have to start raising our own ballplayers. It’s the only way. It’s like building a house; you have to have a solid foundation no matter how much it costs. I think we have it now.” Looking back in 1996, Marvin Miller, the head of the baseball players union, agreed: “He was his own scouting system. He personally recruited the bulk of that team. I knew nobody in baseball who could ever approach what he did.”
Charlie started acquiring young talent as soon as he took over. He signed the pitcher Lew Krausse Jr. in 1961 for $150,000, then a pro baseball record. His scouts signed the Cuban-born Dagoberto “Bert” Campaneris for just a few thousand dollars in 1962. A year later, Charlie grabbed Dave Duncan as an amateur free agent straight out of high school, when the feisty catcher was just a skinny teenager. That same season, Charlie signed the pitcher Paul Lindblad, an underrated reliever who would play for the Athletics organization until 1976 (save for a year and half with other teams in 1971–1972). In 1964, the big catch was Jim Hunter, a North Carolina farm boy whose brother had shot off his toe in a hunting accident. Charlie sent him to the Mayo Clinic for treatment, and Hunter convalesced at his farm in LaPorte, Indiana. Charlie gave him the nickname “Catfish” when he began pitching for the A’s in 1965.
Charlie isn’t remembered for spending a lot of money on players, but he certainly went all-out to land young talent in the 1960s. 1964 was the year that Charlie and his scouting staff really got on a roll. By the time they were done, they had assembled one of the most outstanding pools of young talent in baseball history—playmakers who, a decade later, were the heart of the only non-Yankees dynasty in baseball’s modern era.
Charlie kicked off the year by wooing John Odom, an amateur free agent from Macon, Georgia. Demonstrating the team’s emphasis on youth, Charlie personally made the trip down south to Odom’s home on the night of his high school graduation. Growing up in Alabama had taught Charlie something about Southern hospitality, and he showed up with groceries and cooked dinner for Odom’s family. He charmed them with a dinner menu of corn bread, fried chicken, corn on the cob, black-eyed peas, and collard greens. Nicknamed “Blue Moon” because he rarely smiled and often seemed sad, Odom wasn’t glum after Charlie’s visit. The kid signed for a seventy-five-thousand-dollar bonus in June 1964. “I’d have signed for as little as thirty-five thousand,” Odom told reporters years later.
Next, Charlie signed hometown talent Chuck Dobson, who grew up just an outfielder’s throw away from Municipal Stadium in Kansas City. Dobson signed for twenty-five thousand dollars in 1964. Rollie Fingers was signed as an amateur free agent in 1964 at the tender age of eighteen with a signing bonus of twenty thousand dollars. Nearly thirty years later, he would be inducted into the Hall of Fame. Next was Joe Rudi, a lanky California kid also signed to an amateur free agent contract after going undrafted.
Charlie was just getting started. He drafted Rick Monday in the first round of the 1965 MLB draft and then signed the highly touted prospect to a $104,000 bonus. That same day, he drafted a twenty-one-year-old third baseman named Salvatore Bando and agreed to a sixty-five-thousand-dollar bonus. The following year, 1966, Charlie drafted a young outfielder named Reginald Martinez Jackson, paying the Arizona State University star better known as “Reggie” a ninety-five-thousand-dollar bonus. In 1967, Charlie made his way down to Mansfield, Louisiana, to sign the Athletics’ second-round pick, a young hurler and college football star named Vida Blue. Charlie paid the nineteen-year-old a signing bonus of forty thousand dollars.
And that isn’t even counting players like Claude “Skip” Lockwood and Jumbo Jim Nash, pitchers signed by the Athletics in the mid-1960s who went on to have productive major league careers, albeit mostly with other teams. Second baseman Dick Green was the only Athletics player to be part of the 1970s dynasty who was signed with the squad before Uncle Charlie bought the franchise in late 1960. Yet he spent his entire major league career with the organization—1963 to 1974—under Charlie’s watch.
Nearly all of these young stars would be important members of the championship teams of the early ’70s. But back then, they were all skinny, wide-eyed kids with oodles of raw talent but little polish. Charlie was the owner behind those signing bonuses, which totaled several hundreds of thousands of dollars when the dust cleared. Not bad for a team owner known for being “too cheap.”
THE SOUL OF THE WINNER
Charlie didn’t just sign the checks. More importantly, he was making the final decisions to take these guys. The Oakland Tribune beat writer Ron Bergman once said that Charlie “could look into a man’s soul and tell if he were a winner or not.” That may sound strange or even laughable to today’s numbers-crazy fans and reporters—and to the growing number of experts who value statistics and cold numbers over their own perceptions and intuition. But it was true. Charlie’s intuition would pay off a few years later, before baseball teams were relying on computers. Charlie could judge people and their intangibles better than anyone. And as Bergman pointed out, it’s hard to argue with the results, especially once he got involved with player personnel decisions.
Charlie became known as a hands-on owner—what the sports media like to call a “meddler.” Though other people often held the title of general manager—including Frank Lane, Pat Friday, and Hank Peters—in reality, Charlie was the team’s real general manager, and Dad was his partner. Few player personnel decisions were made without Charlie’s and Dad’s consent or outright participation.
When the A’s started winning, the jealous MLB owners concocted a revisionist history that minimized Charlie’s contribution to the team’s success. If Charlie’s role was to be diminished, then someone had to be credited for building this championship team. The man they came up with for that role was Hank Peters, who worked in the front office in the early and mid-1960s. Peters had a great career as a baseball executive, building winning teams in Baltimore in the 1970s and Cleveland in the late 1980s before retiring in 1992. But Peters left the A’s after the 1966 season, and he wasn’t around for major acquisitions like Vida Blue, the hiring of Dick Williams as team manager, or the excellent, one-sided trades that Charlie made for Ken Holtzman or Billy North or Ray Fosse. Those deals took the Athletics from mere contenders to world champions, and Charlie was the driving force behind all of them.
Nevertheless, one part of the revisionist history is correct. Charlie had someone helping him and giving him advice on players. That man was Carl Finley.
ROBBED
To this day, Kansas City fans feel like they were robbed. They cheered those young players Reggie Jackson, Vida Blue, Catfish Hunter, Sal Bando, and many others when they were still green, only to see the glory and World Series titles go to another city after Charlie moved the franchise to Oakland. Accurately or not, that’s how many a forlorn Midwestern Athletics fan still sees it. Given how Dad’s contributions were overlooked, and still are today, I think he could relate to how those Kansas City baseball fans felt.
CHAPTER 11
THE ROAD TO FREEDOM
1966
After we moved to suburban Overland Park, Dad started to spend more time at his office at Municipal Stadium, a half-hour drive from our house, and Mom grew suspicious. I suppose her doubts began when Dad brought home that autographed photo of Connie Stevens a few years earlier, and her suspicions only deepened when she saw the glamorous crowd, with plenty of young, attractive women, at Charlie’s post-game part
ies at the Muehlebach Hotel.
Eventually, Mom discovered that her suspicions were justified. One rainy, wind-blown night, she found Dad’s new Ford Thunderbird in the parking lot of the Conga Room, a dive on the outskirts of town. She went inside and spotted Dad, wearing a cowboy hat, with the sultry young woman we’d met several months earlier in the restaurant with the Benjamins. Mom and Dad separated in January 1966, and Dad moved back into the Muehlebach Hotel. The next month Mom filed for divorce, citing “gross neglect and extreme cruelty.”
The world Charlie inhabited, and into which he had drawn my father, was hard on marriages. Word around the franchise was that this same young woman had also had affairs with Charlie and Howard Benjamin. The Benjamins’ marriage and Charlie’s fell apart in due course.
Mom and I moved back to Dallas in July 1966, a few months before I started the third grade. We lived in a modest but comfortable duplex about three blocks away from my new school. Dad, who stayed in Kansas City, paid the rent for the first six months. No longer a housewife, Mom took a job as a first-grade teacher at another school in town.
THE PLAYERS’ ASSOCIATION
The Athletics finished the 1966 season 74–86—not great, but much better than in years past, and the squad seemed ready to escape its longtime laughingstock status. Charlie was halfway through his four-year lease extension at Municipal Stadium. As attendance dwindled and his relationship with Kansas City’s leaders and fans deteriorated, it became clear that a move lay ahead. Charlie eyed other cities for the team—Louisville, Oakland, and especially Dallas—any place, really, where he could escape his own unhappy “marriage” with the Midwest.
But in baseball that year, there was an even more important development, one that would change the game irrevocably. The players—who were seeking freedom themselves—recruited a respected national labor official to lead their union, called the Major League Baseball Players’ Association.
