With the advent of free agency looming, other stars soon found themselves headed out of Oakland. In June 1976 Commissioner Bowie Kuhn tried to stem the tide of an Oakland housecleaning when he blocked the proposed sale of former Cy Young award winner Vida Blue to the Yankees for $1.5 million as well as that of star left fielder Joe Rudi and relief ace Rollie Fingers to the Red Sox for $2 million. As it turned out, Kuhn was only delaying the inevitable. The breakup of the three-time champions occurred with lightning speed.

For five years the Oakland A’s had been a glorious franchise. Built from the inside out, with a stable of young homegrown talent who had matured together in the minor leagues, from 1971 through 1975, Oakland won five consecutive American League West titles, winning it all in the middle three of those seasons. In the process, the core starting lineup of Bando at third; Campaneris at short; Green at second; Rudi in left; Jackson in right; Tenace catching or playing first; and Hunter, Odom, and Fingers on the mound, together with such imports as Holtzman and Bill North, took the field and withstood both their own internal squabbling and one of the most notorious owners the game has ever known to defeat all comers and permanently etch their names as one of the greatest teams ever assembled.

Their common foe was always Charles Oscar Finley. If the A’s players sometimes fought with one another as well as their opponents, the bond most of them shared was a loathing of the A’s irascible, overbearing, pompous, manipulative, scheming, cantankerous, bombastic, often prevaricating, but flamboyant, creative, forward-thinking, and inventive owner. Indeed, so frequently did Finley meddle in the affairs of his team, so often did he commit some seemingly egregious offense against one or another player, that the result became a shared commitment among the A’s personnel to band together against Finley’s dictates and misbehavior and denounce him as an abhorrent and often juvenile cheapskate and a louse. Finley became the unifying negative force in the locker room (not that he ever really minded, if it meant his team would win) and the players took that camaraderie to the field and won in spite of his churlish behavior.

This book chronicles the lives and times of those men and those teams. Included is a biography of each player who appeared in an Oakland uniform in each of the three championship years, together with the managers, coaches, Finley himself, and Monte Moore, who broadcast the games. As baseball seasons begin with spring training and end with the World Series, so too is each season here similarly recapped, in chronological order, with the men who joined the team in a particular season included in that year’s account. Documenting multiple seasons was, of course, a major undertaking, and would not have been accomplished without the dedication and able writing of a number of SABR volunteers, each of whom I sincerely thank and whose excellent work speaks for itself in the pages that follow.

Beyond the outstanding writing, however, I extend my heartfelt appreciation to an editorial team which for the better part of two years read every word and checked every fact to ensure that we got it right. In particular, this book would not have been produced without the commitment of Bill Nowlin, Len Levin, and Greg Erion. For their assistance, I am eternally indebted.

— Chip Greene
Waynesboro, Pennsylvania
November 29, 2014

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Every team brings contrasting personalities together. This is an inescapable fact, for winning is the number one consideration. Otherwise, why even keep score? As Hall of Fame football coach Vince Lombardi was fond of saying, “Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.”

Over the course of a grueling 162-game championship season (not counting playoff and series games) tempers can flare—and often do. Every good team has big egos, low boiling points, and high testosterone levels. If you win, the journalists will call it “chemistry:” the harmonious composition of players and management. Of course, if you should lose, the same journalists still call it “chemistry,” alluding to team disharmony, disorganization, and turmoil. If the latter be the case, the problems inevitably continue simmering, ultimately worsen, and the cast of personnel and/or culture inevitably changes.

Separating fact from fiction is often dependent on the personal biases of the journalists themselves. But, the inescapable reality is teams win with talent, perseverance, and grit. Teams are not put together for chemistry; they are formed around talent. Make no mistake about this. As our Hall of Fame manager, Dick Williams, told the team after winning the 1972 World Series against the Cincinnati Reds: “The writers think I’m a genius. That’s a bunch of crap. If I’m a genius, you guys made me one. No one wins without the horses.”

Chemistry is not a product of putting together “nice” or “compatible” players. Chemistry is a product of winning. The more you win, the better the chemistry. Chemistry is therefore a group dynamic that transcends individual personalities and, as previously stated, often changes during the course of a long season.

The Kansas City A’s organization of the mid 1960s were very aggressive signing amateur talent. There was no amateur draft in those days; teams could go after and sign anyone. The A’s signed and stockpiled better talent than other organizations during those years. When the team subsequently moved to Oakland in 1968, they had cornered the best young amateur talent out there. They were loaded and ready to dominate.

In 1971, while playing for the Washington Senators, I was called into manager Ted Williams’ office after a night game in Minnesota. “We’ve traded you to Oakland. You’ve hit 50 home runs over the past two seasons for me and they need a power-hitting first baseman. This is a helluva break for you.” So myself and Darold Knowles, a top-drawer middle-inning LH reliever, were shipped to Oakland.

Going from a perennial last-place team to a powerhouse with World Series potential re-energized me, as it would any other player. My new A’s teammates and I were all close to the same age: young, talented, uninhibited, and confident. They were good and they knew it. I realized this the minute I walked into their clubhouse when first joining the team in Baltimore to play the Orioles.

Manager Dick Williams quickly called me into his office. “These guys are ultra-competitive, Mike. You’ll fit right in. We think you’re the missing link we’ve needed to take us to the postseason.” I was flattered, but knew I had to cut it or I was out. I wasn’t one of “Mr. Finley’s Boys;” he was definitely partial to those he signed as amateurs. Mr. Finley always let the players he didn’t originally sign know that you either got the job done—or you were history. As fate would have it, I got it done, and played an integral part in the A’s inexorable journey to competitive greatness.

The team immediately went on a tear and started to get some serious national attention. The better we did, the cockier we got, the better the late-night stories, and the closer we all became. A veritable “Band of Brothers.” Everyone had the other’s back—and to add to our camaraderie— a common “enemy:” the owner himself.

This was the most awesome group of athletes I had ever been around. We had fun. Lots of fun. The more we won, the more fun we had. It was always something special walking into the clubhouse the next after a game and hearing the shenanigans and mischief that transpired. I sometimes wondered how we could go out “the night after the night before” and play as hard as we did.

I think it was in 1972, we were playing a night game against the California Angels in Anaheim. The game went into extra innings and we finally got on a plane around 3:00am for a flight to New York City to play the Yankees: a day-doubleheader, no less, which was scheduled at 1:00pm. We didn’t arrive in New York until 10:00am, so the team bus went directly to Yankee Stadium from the airport.

We shut out the Yankees in both games. Afterward, the New York press surrounded manager Dick Williams in his office and asked him if he was surprised at how well his team played with such little rest. “Hell, no. This was just another routine day for most of ‘em.”

This anecdote played an intangible part in the enduring chemistry that helped unite us.

Rod Dedeaux, the legendary and renowned baseball coach at the University of Southern California, coached the first United States Olympic baseball team in Tokyo in 1964. I was fortunate to be selected to that elite team. If one of us made a mental mistake during a game, when you got back in the dugout, Coach Dedeaux would make a gala presentation by placing a female’s blond wig on your head, which you had to wear in the dugout for an inning. Talk about looking stupid! But it was all done in jest, solidified the team’s chemistry, and turned a potentially embarrassing situation for the player into one of levity. Rod Dedeaux was a great coach for a reason.

The A’s, as a team, basically did the same thing. We were never afraid to let our teammates know if they messed up during a game, though it seemed like the message was always said in a joking way and everyone on the team bus got a good laugh out of it. We would “serenade” the player with one of our famous “hymns” (which would be difficult to fit into a “Mature Audience”-rated program). It was cool to be able to laugh at mistakes and move on. However, with a team of personalities like we had, on rare occasions tempers would flare and players had to be physically separated. But, this was all part of the A’s DNA and what made us tick.

I remember the great Oakland Raiders football team at that time was known as a hostile, rebel-rousing bunch of “social deviants.” Of course, this made for good copy and “branded” the team. Knowing some of them personally at that time helped me understand the importance of a banner for the team to rally around. We’ve seen this over the years with good teams in all sports. I wouldn’t call us “social deviants” by any stretch of the imagination, but we were a team sorely needing something to rally around.

Mr. Finley probably didn’t realize it at the time, but he did something to help our sought-after team identity. During the 1972 season, future Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson started growing a beard. The team “rule” at that time was no facial hair would be tolerated. Reggie always had a penchant for the limelight and often did things to individualize his self-importance, often at the expense of the team. Dick Williams talked to him about shaving off his beard. He was told that it was really painful to shave because of the ethnic nature of his skin, characteristic of many bumps and ingrown hair follicles. In short, Reggie did nothing about it.

Mr. Finley recognized he had a potential team morale problem at this point and personally got into the act. He couldn’t let one player defy his team rules and not allow everyone to do the same. He talked with Reggie and Reggie tested his star power by simply telling him that he was “the straw that stirred the drink.” Well, everyone on the team knew it was “Reggie being Reggie” and that he was “Mr. Finley’s Boy”—so the club did nothing about it. He would be the only one allowed to grow facial hair. Characteristic of our team, we got pissed off, and we decided we had had enough of Reggie’s attitude. Everyone decided to grow some type of facial hair.

Having lost control of the situation, Mr. Finley decided that he would make “lemonade out of lemons.” He staged a “Mustache Day” at the Oakland-Alameda Coliseum: anyone who attended the game with facial hair would be admitted free of charge. In addition, he commemorated the event by presenting each of us with a gold-plated mustache spoon as a remembrance.

The result? Mr. Finley looked like a hero instead of a pushover, we got the identity we craved with our facial hair, and Reggie (temporarily) lost his individuality. In short, it made us a tighter group, Reggie notwithstanding.

Dick Williams knew there was no love lost for the ornery Mr. Finley by his team and would go out of his way to make it clear that we weren’t alone. Dick tired endlessly of Mr. Finley meddling with his on-the-field running of the team. Especially when it came to making out the game’s starting lineup. Dick was not a “yes-man” and was one of the reasons he was revered by us.

On a “whim,” Mr. Finley would instruct Dick to play a bench player he thought would make an impact on that day’s game. Often times, this meant taking one of his core eight players and sitting him down. This could happen to any one of us—even if the player was on a batting tear. This would infuriate the manager, who was left with the tough task of changing his already posted lineup and smoothing out the affected player’s ego. His meddling finally became so bad that Dick resigned after consecutive World Series championships in 1972 and 1973. I liked Dick. He was a “man’s man” and I thought he ran a ball game better than any other manager at that time. He got the best out of everyone, despite the owner’s incessant interference.

Dick was a risk-taker, which further endeared him to us. We were talented but had never been on the “Big Stage,” in contrast to the powerful Cincinnati team already branded “Big Red Machine.” The 1972 World Series opened in their home park. We were huge underdogs—but that seemed to help our motivation. 

The Reds featured Pete Rose, Johnny Bench, and Joe Morgan. We had lost Reggie Jackson for the World Series due to a leg injury he suffered in a home plate collision in the playoffs with Detroit Tigers catcher Bill Freehan (on the back-end of a successful double steal with me on first and Reggie on third).

But, we did have Campy Campaneris, Matty Alou, Joe Rudi, Sal Bando, Dave Duncan, Gene Tenace, George Hendrick, and Dick Green ready to go. Oh, and lest I forget: Catfish Hunter, Vida Blue, Ken Holtzman, Blue Moon Odom, and Rollie Fingers.

Speaking of Rollie, he was part of one of the biggest baseball “hoodwinks” I can ever remember. Johnny Bench was the unfortunate fall-guy. I’m not sure which game it was in Oakland, but Bench was the hitter in a very close game. I believe two men were on, first base was open, with two outs. The count went to three balls and two strikes. Dick Williams jogged out to the mound to talk to Rollie. A bad pitch here to a great hitter like Johnny could mean three runs and losing the game. I trotted in to the mound.

Dick told Rollie to fake an intentional pass to Bench, but throw a strike. But he didn’t want Rollie to throw a fastball because Bench was a fastball hitter. In typical Rollie fashion, he blurted out, “Are you kidding?  Is this Little League or what?”

With Johnny standing in the box expecting a wide pitchout, Rollie broke off one of his patented sliders for called strike three. Gotta love him. We still laugh about it to this day.

Gene Tenace had been a backup catcher for us, but Dick (or more likely a Finley whim!) decided to start him in the 1972 World Series. He responded with one of the finest World Series performances the Fall Classic has ever seen. He batted .348 with four homers and nine RBIs, including two hits and two RBIs in a deciding Game Seven. Without Geno’s home runs, there’s no Game Seven and no Ring. He made it possible.

We had some characters. Real “beauties” you might say. Holtzman was a professional instigator and “needler,” always getting under somebody’s skin. Vida was Vida, a wide-eyed young kid from Louisiana with an infectious personality and immeasurable talent; you couldn’t help liking him. Campy was, in my opinion, the catalyst of the team; our “table-setter.” Low-key, a consummate professional and gentleman. One of Campy’s favorite diversions was attaching a wallet (with a one-dollar bill half-way sticking out) to some very thin fishing line and suspending it from his hotel window. When some pedestrian would try to pick it up he’d jerk on it. If the pedestrian would run after it that was frosting on the cake for him. Like I said, it’s a long season.

Campy was also a fierce competitor despite his seemingly outward appearance to the contrary. During the 1972 playoffs, Billy Martin, the Detroit Tigers’ fiery manager, ordered his pitcher Lerrin LaGrow to throw at Campy’s feet, trying to sideline our base-stealing star. Campy had already singled, stole second and third, and then scored the first run of the game. He would also get two more hits and score yet another run before facing LaGrow. He hit Campy in the ankle; Campy threw his bat at LaGrow precipitating a dugout-clearing brawl. Ever the competitor, Campy felt he did what he had to. You’ve got to respect a teammate like that. It fired us up.

Captain Sal Bando did a nice job trying to keep Reggie happy and the team from killing him. Believe me, this was no easy task, but Sal was up to it. I thought Dick Green was, by far, the best damn defensive second baseman I had ever seen. A real acrobat in the field. Nothing bothered “Greenie,” who always had a big smile on his face and the loudest, most contagious laugh on the club.

Joe Rudi just went about his business in a low-key style. You’d hardly know he was there until after the game when you looked up and realized he had three hits, two RBIs, and a great catch in the outfield. His leaping catch against the left-field wall saved Game Seven for us. Dave Duncan, also low-key but a fierce competitor, was a power-hitting catcher that everyone respected and liked. Gene Tenace was a fun-loving Italian kid that brought a lot of life to the clubhouse. “Blue Moon” Odom was also someone who everyone liked and let his feelings be known of his personal dislike of Reggie. This led to an altercation on the team bus when Reggie went off verbally on Moon. Ah, the good old days….

I could probably write a book about Hall of Famer Rollie Fingers. He just made everyone laugh, always playing a “naïve” role and the perfect foil for Holtzman’s needling. It was hard to believe that a happy-go-lucky guy like him off the field could transform into such a “lights out” reliever when he crossed the white lines. Nothing fazed him. Kenny always said he was “too damn dumb to know what was really going on.” Maybe that was what made him so unflappable in tight situations. And endearing to all of us.

Hall of Famer “Catfish” Hunter was, well, maybe the best teammate anyone could ask for and a great guy. He was another of our many team agitators, someone you just couldn’t get mad at. He was always on Reggie’s case. Happy-go-lucky off the field, but I can’t think of anyone I played with that I would rather see start a big game. As they say, he had “ice cubes in his veins.”

And, the supporting cast was just as great. Mike Hegan and Don Mincher kept everyone loose. They and I had a word routine that everyone on the team contributed to. Things like, “Hey Minch! You know what ostentatious means, don’t you?” He’d think a bit and come back with, “Yeah, I know. It’s a town in Texas.” And it would go on from there. In fact, before Game Three in Oakland, me, “Mo” (of course, he was known as “Mo” Hegan), and Minch did a pregame interview demonstrating our word game on national TV.

Smooth-fielding Ted Kubiak was always ready to fill-in when he was needed. He didn’t get the nickname “Smooth” for nothing. He could really “pick it.” Dal Maxvill was a veteran infielder you could always count on to come through. I could go on and on. Everyone contributed in their own way.

Then, of course, there was Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson. Our “lightning rod” for all things good and bad. A great talent. I actually liked him despite his eccentricities. He’d “go off the reservation” once in a while and have to be brought down to earth by the guys, but overall, he played hard for us. It was unfortunate that he was sidelined and didn’t play in the ’72 Series. He deserved to be there to show his ample talents to the entire country. But, he got his opportunities in later years and certainly made the most of them.

To this day I am proud to have “walked the walk” with these men. A lot can be said of my team. Disparate? No doubt. Winners? You bet. I consider them all great friends. A terrific bunch, for sure!

— Mike Epstein
December 5, 2014

The Athletics’ trek began with original owner, manager, and president Cornelius McGillicuddy – Connie Mack. In 1909 he opened Shibe Park at Philadelphia’s 21st Street and West Lehigh Avenue. Shibe touted baseball’s first ramps, umpire and visiting team rooms, terra-cotta trim above each archway and windows, and the cupola – the age’s skybox. The first double-decked arena was built by modern material and design – cutting off, lifting, and pushing forward the top half of a deep single deck.

After Shibe, supports linked most parks’ upper and lower levels, putting fans nearer the diamond than in the past wooden-seat age. For the first time, concrete and steel let you round façade angles behind the plate, extend stands down each foul line, and form the double deck. Shibe flaunted a Beaux Arts tower and churchlike dome behind the plate, miming the French Renaissance, and also a green wall and seamless web of angled blocks, planes, and triangles. Presiding was McGillicuddy, tall and gaunt, in suit and tie, a scorecard in one hand, signaling to fielders from the dugout, his name trimmed to Mack to fit a box score.

In 1910-14 Mack’s Athletics won four pennants, three World Series, and more games than any other club. Mack then sold or traded players, partly to pay for Shibe. Living on thin profit’s edge, he added left-field seats, then covered the pavilion. By 1925 a second tier tied third and first base, respectively, to center field and right field’s corner. “Seventy percent of the park was now double-decked,” sportswriter Allen Lewis noted. “Shibe stayed that way the rest of its life.” The park’s last big-league match was played there on October 1, 1970.

Like a bobbed cork, Shibe Park again rose in 1929-31, hosting each American League titlist, then resurfaced in the public eye in 1941 as Ted Williams went 6-for-8 there in a last-day doubleheader to finish with a .406 average. A decade later, A’s pitcher Bobby Shantz won the 1952 AL MVP award. It wasn’t enough to overcome 1954’s wretched 51-103 record and 304,666 attendance. That winter Mack, for whom Shibe had been renamed in 1953, sold the A’s to Kansas City tycoon Arnold Johnson. “We just couldn’t make a go of it,” said Connie, who retired in 1950 and died, at 93, in 1956. Instead, the franchise chose to go about 1,125 miles west, to a city that soon deserved better than it got.

“For years Kansas City had been a great Yankees farm club,” recalled Kansas City Star sports editor Ernie Mehl. “Mantle, Rizzuto, they all played here with the American Association Blues.” In 1938 Muehlebach Field was renamed Ruppert Stadium after Yankees owner Jacob Ruppert. When Arnold Johnson bought the Athletics in 1954, he renamed the stadium after the Triple-A Blues. In 1945 Johnson’s pals Del Webb and Dan Topping had bought the Yankees. After Mehl convinced him that Kansas City deserved a club, Johnson used Webb and Topping to run interference, get the AL to OK the A’s sale, and move them from Philadelphia. Kansas City straightaway gave Johnson $500,000 for Blues Stadium, renaming it Municipal.

Johnson bought the Braves Field scoreboard for $100,000, put it in right-center field, and moved the plate 25 feet toward the outfield. Dimensions fell, rose, then fell again. At Shibe Park center field had been as much as 468 feet from home plate. At Municipal, center veered from 410 to 430; left, 312, 369; left-center, 375, 408. The bottom of the light tower was in play. Right-center followed the bouncing ball from 382 to 360; right, 347, 325. Wall heights wavered: left, 10 to 38; center, 10 to 40; right, 4 to 40. In 1955 the city rebuilt and double-decked Municipal Stadium in 22 weeks:  capacity 30,296. Over time, the Athletics, like the park’s lengths, shrank.

On April 12, 1955, former President Harry Truman, flanked by Connie Mack, threw out the first ball at Kansas City’s big-league opener. “The Boss is the real fan,” Harry said of his wife, Bess. Her rookie Athletics finished sixth (in 13 years, Missouri’s A’s never made the first division) and drew 1,393,054 (quadrupling Philadelphia’s last year). The following season the club won just 52 games and attendance fell to 1,015,154, a mark the franchise wouldn’t hit again until 1973. Midway through the 1957 season, skipper Lou Boudreau was fired: over the club’s remaining nine years in Kansas City, nine other managers succeeded him. Bob Cerv bashed 38 homers in 1958. In 1960 Municipal hosted an All-Star Game, Nationals winning, 5-3. Seven Yankees made the AL All-Star team – a common trend.

“The Yankees! They called us their cousins!” cried 1955-61 A’s broadcaster Merle Harmon. “Johnson kept trading our fine players – Art Ditmar, Bobby Shantz, Ralph Terry, Hector Lopez – the Yankees got every one.” The New York Central Railroad shipped Vic Power, Irv Noren, Enos Slaughter, and Jerry Lumpe west. In late 1959, KC dealt Roger Maris to the Big Apple for Norm Siebern, Don Larsen, Hank Bauer, and Marv Throneberry. “Oh,” said Merle, “and how the trades goaded our fans.” One July night the A’s ripped New York for 27 hits. “For one night we felt like the powerhouse.” Self-effacement lit the air. “’Course, that feeling didn’t last for long.”

What did last was disarray. Through 1960 the A’s never settled above sixth place. That December, Chicago insurance broker Charles O. Finley bought 52 percent of the club from the Johnson estate, Arnold having died in March. Finley tried to bully a rental reduction. He also showed a fine baseball sense and showman’s yen to please. In 1961 Lew Krausse got $125,000 to sign. “The first great bonus baby,” said Mehl, and “the first pitcher to start without any minor-league experience.” Blue Moon Odom and Catfish Hunter signed for $64,000 and $75,000, respectively. Bert Campaneris arrived from Venezuela. Sal Bando jumped from Arizona State. Alumni Rick Monday and Reggie Jackson led baseball’s 1965-66 free-agent draft. “Finley was his own scouting system,” said Harmon, “signing them all.” He seemed less adept at winning and drawing. The style was mom ’n’ pop, not U.S. Steel.

“We’ve got nowhere to go but up,” eighth-placers once cried in an eight-team league. The 1961 A’s differed: tied for last in expansion’s new ten-team AL.  Only 683,817  found the park, two miles east of downtown. By 1964 Finley wanted to move to Louisville. The AL told him to sign a KC lease or lose the team. Campaneris, who went on to star at shortstop for the 1972-74 Oakland world champions, pitched ambidextrously for 1962 Class A Daytona Beach. At 22, Campy debuted in the big leagues with two homers in a game, his aid not enough: The 1964 club went 57-105. One day in 1965 he played each position versus California. That September Satchel Paige, 59, pitched for the first time in the majors since 1953: one hit in three innings. “If you think I’m gonna throw anyplace but your letters, shame on ya!” he growled. Finley’s shame was the Yankees: He envied, but hated, them.

On August 18, 1962, New York drew Municipal’s best crowd – an overflow 35,147. “What a social occasion,” said Mehl. “People from all over Mid-America arrived by car, bus, and train.” Many sat on a grass slope between the right-field fence and Brooklyn Avenue behind it. It was too steep to be mowed. Finley imported sheep and dyed them A’s green and gold. An employee with a shepherd’s cap, cloak, and stick managed the animals. “When the Yankees played [invariably, selling out],” laughed Bando, Finley put the sheep behind the fence. One day a man accosted him and said he had sat on sheep manure. “My pants are ruined. What you gonna do about it?” Finley had them cleaned and pressed.

By 1965 Finley, increasingly at sea, became convinced that the Yankees’ dynasty stemmed from the 296-foot right-field line at The Big Ballpark in the Bronx. His riposte: the Pennant Porch, a four-foot-high fence 296 feet from the plate. “Baseball regulations said it had to be at least 325,” said Harmon. Defiant, Finley ad-libbed a 325 line, indenting it to 296 five feet from the pole. The AL cried foul. Charlie finally painted “K.C. One-Half Pennant Porch” at the 325-foot pole. Stymied on the field, Finley again looked beyond it. Recalling Shibe’s opulence, you mused what Philly’s high society might have thought of this.

Finley built a children’s zoo on an incline beyond right field. Its cast included his mule mascot Charlie O., a Chinese golden pheasant, German checker rabbits, peafowl, a German shorthaired pointer dog named Old Drum, and Capuchin monkeys. The Kansas City Farmers Market kept them happy, Tigers pitchers once feeding the monkeys vodka-soaked oranges. Another time Finley led a young Nebraskan on a tour. “He thinks they’re going to the zoo,” said Campy. “Instead, they wandered by mistake on the field [near outfielder Jim Landis] as the pitch was being thrown.” The style was home style: A “Sam’s Baseball Parking” sign still spruces a nearby bridge. Finley listened by radio from his Indiana home. He had a soft spot for Paige, ensuring his pension. Groundskeeper Smokey Olson used Charlie O.’s blanket to warm Satch’s legs in a bullpen rocking chair.

Some thought Finley off  his rocker. “Charlie didn’t want umpires to have to stash baseballs in their pocket,” said longtime A’s Voice Monte Moore, “so he built Harvey the Mechanical Rabbit,” rigged a basket, and buried him behind the plate. “The ump would point to a ballboy, who pushed a button,” making the rabbit rise, unload stock, and return to terra firma. Finley felt umpires demeaned by cleaning home plate – thus, “Little Blowhard,” a compressed-air jet. Not everyone was aware of Finley’s brainchild. In sequence, one batter readied for a pitch, the ump pressed the button, the airjet hissed, and the hitter, stunned, leapt straight up and fell backward in the box. Little worked. The 1967 A’s finished last, drew a next-to-AL-last 726,639, and in 1968 vamoosed to Oakland. A year later the league expanded to Seattle and back to Kansas City. The A’s were succeeded by the Royals, more quickly at the box office than on the field.

Finley arrived in Oakland already with the reputation for making Jack Benny seem generous. In August 1967 the A’s flew a regularly scheduled plane from Boston to Kansas City, “Finley so cheap he spread us three across in coach,” said first baseman Ken Harrelson. Priorities: Charlie O. went first class. En route, Lew Krausse had too much to drink. Finley wanted to suspend him. Manager Alvin Dark refused, leading Finley to fire him, at which point Harrelson called Charlie “detrimental to baseball.” Next day Finley called, swearing, asking if Harrelson wanted his unconditional release. Hawk said no, wanting and needing his $12,500 annual salary. Charlie said he would call back. Instead, he had Harrelson’s roommate, Mike Hershberger, phone: “As of this moment, you’re no longer a member of the green and gold.” Released, Hawk became baseball’s first free agent, signing with Boston. Harrelson’s take: “Charlie built a lot of things – a prime-time World Series, a great A’s team, free agency – by mistake.”

Oakland’s reputation had been forged by Gertrude Stein, who said famously, “There’s no there there” – although the city had hosted minor-league baseball continuously since the Oakland Pioneers of 1879. It had never had a major-league club, however, until  Finley relocated the A’s. Starting in 1911, the Oakland Oaks of the Pacific Coast League played in homespun Oaks Park, near Emeryville.  The bleachers began ten feet off the ground. “That way,” said owner J. Cal Ewing, “we can avoid a white hitter’s backdrop.” The clubhouse also had a washing machine. “If you want to look neat on the field,” said trainer Red Adams, “you have to start from inside out.” Casey Stengel won the 1948 pennant with “Nine Old Men,” the team averaging 34 years old. The park was older. “Every time a ball hit the left-field fence,” said ex-NL batting champion Ernie Lombardi, “the boards fell down.” The Oaks moved to Vancouver in 1958 when the National League Giants arrived across San Francisco Bay. In late 1967 Finley moved into a park at Oakland’s C.W. Nimitz Freeway and Hegenberger Road. Divide and conquer may work in politics. It nearly killed baseball in the Bay.

Public funds built the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum for the American Football League Raiders. It was symmetrical, like most new 1960s multisport facilities. Lines were 330 feet long. Alleys were 378 (later, 375, 372, and 367), center field was 410 (400 in 1969, 396, 397, and 400 again in 1990), and foul ground reached to Berkeley. (“Balls kept getting caught,” said 1968 skipper Bob Kennedy. “Cost you 10 points a year.”) Tall grass stemmed triples. Heavy night air killed would-be dingers. The backstop – a notch in the stands – lay a league-high 90 feet from the plate. The Coliseum lay hard by parking lots nowhere near downtown Oakland. It was easy to reach by highway and train, but had little buzz, less community shopping and dining, and outside concrete walls made increasingly dull by the brick and sandstone exterior of the 1990s and beyond “old new” parks: a Camden Yards, a Target Field, the phantasmagoric PNC Park.

Set in the ground like a D-Day concrete pillbox, barely visible from the Freeway, the Coliseum’s appearance fit the neighborhood, plain and rough and spartan. “No cable cars or great skyline,” said Half Moon Bay native and future A’s and Giants voice Jon Miller, “just train tracks and warehouses.” A visitor descended to the ticket window, sighting a next door complex housing skating and hockey and hoops. The Coliseum – almost from the start, wags dubbed it the Mausoleum – was stark, outside and in: no arch, roof, or sculpture. Official baseball capacity was 50,000. Three tiers reached beyond each line. A single 7,000-seat bleacher deck trimmed the 8- foot (10 in 1981) outfield wall. A green hill lay beyond it. “Given the park’s sterility,” read the Oakland Tribune, “you focus on the hill, not field.”

The Coliseum premiered on April 17, 1968. First pitcher: Lew Krausse. Batter: Baltimore’s Curt Blefary. Homer: Oriole Boog Powell. Score: Orioles, 4-1. First ball: thrown out by California Governor Ronald Reagan. “One thing I’m sure of,” he said of Income Tax Day, “is that a lot of you paid your taxes.” Boos rained from 50,164. Reagan smiled. “Up to a few moments ago, I was glad to be here.” Straight off, the A’s practiced hand-to-mouth artwork. Charlie O. stepped from a luxury van, stopped at each base, and bowed. Tennessee Ernie Ford and a marching band readied for the National Anthem. “But Finley couldn’t negotiate an agreement on live music from the union,” said Monte Moore. “We played a recording.”

Finley’s $1 million right-field scoreboard flopped for several months. The pitcher’s mound lay on a steel shell for Oakland’s soccer team. The exposed shell was covered between innings. “Opening Night had sort of a wing-it feel,” confessed Charlie. A worse feel was empty seats. On May 8, 1968, Catfish Hunter threw a perfect game against Minnesota at the Coliseum – the AL’s first since 1922. The game wasn’t televised. No TV outlet even covered it. Improbably, given today’s media landscape, all that remains is the last radio out. In the ninth inning Hunter faced Rich Reese: A’s ahead, 6-0, two out, and full count. Reese fouled off a panoply of pitches, then fanned.  Moore and Al Helfer divided 1968 A’s radio, Al doing the night’s last 4½ innings. From the old school, Helfer never noted the no-hitter till it happened, afraid that he might jinx it.

Al said only, “My goodness, the boy has pitched a no-hitter” at the end – a hard drinker, he may not have noticed that “the boy” had also pitched a perfect game. Either way, a tiny announced crowd of 6,298 watched. “Baseball hadn’t caught on yet in the Bay,” Moore said. “What those of little faith missed.” Bay baseball beat writer Bob Stevens believed that “Finley thought you could create new fans in the Bay Area.”  Instead, he stole the Giants’, dividing a finite market.  In 1968 both clubs drew a combined attendance of 1,711,069 versus the 1966 Giants’ 1,657,191. Oakland’s 837,466 placed eighth in league attendance. Those missing in action for the no-hitter could have seen the Athletics’ first .500 year since 1952. 

The following year the A’s installed the 24-foot-high and 126-foot-wide “Finley Fun [computer score] Board” with cartoons and other graphics. They had much to hail in 1969-70 – in one year or the other, Reggie Jackson’s 47 homers, Sal Bando’s 113 RBIs, and Vida Blue’s no-hitter – but even fewer showed up to celebrate. “Youngest [21] to no-hit anyone since Daffy Dean,” Finley said of Blue. On the other hand, the ’69 and ’70 A’s each drew less than 800,000, Vida’s gem luring 4,284.  “Charlie was hung up on his color scheme – white, gold, and Kelly green,” added Hunter. “I remember one home opener had gold-covered bases.” Ironically, more marketing gold would have reaped more green.

From the start Oakland was unsure how to view the enigmatic Finley. After high school, the son of a steelworker entered the mills, sold insurance at night, formed a company, and was a millionaire by 35. Buying the A’s, Finley badgered grounds help, phoned the dugout, hatched trades, and had a reverence for talent developed there. In 1970 he hired baseball’s Jackie Gleason to do radio and TV. Holy Cow! It might be! It could be! It was! Harry Caray became the A’s Voice for a season, selling beer, sacking pomp, and on his arrival in Oakland predicting that “here was a club that’ll soon be a world champion,” youth not  wasted on the young. “Sal Bando, Bert Campaneris, and Dick Green, left to right in the infield and all in their early 20s,” he said. “Don Mincher and Mike Epstein at first base. Gene Tenace behind the plate. Joe Rudi, Rick Monday, and Reggie Jackson in the outfield.” Pitching wed “Vida Blue and Catfish Hunter and Blue Moon Odom and Kenny Holtzman. On and on.”

Quoting Ring Lardner, to some Finley seemed to treat employees like a side dish he declined to order. Caray said Finley treated him like a friend. He let Harry use Charlie’s penthouse on a lake and his Cadillac – “gave me the keys. I only wish his team had been in the Midwest where my roots were” – Caray left after 1970 to join the White Sox – “but you didn’t have to be a scientist to know they were going to be great.” Finley had one scout, carried a briefcase, lived two time zones away, yet “wound up with this world of talent.” Without free agency forcing Finley to break up the A’s, “he’d have won a ton of titles more.”

There was a lot to follow, if only Charlie could arrange it. One year he didn’t sign a commercial station to carry games in English, giving A’s rights to the UCLA-Berkeley radio outlet, its peewee signal limited to the campus and a few downtown blocks. Meanwhile, his 1,000-watt Spanish AM flagship station reached most of the area, an engineer explaining that because its tower/transmitter was installed on top of cement pillars in the bay, water as a conduit increased power. This didn’t help Oakland English-speaking listeners even as, ironically, the A’s English radio network stretched to Honolulu. A protester phoned Finley: “It’s nice they can hear you in Hawaii. Why can’t we hear you here?”

Those who heard, rejoiced. In 1971 Blue burst like Vesuvius: 24-8, 8 shutouts, and a 1.82 earned-run average, receiving the MVP Award. Oakland won the West, still drew only 914,993, and lost the League Championship Series to Baltimore. One night league executives had dinner in Oakland’s Jack London Square. Casey Stengel, 81, began giving tales the “Stengel treatment.” Suddenly the mule Charlie O. entered, wandered to Casey’s table, and nudged the Ol’ Perfessor, by now slightly wasted. “A very remarkable horse,” Stengel mused. “He hasn’t seen me for a year, and still remembers.” There was much to remember about the next three years – Oakland’s 1972-74 dynasty – baseball’s first threepeat since the 1949-53 Yankees. The minor stars changed, but the firmament’s brilliance remained.

Sources

Virtually all material, including quotes, is derived from Curt Smith’s books Voices of The Game, Storied Stadiums, Voices of Summer, The Voice, Pull Up a Chair, A Talk in the Park, and Mercy! A Celebration of Fenway Park’s Centennial Told Through Red Sox Radio and TV (published, in order: Simon & Schuster 1992; Carroll & Graf 2001 and 2005, respectively; the Lyons Press, 2007: and Potomac Books 2009, 2010, and 2012, respectively.)

Books

Lowry, Philip, Green Cathedrals: The Ultimate Celebration of All Major League Ballparks (New York: Walker & Company, 2006).

Silverman, Matthew, Swinging ’73: Baseball’s Wildest Season (Guilford, Connecticut: The Lyons Press, 2013).

Websites

Baseball-reference.com

Indeed, Finley was a man of great complexity. If he was “a skinflint who alienated players and fans”3 alike, so too was he a brilliant showman who introduced to the game such concepts as designated hitters and designated runners, orange baseballs, and night games in the World Series. Likewise, if Finley was “a loud-mouth, a tyrant and a miser,”4 he was also, in the words of author Launius, a man of “ingenious mind” who “often demonstrated innovation and vision between his bullshit.”5

Of such cantankerous and creative personalities are legends often made.

Yet, if Finley’s legacy is largely that of an ornery cuss who feuded alike with baseball’s powers that be and his own players, and a man who “professed indifference to the often savage bickering among his players and to their contempt for him,”6 it’s easy to overlook his most brilliant and lasting accomplishment: For when the ranting, the raving, and the vitriol from both sides subsided, Finley could “point to three straight world championships as an acceptable trade-off”7 for his boorish behavior. Despite the contentious nature of the relationship between Finley and the A’s players, they achieved heights that few other teams in any sport have equaled – three consecutive championships.    

Finley the baseball executive built those teams; in their construction, he knew what he was doing. More than simply the A’s owner, Finley was also a shrewd evaluator of baseball talent, and wore a lot of front-office hats. Referring to another legendary dysfunctional championship organization, the marketing introduction to Finley’s biography suggested that, “Before the ‘Bronx Zoo’ of George Steinbrenner and Billy Martin were the Oakland Athletics of the early 1970s, one of the most successful, most colorful – and most chaotic – baseball teams of all time. They were all of those things because of Charlie Finley. Not only the A’s owner, he was also the general manager, personally assembling his team, deciding his players’ salaries, and making player moves during the season – a level of involvement no other owner, not even Steinbrenner, engaged in.”8 

That eye for talent developed from a lifelong obsession with baseball, which gave Finley an appreciation for what was needed to win ballgames. Because of this, according to Launius, “Finley had an innate understanding of how to build a championship club. He could find talent, sign it, and develop it. For instance, he could call up other teams’ scouts and get them to tell him who their hot properties were and then go sign these players out from underneath them. Finley was the master manipulator and super salesman.”9

Finley’s talent was no less acknowledged by those who played for him. Reminiscing to sportswriter Leonard Koppett of the New York Times upon Finley’s death in 1996, Catfish Hunter, whose own stormy relationship with Finley is well-documented, stated that Finley “was the type of owner who knew a lot about baseball and knew how to get great players and win; he was 10 to 20 years ahead of his time.”10

The testament to Finley’s talents as an evaluator lay in the core of Oakland’s championship teams, which was assembled and developed primarily while the A’s were in Kansas City. Under his auspices, A’s scouts including Marv Olson, Ray Sanders, Don Pries, Felix Delgado, Clyde Kluttz, and Jack Sanford fanned out across the country and Latin America and unearthed the athletes who developed together in Finley’s farm system and later came of age in Oakland.  As a result of this scouting network, we can envision the sight of Finley sitting in a family kitchen in Hertford, North Carolina, or Macon, Georgia, sharing pork chops, grits, or corn on the cob and discussing with wide-eyed yet perhaps skeptical parents what he would do for their sons, then writing sometimes substantial checks to ensure that he obtained the services of the young men he was sure would bring his team success.

CHIP GREENE, a SABR member since 2006, has contributed to numerous SABR book projects. Additionally, he contributed sports biographies to the four-volume encyclopedia American Sports: A History of Icons, Idols and Ideas, published in 2013 by Greenwood. Chip edited Mustaches and Mayhem: Charlie O’s Three-Time Champions, the SABR biography book project that chronicles the three-time champion Oakland Athletics. The grandson of former Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher Nelson Greene, Chip lives with his wife, Elaine, and daughters, Anna and Haley, in Waynesboro, Pennsylvania.

Homegrown A’s Who Played On All Three Championship Teams

Over the course of the A’s three consecutive world championships, 75 players appeared in at least one regular-season game for Oakland. Of those, only 17 played all three seasons; and of those, 12 players were signed or drafted by Kansas City and developed within the organization. That core group is represented in the table below:

*Kubiak was signed as a free agent by Kansas City in 1961. After six seasons in the A’s farm system, he joined Kansas City in 1967 and moved with the team to Oakland, playing through the 1969 season. However, in 1970 Kubiak was traded to Milwaukee and subsequently played for two more teams before Finley reacquired him in a trade midway through the 1972 season.

Notes

1 https://amazon.com/Charlie-Finley-Outrageous-Baseballs-Showman/dp/B0057DCJL8.

2 G. Michael Green and Roger D. Launius, Charlie Finley, The Outrageous Story of Baseball’s Super Showman (New York: Walker and Company, 2010).

3 https://nwitimes.com/niche/shore/profiles/new-biography-reveals-the-good-and-bad-of-laporte-s/article_700350a3-6de2-53ce-8ddb-58f644efb69f.html.

4 https://espn.go.com/classic/biography/s/Finley_Charles.html.

5 https://launiusr.wordpress.com/2012/02/24/bill-veeck-and-charlie-finley-what-about-mlb-hall-of-fame-enshrinement/.

6 https://espn.go.com/classic/biography/s/Finley_Charles.html.

7 Ibid.

8 https://amazon.com/Charlie-Finley-Outrageous-Baseballs-Showman/dp/B0057DCJL8.

9 content.usatoday.com/communities/dailypitch/post/2010/06/as-former-owner-charlie-o-finley-revolutionized-game-died-broken-man/1#.VGYaXKgo5Ms.

10 nytimes.com/1996/02/20/sports/charles-o-finley-baseball-team-owner-who-challenged-traditions-diesat-77.html.

But October 1971 arrived with a thud. The 101 wins were the same number as the AL East champion Baltimore Orioles, yet the A’s were no match for the O’s in the League Championship Series. Oakland allowed five runs per game; Baltimore surrendered half that many. It was clear to A’s owner and general manager Charles O. Finley that if Oakland wanted to compete with Baltimore – the class of the American League after appearing in three straight World Series – the A’s needed an upgrade. But not even the self-assured A’s owner could have imagined his team would appear in the next three World Series, and win them all.

The new Athletics, the Swinging A’s, the only team besides the New York Yankees to win three straight world championships, came together in spring training 1972, clean-shaven and raring to go. Well, clean-shaven except for one slugger with something to prove.

No major-league player had worn a mustache in the regular season since World War I. Now, in the wind-down of the divisive Vietnam War, with so many other weighty issues going on in the country and the world, finally came a breakthrough on the hirsute baseball front: Reggie Jackson wasn’t shaving.

Iconoclast slugger Dick Allen, then of the Cardinals, had arrived in Florida with a mustache and muttonchops for spring training in 1970, but he shaved before departing St. Petersburg for St. Louis.1 Now, two years later, Jackson, never at a loss for words, was at a loss for putting his razor to use.

No player had donned a mustache past spring training since another A’s regular on a pennant-winning team: Wally Schang, catcher for Connie Mack’s 1914 American League champions. Facial hair was out of fashion in the 1910s and Schang – and the rest of the major leagues – remained clean-shaven through two World Wars and then two wars in Asia. But by the 1970s, hair was in again. Even Broadway was in on it, with the musical Hair in the midst of a four-year run while simultaneously running in nine US cities as well as London.2  So it only made sense that the counterculture enclave of Oakland, home of the Black Panthers, Cal Berkeley, Hell’s Angels, and John Madden’s Raiders, would be the launching pad for hair on big-league faces.

When Jackson showed up to spring training in Mesa, Arizona, sporting a ’stache, Finley did not like the idea initially. He wanted Reggie to shave before the season started, just as Dick Allen had – not to mention Frenchy Bordagaray, whose mustache lasted only through Brooklyn’s spring training in 1936.3 Oakland’s owner, famous for getting under the skin of his players, took a new tack during spring training, however. Finley fashioned himself quite the showman, having introducing everything from the mule press conference (no comment from Charlie O the mascot, but plenty of words from Charlie O. the owner) to ballgirls (enjoyed by players and fans alike in Oakland). So why not bring the mustache back to baseball?

Accounts differ whether Finley first encouraged players to grow mustaches as reverse psychology to get Jackson to shave, or if the players came up with the plan on their own.4 What is beyond dispute is that the A’s broke the 58-year-old facial-hair barrier as a team. The Mustache Gang was led by a furry trio who eventually made the Hall of Fame and had their numbers retired in Oakland: Rollie Fingers and his legendary handlebar mustache; Catfish Hunter, who sported a debonair farmer’s mustache; and Jackson, of course, in beard, mustache, and machismo. Like his three star players, manager Dick Williams, who joined the mustachioed masses on his ’72 team, even sported a ’stache on his Hall of Fame plaque in Cooperstown.

Nearly every A’s player who could physically grow facial hair did so in the spring of ’72 in order to extract a bonus from the notoriously tight-fisted Finley. The $300 bonus went to any player who grew the mustaches by Father’s Day, or Mustache Day, as Finley rechristened June 18. And those mustaches looked great with the new uniforms.     

It was not as if the A’s didn’t already have the most colorful uniforms in the game, but Charlie Finley outdid himself. Kelly green and Fort Knox gold had been the team colors since Finley introduced them to the stunned American League in 1963, and though garish at the time – “It makes them look like grasshoppers,” said Yankees manager Ralph Houk – the new uniforms were a step through the looking glass … and avoiding the mirror was not necessarily a bad thing.5

Gone were button-up tops. In their place: double-knit pullover shirts. “No buttons. No zippers,” Finley crowed. “Imagine – a baseball uniform without buttons.”6 The team wore white pants, home or away, along with the pullover tops in either green or gold, though the latter color seemed almost fluorescent. The team wore green undershirts with the gold jerseys and vice versa; the stirrups were green with gold socks. Striking! Long before any team thought of alternate uniforms for special days, the A’s had their Sunday whites. And not just your run-of-the-mill white every other team wore at home, but, to borrow a phrase from Procol Harum, an English rock group of the day, “a whiter shade of pale.” Finley called it “polar bear white,”7 while team captain Sal Bando later referred to them as “wedding gown whites.”8  In any event, the whites were special, reserved for Sunday games.

What was really special was the A’s pitching staff, which boasted a potential ace every day of the week. The team entered the year with two pitchers coming off 20-win seasons: Vida Blue had had a tremendous 24-win campaign, while Jim “Catfish” Hunter had enjoyed the first of five straight 20-win seasons.

John “Blue Moon” Odom, who, like Hunter, had been signed by Finley as a teenager in 1964, was no longer a sure thing in the rotation. Odom, who had started at least 25 games each of the previous four seasons, had been shot in the neck and chest in January 1972 while foiling a burglary near his mother’s home in Macon, Georgia. One might think Odom’s life – never mind his career – had been placed in serious jeopardy. But incredibly, each bullet passed through his body without doing serious damage to any organs.9 Odom would be fine and pitch five more years in the majors. He finished 1972 with a 2.50 ERA and placed second in the AL to Hunter in winning percentage (.714). But in March of 1972, Charlie Finley didn’t know that. All he knew was that right-handed starters Odom and Chuck Dobson were question marks due to health issues. (Dobson would not pitch at all in the majors in ’72 because of elbow problems.) So Finley replaced two pitchers who’d combined for 25 wins with a 30-game winner.

Denny McLain was only 28 in ’72, but he seemed a long way from 30. The first pitcher in 34 years to win 30 games, McLain had actually gone one better with a 31-6 mark for the 1968 world champion Tigers. He won the Cy Young Award in both ’68 and ’69 (sharing the award the latter year with Baltimore’s Mike Cuellar), but he subsequently dropped off a cliff – of his own making. He showed plenty of wear and tear after averaging 23 wins and 290 innings a season from 1966 to 1969, compounded by his treating his body like a rental and treating those around him like dirt. McLain could, and often did, drink a case of Pepsi per day – an endorsement deal with the bottler included delivery of ten cases to his house per week – but his cola obsession was the least of his poor habits. He invested in a Michigan bookmaking operation and was suspended for half of the 1970 season. He then drew additional suspensions for carrying a gun on a team flight and pouring buckets of water on two Detroit writers.10 Despite McLain’s tremendous success on the mound, the Tigers were willing to part with their award-winning headache. Barely a week after the 1970 season ended, Detroit traded him to the Washington Senators, where he clashed with manager and legend Ted Williams. McLain led the league in losses instead of wins. 

On March 4, 1972, with two pitchers hurt and Vida Blue holding out, McLain didn’t look so bad from where Charlie Finley sat. Still, the A’s owner wasn’t about to pay full price. Bob Short, who had relocated his team from Washington to Texas over the winter, was prepared to pay one-third of McLain’s $75,000 salary to get rid of him, but he wasn’t willing to take damaged goods in return for spoiled goods. Short passed on both the injured Odom and Dobson and insisted on pitching prospects Don Stanhouse and Jim Panther. McLain proceeded to get into a shouting match with a TV reporter the day he arrived in Arizona and then surrendered ten runs in his spring debut for the A’s.11 He would make his last major-league start that August – as an Atlanta Brave.

Finley had far better luck with Ken Holtzman. He was one of the National League’s top lefties, pitching no-hitters for the Cubs in 1969 and 1971, and slotting in behind the 1971 Cy Young winner Ferguson Jenkins in the Cubs rotation. Though he was coming off his worst year (9-15, 4,48 ERA), Holtzman, like McLain, was still in his 20s, but unlike McLain, his best years were ahead of him.

Holtzman’s biggest problem with the Cubs was his manager, Leo Durocher. Old school Leo the Lip used a motivational technique from his playing days in the 1920s and 1930s, belittling players and making them mad to get the most out of them. In the 1970s it wasn’t working, at least not with Holtzman, especially given that many of the barbs dealt with his faith. “I think Jewish athletes tend to be stared at more often because they defy a commonly held stereotype of nonphysical, academic-minded nerds who strive to become doctors, lawyers, etc.,” Holtzman reflected long after his career ended. “While some of this stereotype is perhaps justified, it never hindered my pursuit of both disciplines.”12

Holtzman asked for a trade after the 1971 season and the Cubs found a willing partner in Charlie Finley. The A’s owner/GM spent most of his time in Chicago and knew all about Holtzman’s talent. He also knew that the A’s had been caught short in the rotation in the previous year’s ALCS, facing a Baltimore rotation that included the last quartet of 20-game winners in history. With Blue, Hunter, and Holtzman, the 1973 A’s would become the last team to have three 20-game winners on one staff.

Finley had the perfect bait to procure Holtzman from the Cubs: Rick Monday, a power-hitting center fielder who could fill one of the weak links in the Cubs lineup. Monday had been the first-ever pick in the 1965 amateur draft, but A’s manager Dick Williams grew frustrated with his lack of success against lefties and had resorted to a platoon with right-handed Angel Mangual in center field late in the 1971 season.

Trading for Holtzman was arguably the best deal among the myriad moves by Charlie Finley during Oakland’s championship run. Holtzman fit in superbly with his new club, immediately buying into the winning vibe in the Oakland locker room. And he very much appreciated his new manager.  “Dick Williams had complete trust and faith in his starting pitchers and let them pitch out of trouble on occasions where Leo might have pulled them from the game,” Holtzman reflected.13 

The A’s players did not, however, have that level of trust in their owner. Especially when it came to contract negotiations. The two biggest seasons by A’s players since their 1968 move from Kansas City – and, to be honest, since their 1955 move from Philadelphia –had been achieved in the last three years by high draft picks who vaulted through the A’s farm system and became young stars on the big-league stage. In 1969 Reggie Jackson, just 23, had crushed 37 home runs by the All-Star break. He tailed off in the second half but his 47 home runs and .608 slugging hadn’t been touched by anyone in an A’s uniform since Hall of Fame slugger Jimmie Foxx for Connie Mack’s Philadelphia Athletics in the 1930s. In the spring of 1970, Jackson asked for his salary to be tripled, to $60,000. The two sides finally reached an agreement of $45,000 shortly before the season began, but they continued feuding after Jackson got off to a slow start.14 The acrimonious public fight between player and owner soured their relationship for the rest of Reggie’s time in Oakland. Next up: Vida Blue.

Blue had been truly sensational in 1971. After losing on Opening Day, he won 16 of his next 17 decisions. He tossed 40 innings in a four-start span in July, including two 11-inning no-decisions, not to mention three innings pitched as the starting (and winning) pitcher in the ’71 All-Star Game that ended the AL’s eight-year losing streak. By mid-August he was 22-4 with a 1.70 ERA and 245 strikeouts. McLain’s magic number 30 was not out of the realm of possibility.

Blue tailed off down the stretch, but he still finished 24-8 with a 1.82 ERA and 301 strikeouts in 312 innings. An overnight sensation at age 22, he appeared on the covers of Time and Sports Illustrated and was the youngest Cy Young Award winner in history. (New York Met Dwight Gooden later garnered that distinction, but Blue remains the youngest AL pitcher to claim the award.) Blue also captured the Most Valuable Player trophy, also becoming a trivia answer as the last switch-hitter to be named league MVP – hitting was the one area in which he did not excel in ’71 (just a .118 BA).

Blue’s lawyer, Bob Gerst, started contract negotiations the first week of January 1972. Blue had made $14,500 during his remarkable ’71 season. Gerst asked for $115,000; Finley offered $50,000. They had a long way to go.

Gerst lowered his client’s asking price to $92,000, but Finley stayed at $50,000. Spring training opened, Blue stayed home. Finley acquired McLain, a 22-game loser, and planned to pay him the same $50,000 sum (after Washington’s share) as Blue, a 24-game winner. Vida Blue announced he would quit baseball, go into acting, go to Japan, go into the steel business. None of these came to be. Even Vida had a hard time keeping a straight face. Finley dispatched players to Oakland to try to get Blue to sign. No dice. The impasse continued.15

The Major League Baseball Players Association called the first work stoppage in major-league history on April Fool’s Day, abruptly ending spring training with the A’s record at 9-11.16

The issue of the players’ pension fund delayed the regular season and seven games wound up cut from Oakland’s schedule; they were never made up because the owners refused to pay the players for the games missed. Finley was far from the only stubborn man sitting in an owner’s box.

When it came time to cut down to a 25-man roster, the A’s released two-time batting champ Tommy Davis, a .324 hitter the previous year off the bench. Yet the more painful move was placing the previous year’s Cy Young Award winner and MVP on the restricted list.17 Ken Holtzman’s Oakland debut was as Opening Day starter. Would Blue ever don the green and gold again? Yes, but it would take pressure from both the commissioner of baseball and president of the United States for it to come to pass.

“It would be a great tragedy if a young player with all that talent stayed out too long,” stated Richard Nixon, who would find tragedy on a much grander scale following a botched break-in at the Watergate Hotel in June of 1972. As for Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, he had troubles of his own.

After enduring the game’s first strike – and the players claiming victory – Kuhn’s next move was to settle this Blue business. Both pitcher and owner were pretty bitter when summoned to the Drake Hotel in Chicago; Kuhn’s room but Finley’s turf. It turned into a 22-hour negotiating marathon. “I had never felt so much like a Louisiana bayou sheriff,” Kuhn later wrote, which may have explained why the Louisiana native Blue was so hostile toward the commissioner.18

As the sun came up, the two sides finally agreed on $63,000. It still took three days and more threats to get them in a room to sign the deal. When Finley initially refused to go to American League President Joe Cronin’s office in Boston for the May 2 meeting, Kuhn responded that if the A’s owner didn’t show, Kuhn would make his star pitcher a free agent. Both sides signed, reluctantly. As a result of the ramping up of the Finley-Kuhn feud, the A’s owner drew a $500 fine from the commissioner, the maximum fine allowed at the time.19  After Dick Williams used a three-man rotation of Holtzman-Hunter-McLain (until Blue Moon Odom replaced the demoted Denny),20 Vida Blue finally made his first start of 1972 during the final weekend of May. By then the owner was angrier at Kuhn than he was at Blue, but his team was finally whole – and dominant.

Sources

Interviews

Sal Bando, September 14, 2011.

Ken Holtzman, May 3, 2012.

Books

Green, G. Michael, and Roger D. Launius, Charlie Finley: The Outrageous Story of Baseball’s Super Showman (New York: Walker & Company, 2010).

Kuhn, Bowie, and Marty Appel (Editorial Assistant), Hardball: The Education of a Baseball Commissioner (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1988).

Markusen, Bruce, Baseball’s Last Dynasty: Charlie Finley’s Oakland A’s (Indianapolis: Masters Press, 1998).

Newspapers and Magazines

Meyers, Jeff, “Frenchy Bordagaray, an 82-Year-Old Grandfather Living in Ventura, Shocked the Baseball Establishment in the 1930s With Such Gimmicks as Racing a Horse on Foot and Growing a Mustache, But His Flair Made Him a Media Darling,” Los Angeles Times, December 25, 1992. articles.latimes.com/1992-12-25/sports/sp-2588_1_frenchy-bordagaray

Rushin, Steve, “The Hirsute of Happiness: How Facial Hair Brought Joy to the Red Sox,” Sports Illustrated, September 30, 2013.

“They Said It,” Sports Illustrated, April 29, 1963. sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1074724/index.htm

Websites

https://baseball-almanac.com

https://baseball-reference.com

https://hairthemusical.com/history.html

https://oakland.athletics.mlb.com/oak/downloads/y2011/2011_media_guide.pdf

Armour, Mark, “Denny McLain,” SABR BioProject, sabr.org/bioproj/person/6bddedd4

Notes

1 Steve Rushin. “The Hirsute of Happiness: How Facial Hair Brought Joy to the Red Sox.” Sports Illustrated, September 30, 2013.

2 James Rado, “Hairstory: The Story Behind the Story,” February 14, 2009. hairthemusical.com/history.html

3 Jeff Meyers, “Frenchy Bordagaray, an 82-Year-Old Grandfather Living in Ventura, Shocked the Baseball Establishment in the 1930s With Such Gimmicks as Racing a Horse on Foot and Growing a Mustache, But His Flair Made Him a Media Darling,” Los Angeles Times, December 25, 1992. articles.latimes.com/1992-12-25/sports/sp-2588_1_frenchy-bordagaray

4 Green and Launius, Charlie Finley, 159.

5 “They Said It,” Sports Illustrated, April 29, 1963. sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1074724/index.htm

6 Green and Launius, Charlie Finley, 158.

7 Ibid.

8 Author interview with Sal Bando, September 14, 2011.

9 Bruce Markusen, Baseball’s Last Dynasty: Charlie Finley’s Oakland A’s (Indianapolis: Masters Press, 1998), 77-8.

10Mark Armour, “Denny McLain.” SABR BioProject. sabr.org/bioproj/person/6bddedd4

11 Markusen, Baseball’s Last Dynasty, 81.

12 Author interview with Ken Holtzman, May 3, 2012.

13 Ken Holtzman interview.

14 Green and Launius, Charlie Finley, 133-34.

15 Markusen, Baseball’s Last Dynasty, 81-84.

16 https://oakland.athletics.mlb.com/oak/downloads/y2011/2011_media_guide.pdf

17 Markusen, Baseball’s Last Dynasty, 88.

18 Bowie Kuhn and Marty Appel (Editorial Assistant), Hardball: The Education of a Baseball Commissioner (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1988), 132.

19 Kuhn and Appel, Hardball, 131-133.

20 Markusen, Baseball’s Last Dynasty, 93.

The dynasty began with a most interesting 1972. It, in turn, began with a players’ lockout that cost 13 days, fairness (Boston lost seven games, Detroit six), and attendance (before August, many teams drew sparsely). The Phillies had a 59-97 record. Incredibly, their ace, Steve Carlton, won 27 games. Roberto Clemente got his 3,000th and final hit, but died on New Year’s Eve on a mercy mission to help earthquake victims in Nicaragua. According to Total Baseball: The Official Encyclopedia of Major League Baseball, the American League batted an overall .240, leading to 1973’s designated hitter. The 1972 A’s lost seven games to the strike, also hit .240, but led the AL with 134 homers and were second with 604 runs. The A’s began wearing solid green or solid gold jerseys with contrasting white pants. Owner Charlie Finley officially changed the team name to “A’s,” banning “Athletics.” Either way, Oakland had a brilliant 2.58 ERA, topped the league with 43 saves, and had a 93-62 record.

The A’s vaulted to a 42-20 start, then lost three of four games to the second-place White Sox. This augured a banal July and August of barely .500 baseball – Oakland was 30-28 – before the A’s forged a 20-11 September-October record, winning the American League West by 5½ games over Chicago. Rudi led the “Junior Circuit” in hits (181) and triples (9) and trailed only the Yankees’ Bobby Murcer in runs (94 to 102). He had 32 doubles, 288 total bases, and a team-high .305 average that A’s voice Monte Moore dubbed “phenomenal” in the 1972 World Series vs. Cincinnati. Given the AL’s lack of offense, Moore may have had a point. He had an Okie twang: also, a hankering for hyperbole, terming “miraculous” Green’s survival of a Reds block at second base in October. Campaneris hit .240, but led the league in steals (52) for the sixth and final time. Epstein had 26 home runs, 70 runs batted in, and a .490 slugging average. Jackson hit .265, had 25 home runs, and added 75 RBIs; Bando, .236, 15, and 77; Duncan .218, 19, and 59. Paraphrasing Earl Weaver, the A’s lineup had “deep depth.”

At one time or another, Connie Mack is said to have claimed that pitching is 75 or 90 percent of baseball. All apply to the club a/k/a The Mustache Gang. Finley offered any player $500 to grow a mustache by Father’s Day. In that very different salary age, each player complied. One, Catfish Hunter, had a 2.04 earned-run average and won 20 games (21-7) for the second of five straight years, leading in 1972 win percentage (.750). Cooperstown ’87 retired 224-166 with a 3.26 ERA. “There was no one like him to win the big one,” said manager Dick Williams. Few equaled Fingers’ handlebar mustache, or his genius in relief. Once Finley voided a major pay hike by giving Rollie a year’s supply of mustache wax. Fingers repaid him in 1972-74 with 61 saves, including 1972’s third most in the league’s 21 with a 2.51 ERA in 65 games. Holtzman was 19-11; Odom, 15-6; Blue, 6-10; and swingmen Dave Hamilton 6-6 and Joel Horlen 3-4. Relievers Bob Locker and Darold Knowles finished 6-1 with 10 saves and 5-1 with 11, respectively. The A’s fought like other teams played pepper. “So what else is new?” said Fingers of a Jackson-North brawl. “Being on this club is like having a ringside seat for the Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier fights.”

The A’s clinched their division in September. The AL East Division was stickier. On October 2 the Red Sox readied for a year-ending series – three games at Detroit. “That schedule!” said Boston announcer Ken Coleman. “The strike made us play one fewer game than the Tigers.” The Sox led their division by a meaningless one-half game, needing two of three to win. Instead, base-running bungling – two Sox simultaneously landed at third base – cost Boston the first game, 4-1. A day later Detroit’s Al Kaline’s single scored the division-winning run, 3-1. The 1972 League Championship Series began October 7 at the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum before 29,536.Before it was over the LCS reminded you of the Capulets vs. the Montagues. Sparta.

The Game One prologue to the World Series was tied, 1-1, for the first ten innings. In the top of the 11th, Kaline took Fingers deep: 2-1 Tigers. In the bottom half, pinch-hitter Gonzalo Marquez singled to tie, right fielder Kaline threw the ball away, and Gene Tenace scored the winning run: A’s, 3-2. The next day 31,088 saw Odom blank the Tigers, 5-0, on three hits in a match recalled for another kind of hit. In the seventh inning, Campaneris batted, having already singled thrice and scored and stolen a base twice. Lerrin La Grow’s first pitch plunked him in the ankle, after which Campy flung his bat toward the mound, narrowly missing the reliever; at which point a bench-clearing brawl began; whereupon Tigers skipper Billy Martin had to be restrained from attacking Campaneris. Like the year’s regular-season attendance – 921,323 – the crowd was so loud as to compensate in volume for what it lacked in size. 

Behind two games to none, the Tigers flew home to “the corner of Michigan and Trumbull,” as their great announcer, Ernie Harwell, dubbed Tiger Stadium. Joe Coleman kept Detroit alive, fanning an ALCS record 14 in a seven-hit 3-0 victory. Next day the teams played the playoff’s most riveting game. Tied 1-1 after nine, the A’s scored twice in the top of the tenth inning on a Matty Alou double and a Ted Kubiak bloop single. Ahead 3-1, Dick Williams asked Bob Locker to uncork the champagne in the A’s clubhouse. Instead, Locker, Joel Horlen, and Dave Hamilton yielded two singles, two walks, a wild pitch, were pricked by an error, then allowed another single by Jim Northrup to score Gates Brown with the winning run: Tigers, 4-3. The noise in the ancient chamber, opened in 1912, was almost insupportable. Twice playing extra innings, the two combatants had split the first four ALCS games.

Tiger Stadium hosted the best-of-five’s decisive game. The score was 1-all entering the fourth inning. “Here’s the pitch to Tenace,” said Moore’s partner, the gravelly Jim Woods. “Line drive into left field – this may be tough to score on. Here’s [George] Hendrick around third. Here’s the throw coming on into the plate. The ball is dropped – ball is dropped by [catcher Bill] Freehan! And Oakland moves into the lead, 2 to 1, on Gene Tenace’s first hit of the playoffs!” The same 2-1 score held forth in the ninth. Left-handed Blue, relieving, faced Detroit’s Tony Taylor: one on, two out, a 2-2 count. “Vida gets set,” said Moore. “He kicks high, he throws. There’s a drive into center field. Back goes Hendrick. He is under it! The Swinging A’s have won the American League championship! The Oakland A’s are champions!” Odom got the win, Blue the save, the A’s the franchise’s first pennant since 1931.

For Oakland, the LCS had been, as Wellington said of Waterloo, “a close-run thing.” You could also say that of the National League titlist that emerged from its League Championship Series. Born in 1969, five of the first six best-of-five LCS had ended in a sweep. The 1972 Pirates-Reds series, like the A’s, went the maximum length. In Game Five Pittsburgh led, 3-2, Johnny Bench batting in Cincinnati’s last of the ninth inning. “Change – hit in the air to deep right!” said Reds voice Al Michaels. “Back goes Clemente! At the fence – she’s gone! Johnny Bench – who hits almost every home run to left field – hits one to right! The game is tied!” With two out, the pennant – George Foster – led off third base. Hal McRae pinch-hit. “In the dirt – it’s a wild pitch!” Michaels bayed. “Here comes Foster! The Reds win the pennant [4-3]! Bob Moose throws a wild pitch, and the Reds have won the National League pennant!”

Would the Series be as close as either LCS? Many wondered. The A’s had lost Jackson for the Series, No. 9 tearing his hamstring in the LCS. It further lengthened the long Classic odds that the Big Red Machine would flatten the A’s. Baseball’s oldest professional team entered the Series running on every cylinder. The Reds finished 95-59, winning the National League West by 10½ games. Catcher Johnny Bench hit an NL-high 40 homers, had 125 RBIs, and was the MVP. Pete Rose led the league with 198 hits. Second baseman Joe Morgan had an NL-best 122 runs and 115 walks, stole 58 bases, and with shortstop Dave Concepcion turned the double play so fast it was as though the ball was radioactive to their gloves. Starters Jack Billingham, Ross Grimsley, and Gary Nolan went 41-25. Manager Sparky Anderson was named “Captain Hook” for pulling them. He had ample reason: a brilliant bullpen. Clay Carroll, Pedro Borbon, and Tom Hall compiled 60 saves.

Beyond baseball, the Series acquired a cultural coloration. The A’s were rebellious, often fought, and had a counter-culture air. The clean-shaven Reds were a metaphor for the Silent Majority itself. In fall 1972, Middle America was in the saddle. The economy was booming, President Nixon having frozen wages and prices, cut taxes, and severed the dollar’s link to gold. Said the New York Times: “The United States is in the midst of a new economic boom that may prove to be unrivaled in scope, power, and influence by any previous expansion in our history.” Earlier that year Nixon had ended a quarter-century of estrangement between America and the People’s Republic of China, visiting in February; signed the first agreement of the nuclear age to limit strategic arms, in May in Moscow; and two weeks after the Series ended won statistically America’s greatest landslide re-election, taking 49 states and 60.7 percent of the popular vote. June 1972’s break-in by Republican officials at D.C.’s Watergate offices seemed an asterisk. Nixon appeared invulnerable.

So did the Reds. “The A’s were lightly regarded,” Ron Fimrite wrote on the eve of the World Series. We should have recalled Yogi Berra: “In baseball, you don’t know nothin’.”  Gene Tenace had hit five homers in the regular season. October’s Hero twice went yard his first two at-bats in the Series – a Fall Classic first. In the second inning, the .225 part-time catcher/first baseman bashed a two-run stiletto. Cincinnati tied the score, 2-all, in the fourth. Then: “One out in the Oakland fifth,” said NBC Radio’s Jim Simpson. “Hits this one a long way to left field down the line! Rose looking up! It is – gone! Home run, Tenace!” His second home run gave the A’s their final 3-2 edge. The next day Hunter singled in a run and pitched 8⅔ one-run innings. Rudi homered, and in the ninth robbed Dennis Menke of a potential game-tying blast, leaping face-first against the green board fence at Cincinnati’s Riverfront Stadium. “I didn’t think I had a chance,” he said. “I thought it was gone.” A’s win, 2-1. Gone was the Reds’ invulnerability, down two games to none, the Series moving west.

Before 1976, each rival home-team announcer aired the World Series. Thus, in 1972-74 Moore did half of each NBC TV and radio game at Oakland and away, respectively. Monte recalls Jack Billingham beating Odom in Game Three, 1-0 – especially the eighth inning. With Reds runners on second and third base, a 3-2 two-out count on Bench, Williams asked for time, went to the mound, called catcher Tenace and third baseman Bando over, talked, sauntered back to the bench, and pointed to first base. Fingers, Tenace, and Bando nodded at Williams’ diktat: clearly, an intentional walk. Bench readied. Fingers set and looked at second base. Said Bench: “I thought they were putting me on.” As Fingers kicked, Tenace suddenly squatted behind the plate and nabbed a slider that caught its outside corner – called strike three! – that left Bench vowing, “I’ll never be set up like that again.”

Next day’s affaire was just as close: Six of seven Series games, in fact, were decided by one run. In the fifth inning, Tenace homered: 1-0 A’s. Bobby Tolan knocked in Concepcion and Morgan in the eighth: 2-1 Reds. In the bottom of the ninth inning, four straight singles, including three pinch-hits, set a World Series first and brought Oakland within a game of another first – a title. A’s win, 3-2, leading the Series three games to one. How could Cincinnati survive? Courageously, as it happened. In Game Five the Reds braved that man again. “McGlothlin is ready, throws,” Jim Simpson said of Tenace, batting with two A’s on base. “Long drive – left field! Back goes Rose, looks up. Home run! His fourth of the Series! It’s 3 to 1, Oakland!” The Reds rallied one run at a time, Rose’s ninth-inning single giving them a 5-4 edge. In the bottom of the inning Morgan’s great throw doubled pinch-runner Odom at the plate – the potential tying run. Cincy was alive – till when?

Game Six was a clunker: Reds, 8-1. The finale, though, was taut and exhausting, like the whole. Tolan’s first-inning error gave the A’s a run. Hal McRae’s sacrifice fly tied things in the fifth. An inning later Tenace and Bando each doubled in a run: 3-1, A’s. Cincinnati scored its second run in the eighth inning , but Fingers said no mas. “Rose steps in,” Simpson said in the ninth. “He is two-for-four today and has made great contact all four times. The other two were driven deep to the center-field wall … Fly ball, deep left field! Rudi goes back near the warning track, is there. The World Series is over! And on one pitch, Rose is out, and the underdog Oakland Athletics win their first world championship since they were in Philadelphia in 1930! The A’s win it, 3 to 2!”  Neither team pitched a complete game. The two teams hit an identical .209. Oakland was outscored, 21-16. Fingers relieved in six games. Tenace, the Series MVP, had four homers, 9 RBIs, and a .348 average.

The contrast was indelible: Kiwanis vs. camp, Main Street vs. Woodstock, gray/white vs. green and gold. A Series to shout about. A classic Fall Classic. Its last tableau was unforgettable. On the roof of the A’s dugout, Charlie Finley and Dick Williams kissed their wives, the straw-hatted A’s Swingers Band playing Finley’s favorite song. “Sugartime” lyrics went: “Sugar in the morning, sugar in the evening, sugar at supper time. Be my little sugar, and love me all the time.”

At that moment, Oakland loved Charles O. Finley. “Mr. Finley has been wonderful to me,” Williams said, full-heartedly. One year later, he pined to punch Charlie in the nose.

Sources

Virtually all material, including quotes, is derived from Curt Smith’s books Voices of The Game, Storied Stadiums, Voices of Summer, The Voice, Pull Up a Chair, A Talk in the Park, and Mercy! A Celebration of Fenway Park’s Centennial Told Through Red Sox Radio and TV (published, in order: Simon & Schuster 1992; Carroll & Graf 2001 and 2005, respectively; the Lyons Press, 2007; and Potomac Books 2009, 2010, and 2012, respectively). 

Books

Fimrite, Ron, The World Series: A History of Baseball’s Fall Classic (New York: Time Inc. Home Entertainment, 1997).

Lowry, Philip, Green Cathedrals: The Ultimate Celebration of All Major League Ballparks (New York: Walker & Company, 2006).

Silverman, Matthew, Swinging ’73: Baseball’s Wildest Season (Guilford, Connecticut: The Lyons Press, 2013).

Thorn, John, Peter Palmer, and Michael Gershman, Total Baseball: The Official Encyclopedia of Major League Baseball (Kingston, New York: Total Sports Publishing, 2001).

Websites

Baseball-reference.com

Carl’s daughter, Nancy, lived with him in an apartment not far from the Oakland Coliseum. Nancy had lived in Dallas with her mother following an acrimonious divorce, but her father gained custody and she moved to Oakland at 14. As the A’s grew up, so did Nancy. She ran errands, stuffed envelopes, sat in on meetings, peeked in at Pink Floyd doing a sound check at the adjoining Oakland Coliseum Arena, processed postseason ticket requests, visited Charlie O. the mule at his stable, and watched some of the best baseball played during the 1970s. It was a childhood many would envy, but it was just the way things were for a shy high-school student whose family name was constantly in the press – and not always favorably.

It was the time of her life, which she has been working into book form. Her story includes never-before-seen documentation and perspective from her family’s side of a story that has often been told only one way in the press of the day and in the books and documentaries that have followed. Still a resident of the East Bay, and raising her own family, Nancy Finley fondly recalls the A’s glory days.

1) How old were you when you started working in the A’s offices?

Nancy Finley: Working? At a very young age, someone in one front office would ask me to take a note to someone in another front office. They thought it was cute.  I would have to say that I was paid for my work starting with our championships, because of how serious it was. I never worked full time during those years, though – I was only 14 in 1972.

2) There have been a lot of stories about how few people worked for the A’s front office compared to other teams. Can you paint a picture of what it was like behind the scenes with the A’s?

Finley: I still have a December 24, 1974, Oakland Tribune article, where a well known entertainment columnist, Perry Phillips, wished all of his friends happy holidays. I remember this columnist well.  He was a friend of Dad’s.

This columnist mentions the Raiders staff (including front office), many Bay Area restaurants (I recognize most names), and our A’s staff. He names Al Dark, Dad, Charlie, and Charlie’s secretary. That is it. With the Raiders, the list is much longer. [Editor’s Note: The list has 32 Raiders names, to be exact.

We were the smallest front office in baseball, but we were also the best.

3) Did you have any input with the yearbooks?

Finley: No. If I had, my name would have appeared. Dad never wanted my name here. here were too many kidnapping threats (à la Patty Hearst) in the 1970s. Dad had 99 percent of the input in the yearbook. Dad often beefed up our front office by adding names twice, or, inserting other relatives.

4) There’s an interesting story about you handling the A’s postseason tickets. Can you describe what the task was like in the age before computers and credit cards?

Finley: I remember we had to start taking orders for postseason tickets soon after Labor Day. It may have even been slightly earlier. Whoever was in first and second place a certain amount of time before the end of the season had to have championship tickets preprinted. Seeing printed World Series tickets in mid- to late September added stress.

During our radio and TV broadcasts, our announcer would tell fans that if they wanted to purchase tickets for playoffs or World Series, they needed to send a check to a PO box in Oakland. Only Dad had this POB key.  

Fans could call our ticket office for pricing. Everything was paid via check, money order, or cashier’s check, via “snail mail” to that address. I spent all day, from about 7 or 8 a.m. until it was dark, opening envelopes. Sometimes, cash fell out instead. Sometimes, gift certificates fell out. Sometimes, jewelry fell out – nothing bulky, usually a thin gold chain. Bribery did not work in getting better seats, though I never knew what happened to the excess people sent in.

5) Did you ever work the ticket booth?

Finley: On occasion, I helped inside our ticket front office. I did not work behind the ticket booth at the Coliseum. Again, it was for security purposes.

6) Did you help with any promotions?

Finley: Yes. I remember being around the family during brainstorming sessions at a very young age. I’ll always have fond memories of this. It electrified the room. As a pre-teen, just about every business dinner I attended with Dad and Charlie turned out to be a brainstorming session. No one’s idea was ever laughed at in a bad way. This taught me to be open-minded.  

As a teenager, I was brought into this group. It just happened. I could offer what my generation thought. It was during one of these brainstorming sessions that Charlie said he really liked the way I thought. Charlie told dad that I was now an A’s VP.  Unofficially, my father made sure.

7) Can you explain how you were related to Charlie Finley?

Finley: My grandfather and Charlie’s father were brothers. They were the eldest of the Finley siblings. After World War I (most Finley males were drafted), Charlie’s father married and lived close to his parents and siblings in Birmingham, Alabama. My grandfather did not want any part of working in the local steel mill. He moved to Dallas, Texas, for a better employment opportunity. My grandfather became a salesman of anything, as I call it. Mostly he sold used cars. Dad never had the typical Depression-era stories, since they always had food on the table.

Granddad used to call Charlie his “favorite nephew,” and “like a son.” I have heard how Charlie was more like my grandfather than Dad was. Dad was more like Charlie’s father, Uncle Oscar. Uncle Oscar was mellow. Charlie certainly was not.

In the late 1930s the Birmingham steel mills were closing. Uncle Oscar had worked in these steel mills. At this time, steel-mill jobs were opening in Gary, Indiana. Charlie did not want to move. He asked to live with Granddad while his parents settled in Gary.

After Uncle Oscar was settled in Gary, my other uncles – I call them “the brothers” – and Granddad visited Gary often. They were very close.

Dad and Charlie each had one younger brother. These were not close relationships. Charlie and Dad, and through all of the other “brothers,” stayed in touch. I don’t know if this is just a Southern thing, although I notice my older cousins refer to themselves as my “aunt” or “uncle.” This is what my children now call them. I remember in Kansas City, being in a large crowded room, with Charlie squatting down, his arms held out, and saying, “Come to Uncle Charlie!”

8) Did you enjoy baseball or other sports before your father, Carl, became associated with the A’s?

Finley: I was too young to know about other sports. I used to think our Kansas City players changed into Chiefs uniforms in the winter, and played football.

9) Since there are so many stories about Charlie Finley, can you provide a better picture of what he was like behind the scenes with his team and his family?

Finley: If you can believe it, he was very private with his family. He was also down to earth. He did not like pretentious people. He appreciated being asked for advice. Sometimes he was in a mood to say something, to see if a reporter would pick up on it. This backfired at times. It was written as fact, when he was actually bluffing. He absolutely loved animals.  

10) Did you spend much time with the fabled mule, Charlie O.?

Finley: I spent a lot of time visiting Charlie O. in Kansas City, at Benjamin Stables, where he was boarded. Howard Benjamin gave me my own pony, slightly larger than a standard pony. Everyday after school, I was at Benjamin Stables to ride, and visited Charlie O., with carrots or sugar cubes. 

In Oakland, the only boarding stable was Skyline Ranch in Oakland Hills, about five miles from the Coliseum. It appeared Skyline Ranch wasn’t familiar with mules, though this was just my intuition. I visited Charlie O. as much as possible.  I really yearned for Benjamin Stables.

11) What was it like living in the Bay Area and going to Oakland High School during such a turbulent time in the city’s history?

Finley: When I moved to Oakland, I didn’t realize this area was in the middle of so many movements. I moved from Dallas, where girls were not allowed to wear pants in public schools. Suddenly I was enrolled in an Oakland public school without many dress restrictions. Dad and Charlie were strong believers in the public-school system.  

I never realized how my school was fully aware of who I was, and my father’s position. I did see clues. It was difficult to make friends. I was very shy, and it seemed like most of my schoolmates knew each other from elementary school. I do remember some mornings when “Finley” would appear as the main headline on the front page. This was the actual front page, not the sports section. I was worried about classmates saying something. A few did come up to me, and demand to know why we did such and such. This was a scary feeling. Dad said he might look into a private school. I said no, since it felt like I had changed schools so often. I was determined to learn to deal with these comments.

I stayed to myself. After school each day, Dad or someone in our front office would pick me up and drive me to our front office. This is where I felt the most comfortable. I often did my homework sitting near the top of our upper deck and watching the sun set over the Bay, toward San Francisco. The view from our box seats had the backdrop of the Oakland Hills to the east. This was before the Coliseum renovations in 1996, which took away the view of the east hills.

12) What do you think was the secret to Charlie and the A’s success? Was it really Sweat plus Sacrifice?

Finley: One secret, I recently discovered, is synesthesia. Massachusetts Institute of Technology defines synesthesia as “an involuntary joining in which the real information of one sense is accompanied by a perception in another sense.” To put it another way, people with synesthesia can taste shapes or smell colors. This has been proven to be genetic. Charlie meets all of the criteria. And how many times have I read the word “color” or “colorful” in the same sentence with Charlie’s name.

Charlie, and, I believe Dad – they discussed everything – had an instinct for finding talent. I remember when Charlie would call Dad, and be very excited about a new prospect. He had that immediate feeling. He would ask Dad, “What do you think?”

Dad said Charlie’s description of this new talent was always amazing.  

I believe our key to success was instinct, with a little common sense thrown in.  

I refer to this instinct as the fourth “S” in the formula: Synesthesia.  

13) Who was your favorite A’s player? Do I recall correctly that some of the players’ families babysat you as a child in Kansas City?

Finley: My favorite players have changed year to year. I have never had just one favorite player.

In Kansas City, Dick Green’s wife babysat me. I think he demanded too much money afterward. Ha!

14) What was the adjustment like for you and your family going from Kansas City to Oakland?

Finley: Interesting. I was living in Dallas when the team made the move from K.C. to Oakland. This may have been a good thing at the time. When my parents divorced in late 1966, I moved back to Dallas with Mom. Dad stayed in K.C. My parents’ divorce was adversarial.  

Before the divorce, I remember hearing about the team moving to Dallas/Fort Worth, if it had to move. This was the desired place to move. It also made sense for the family, since several family members had moved to Texas.

I remember hearing about other city locations, if a move had to happen. Oakland and Atlanta were the other places. I had heard of Atlanta, although I didn’t know where Oakland was.

While living in Dallas, about mid-1968, I finally heard about the team moving to Oakland. I remember wondering how everyone was doing, what it was like in Oakland. I missed Dad so much.  I missed everyone. I wanted to be with Dad.

In early 1970, when I was 11, Dad gained sole custody of me. I was so happy. The first thing I wanted to do was see the Oakland Coliseum, and visit the front-office staff.

15) After working for the A’s during their three straight world championships and five straight division titles, what did you do for an encore?

Finley: After our 1975 AL West Division title, I began to spend more hours inside our front office. I remember trying to recruit former classmates who seemed trustworthy. Dad and Charlie preferred hiring people we knew and could trust, which is probably one of the reasons we had fewer employees than other teams.

By the mid-1970s our office at the Coliseum still wasn’t finished. This was promised when the team moved to Oakland in 1968. According to Dad and Charlie, Oakland was the only city they looked at that had a “ready to move into” stadium. So Oakland was chosen. Charlie would not spend his money on the Coliseum office, since he spent about $400,000 to remodel the old Kansas City stadium, and felt burned. The unfinished Coliseum front office became contentious.

In 1976 Charlie and Dad decided to rebuild another dynasty. They sounded very confident that they could do it. They kept this to themselves. I remember how curious the press seemed about what was happening with us in the late 1970s. Behind the scenes, we were making it happen again.

Then, about March 1979, I remember when we were served with a complaint by the city, county, and Coliseum board. I remember reading the “Causes of Action.”  Even I could see these were silly, and meaningless. It was as if it was meant to harass.

This complaint was filed in federal court, with higher costs than municipal courts. What a waste of taxpayer money. Within four months, the federal-court judge dismissed this suit, in our favor. I remember Charlie saying he couldn’t understand why this would be filed against us, after so many championships. Someone on the Coliseum board replied, “It isn’t all about winning.” We were all perplexed by this statement.

Dad said this suit made him have a lengthy talk with Charlie. They both agreed it was probably time to sell the team. This suit impacted morale.

We hired Billy Martin for our 1980 season. That was a wonderful year. The new ownership did not happen until the end of 1980, so 1981 was the first season under the new ownership. The new owners took over the players we’d scouted, brought through the farm system, and broken in for the major leagues.

Dad was asked to remain with the new ownership in a VP/Mentor position. What happened in 1981?  We won the 1981 AL West Division title! This was our rebuilding!

If only Charlie and Dad could have been together with the A’s for this series; 1981 was like our first 1971 division title. It made me wonder if we could have had a repeat, with ’82, ’83 and ’84, if only Charlie hadn’t sold the team.

Whatever the source of the anger, the Oakland Athletics were a fighting and feuding bunch. The index to Dayn Perry’s biography of Jackson has a listing for “fights (fighting)” with six references that only begin to detail the many memorable confrontations, some of which included Reggie, though he was hardly a lone actor.3 The first reference leads the reader to a confrontation between Jackson and reliever Dick Woodson of the Minnesota Twins in 1969 when Billy Martin – legendary for his own brawling behavior – was the Twins’ rookie manager. As a very successful college football player, Jackson believed he played the game with a higher level of intensity than many, and so when he charged Woodson after the pitcher threw at him, he proudly said he executed a “form tackle that would have made Frank Kush (legendary Arizona State coach) proud.”4

From the perspective of the modern game, it is difficult to recall fully the way the game was once played by rough-and-tumble personalities like Billy Martin.  Before free agency opened the financial floodgates and players started getting paid like movie stars, tough guys like Martin and Jackson were less concerned that needless injury from fighting might cut into their seven-figure paydays.  Back in the day – pre-1975 – when teams poured onto the field after a beaning, the odds that a punch would be thrown were far greater, and one of the last great teams celebrated for their pugilism almost as much as their baseball talent was the Oakland Athletics. And their anger found a home at least as often in their own clubhouse as it did on the field against the opposing team.

The press gave internal strife within the Oakland clubhouse a prominent role in crafting the competitive edge of the Oakland Athletics, or at least were complicit in airing the private squabbles publicly.  Wells Twombly of The Sporting News wrote about the rivalry between Billy North and Angel Mangual under the heading, “Civil Strife Brings Out Best in A’s.”  Mangual and North literally fought for playing time in center field during the ’73 midseason, but the more pugnacious of the two, Billy North, won the job by TKO.  Sal Bando, captain of the team and chairman of the “morale committee,” told Twombley that total candor in the clubhouse “is a tradition with us. … The owner screams at the players.  The manager screams at the players and the players scream right back.”5

Jackson was the most notorious of a wild bunch and his remarks about fights within the clubhouse provide much of the available information on them.  However, the other protagonists have invariably clarified key points in the Jackson narrative.  Jackson’s reputation took off during the first championship season in May 1972 when he and Mike Epstein had one of the more serious confrontations of any that ensued.

Jackson had been anchored the defensive backfield at Arizona State and Mike Epstein had played fullback for the University of California Golden Bears before turning to baseball. Epstein was a big, burly man whose 230 pounds were stretched over a 6-foot-3 frame and he was used to hitting the line with enough brute force to gain his three yards in a cloud of dust. Charlie Finley gave Jackson authority over distributing the tickets given to players for each game that were then doled out to family and friends. Epstein – whose family lived in the Bay Area – asked for tickets in late May and Jackson asked who the tickets were going to. “It’s none of your business,” Epstein shot back.6  According to Epstein, the fight was a short one as the fullback knocked the defensive back unconscious.7

Besides the two footballers, the A’s boasted two diminutive players with quick tempers. Cuban-born Bert Campaneris stood only 5-feet-10 and was known for having a short fuse.8  In the American League Championship Series against the Detroit Tigers, the A’s were once more up against manager Billy Martin. In Game Two of the series, Campaneris had gone 3-for-3 and Martin ordered his pitcher, Lerrin LaGrow, to throw at Campaneris. When the ensuing pitch hit the feisty Cuban in the ankle, he got up and whipsawed his bat toward the mound where the helicoptering projectile “narrowly missed the top of his head.”9 The benches emptied and though few punches were actually thrown, Martin was physically removed from the field of play screaming at Campaneris to come out and fight him. The Oakland players remained uncharacteristically placid in response, but Campaneris was fined $500 and suspended for the rest of the ALCS.

The other player in the Oakland clubhouse whose small size hid a large fist was Billy North, who led off for Oakland during his six-year tenure with the A’s. He fought numerous times with opposing pitchers. Reggie Jackson described and incident in which North charged the mound after Doug Bird of the Kansas City Royals threw him a strike. The pitch seemed to have no special message attached to it, but according to Jackson, Bird had beaned him three years earlier and North had not forgiven the offense until that very moment when he “walked to the mound and dropped Bird with a right to the jaw and then just started banging away on him.”10

As Jackson put it, “It was always something.”11 Reggie recounted fights between Rollie Fingers and Blue Moon Odom, Bert Campaneris, and Vida Blue. There was the time that “Blue Moon Odom went after reserve outfielder Tommy Reynolds with a coke bottle.”12 But the worst of them all may have been the numerous accounts of the fight between Billy North and Reggie Jackson.

The confrontation is said to have occurred in the shower, where the slippery conditions contributed to the injuries suffered by Jackson. The most objective accounts of the fight lay the blame on Reggie’s failure to come to terms with the clubhouse cliques that had sprung up racially.  Billy North was part of a group of African American players who did not mix as easily with the white players as Reggie did.  Reggie had grown up in a white neighborhood in Philadelphia and is said by Dayn Perry in his biography of Jackson to have been boasting of dating a “gorgeous white chick,” when North asked if she might have a friend for him.13

With racially loaded language that Mike Epstein claimed was all too common for Reggie Jackson, the slugger told North that the woman did not date African Americans, though he chose his words less carefully. North was quick and got the better of the larger man with surprising force. Jackson was injured in the fight, as was Ray Fosse, who tried to break it up.  Fosse ended up in the hospital, Jackson merely missed a few innings, but according to Perry’s accounts, the aftermath of the fight bothered Reggie for weeks and hindered his performance on the field.

Ironically, Charlie Finley was always quick to try to bring the feuding parties together, as he did with North and Jackson.  Whether Finley was an underlying irritant who kept the pot boiling or not, he went to considerable lengths to keep his star slugger happy.  He held a “Reggie Jackson Day” several weeks after the fight with North and showered Jackson with gifts.  However, the effects of the confrontation became cumulative and the expanding reservoir of ill will may have ultimately led to Jackson’s leaving Oakland.  For all of the camaraderie that Jackson enjoyed playing in Oakland, the clubhouse animus that built up over the years from the “Junk Yard Dogs” lingered in his final years with the team. 

The next fight, between Blue Moon Odom and Rollie Fingers, also took a toll.  “Odom walked with a limp and Fingers needed six stiches in his scalp.”14  Jackson saw the fights as building a combative spirit that ultimately helped the team win its final World Series triumph against the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1974.  Though they won the Series, the team began to come apart in the offseason that followed.

Reggie Jackson painted a sanguine face on the inner turmoil of the team and said it helped nurture the players’ winning ways.  Others saw something darker, and ultimately Charlie Finley may have been moved by more than the money demands of his star-filled lineup to let them go.  Mike Epstein believed he was traded at the end of the 1972 season because of the bad blood with Reggie Jackson.  That fissure healed easily enough, but Finley’s inability to resolve the endless disputes between himself and his cast of All-Stars, and those between the players themselves may have provided additional motivation when he let the Yankees sign Catfish Hunter in 1975 and then traded Reggie Jackson and Ken Holtzman to the Orioles for the 1976 season. There may have been a precarious chemistry that fueled the fighting Athletics, but the same pugnacious character that marked relationships between so many involved with the team may have ultimately helped undermine their staying power as a team.

Sources

Telephone interviews with Mike Epstein, June 15, 2007, and September 4, 2013.

Jackson, Reggie, with Kevin Baker, Becoming Mr. October (New York: Doubleday, 2013).

Jackson, Reggie, and Mike Lupica, Reggie: The Autobiography (New York: Villard, 1984).

Perry, Dayn, Reggie Jackson. (New York: Harper Collins, 2010).

The Sporting News, 1966-1974.

Notes

1 Reggie Jackson and Mike Lupica, Reggie, the Autobiography, 78.

2 Jackson and Lupica, 72.

3 Dayn Perry, Reggie Jackson, 317.

4 Perry, 51-52.

5 Wells Twombly, The Sporting News, October 27, 1973, 14.

6 Perry, 84.

7 Epstein interview.

8 Perry 86.

9 Perry, 86-87.

10 Jackson with Baker, 23,

11 Lupica, 83.

12 Ibid.

13 Perry, 122.

14 Jackson with Baker, 23.

Families across North America gathered around their wood-paneled television sets to watch Game One of the World Series that Saturday afternoon.  Many fans in the televised audience had not seen the Oakland A’s or the Cincinnati Reds in a regular-season contest.  There stood the Reds along the first-base line wearing businesslike white outfits with minimalist red graphic design, black shoes, short hair, and shaven faces.  Meanwhile, the A’s were dressed in green caps, yellow jerseys, white shoes, long hair, and every combination of facial hair imaginable. 

“That was a focal point of the media,” analyzed Sal Bando, third baseman and captain of the A’s.  “You had more of a radical personality in Charlie Finley, and we had the long hair and the mustaches.  And then you take this very conservative, very inflexible Sparky Anderson and the Cincinnati Reds and their short hair and their high socks and their nice pants.  It was a contrast between two different styles.”1  Bando imagined that “you probably had the youth of the day rooting for the A’s … [and] the older population rooting for the Reds.”2  True enough, households watching the game probably had more in common with the cartoon Boyles of “Wait Till Your Father Gets Home” than the idyllic families portrayed in television serials from the recent past.

To anyone attending Opening Day at any ballpark during the 1960s, the game appeared untouched by the social changes occurring elsewhere.  The attire and attitudes of the players represented a throwback to the Eisenhower era, precisely what the Lords of the Realm wanted.  Baseball teams were governed by a cabal of wealthy, conservative older white men.  In their estimation, the players were paid to throw strikes and hit curveballs, not to write philosophy or criticize the establishment. Paul Daugherty of the Cincinnati Post illustrated the owners’ fears of being infiltrated by “those stubbly, pinko subversives who thought the Vietnam War worked best as a concept.”

Upon his appointment as general manager of the Cincinnati Reds in 1967, Bob Howsam became the first baseball executive to prohibit his players from growing facial hair.3  Besides banning mustaches, beards, and long hair, players were instructed to wear only black shoes, pants legs at the knee, jackets and ties at all times in public, and to refrain from drinking alcohol on airplanes.4 Many of the managers shared Howsam’s paternalistic stance on player grooming, including George “Sparky” Anderson. Hired by Cincinnati in 1970, Anderson demanded that hirsute players report to the unofficial team barber, relief pitcher Pedro Borbón.5  Many of Borbón’s teammates challenged the rules.  As a long-haired rookie in 1971, pitcher Ross Grimsley was ordered to get four haircuts before being allowed to work out with the team.6 Pete Rose expressed his dissatisfaction with the rule by attending the 1972 winter meetings wearing a Vandyke beard.7  Rose asked Anderson, “Do you think Jesus Christ could hit a curveball?”  When Anderson replied to the affirmative, Rose rebutted, “Not for the Cincinnati Reds he couldn’t – not with that beard.” 8 

By 1970, other teams had copied the Reds’ dress code, including, paradoxically, the Oakland A’s.  During the 1971 American League Championship Series, it was obvious that the Oakland right fielder was growing a mustache.9  Reginald Martinez Jackson was everything a baseball player was not supposed to be in 1971: university educated, outspoken, and articulate.  Of mixed African American and Puerto Rican heritage, Reggie claimed that the New York Mets deliberately overlooked him in the 1966 amateur draft because he dated a “white” girl.10  He referred to himself in the third person and he stopped to watch his home runs before jogging gingerly around the bases.  Now he was flouting the team rules with his mustache. 

Reggie Jackson was hardly the first baseball player to grow a mustache.  In the 19th century, they were commonplace.  However, by 1913, when catcher Wally Schang wore a mustache as a member of the Philadelphia Athletics, it was considered an oddity by standards of that time.11  After Schang, attempts to grow mustaches and beards in the majors were scarce. The Washington Nationals signed former House of David pitcher Allen Benson to a contract in 1934, and he retained his beard.12  In 1936 outfielder Frenchy Bordagaray arrived at the Brooklyn Dodgers’ training camp sporting a goatee.  Manager Casey Stengel was not impressed, insinuating that “if anyone is going to be a clown on this club, it’s going to be me.”13 

In the postwar era, an anecdote shared by Tommy Davis was emblematic of the attitude toward facial hair among his peers.  In 1966 he arrived in New York from the Dodgers wearing a Fu Manchu mustache. Davis was greeted by Mets teammates Jack Fisher and Ed Kranepool with a razor and shaving cream. Though Davis later grew a mustache, in 1966 he conceded, “Whoever heard of a ballplayer with a mustache?”14

Toward the end of the 1960s, Davis’s question was no longer rhetorical.  Late in the 1968 season, the year before he was traded to the expansion Montreal Expos, Astros outfielder Rusty Staub grew a mustache.  The manager in Houston was Harry Walker, an ardent traditionalist who “hated hippies and long hair.”15  According to John Wilson of the Houston Chronicle, “If Rusty had not grown that mustache, that … trade would [never] have been made.”16  In 1969 Dick Allen of the Philadelphia Phillies wore a mustache and an Afro during the regular season.17  He too was traded, to the St. Louis Cardinals.  Jim Bouton grew a mustache one offseason but shaved, predicting, “What’s standing between me and my mustache is about twenty wins.”18

Despite their mod image, the 1971 Oakland A’s were otherwise no less conservative than any other team.  Their owner, Charles O. Finley, proclaimed that “sweat plus sacrifice equals success.”  His manager, Dick Williams, earned his reputation as a rigid disciplinarian with the Boston Red Sox.  An insurance magnate based in Chicago, Finley imposed a dress code not only on his players, but also on the front-office staff.  In 1972 Reggie arrived at spring training with a beard, much to the chagrin of his manager.  Mike Hegan remembered:

“Charlie [Finley] didn’t like it … so he told Dick to tell Reggie to shave it off and Reggie told Dick what to do.  This got to be a real sticking point.”19  As Williams remembered the situation, the other A’s players were becoming upset that Reggie was ignoring team protocol.  Catfish Hunter, of all people, decided to take matters into his own hands aboard an early-season flight:

“Catfish walked to … where Charlie [Finley] was sitting,” recalled Williams in his autobiography.  “‘Charlie,’ he announced, ‘Reggie Jackson has facial hair … and we don’t think it’s fair.’  ‘Oh really?’ he answered.”20  Using reverse psychology, he refused to reprimand Reggie and instead offered $300 to any player who grew a mustache by June 18.21  Father’s Day in Oakland was to become Mustache Day. 22

Anyone associated with the Oakland A’s was familiar with Charlie Finley’s penury.  When the players were offered $300 merely for growing a mustache, most jumped at the occasion.  Rollie Fingers grew a handlebar mustache that became his trademark – when his gross biweekly earnings were $1,200, how could he refuse a $300 bonus?  As Fingers once told Phil Pepe, “For $300, I’d grow one on my rear end.”23  He even managed to negotiate for Finley to include $100 for mustache wax in his contract.24

Not all of the A’s were enthusiastic about the promotion, including Sal Bando:

“There were three guys that didn’t want to do it, Larry Brown, Mike Hegan, and myself.  Finley called us in and convinced us … he wanted us to do it.”25  Hegan was the last holdout.  “I finally grew a mustache, did it for about six weeks … and then shaved it off,” explaining that “my wife didn’t like it.”26  After a bitter contract negotiation with Finley, Vida Blue refused to engage.   As Williams remembered, “The players were so confused by Charlie’s edict that most of them [also] decided to grow their hair long.”27 By Father’s Day, all the A’s except Vida wore a mustache.  Mike Epstein grew muttonchops and a Fu Manchu mustache.  Dave Duncan grew a beard.  Even the coaching staff participated.

“I took the lineup card to the umpire and he said it didn’t look very good,” reported third-base coach Irv Noren. “It took a month or two to grow but $300 was $300 in 1972.”  Along with the rest of the A’s, Noren returned from the game to find a check in his locker, though he admitted that “I shaved as soon as the check cleared.”         

At a time when per-game attendance barely exceeded 11,000, the Oakland A’s sold 26,000 tickets to Mustache Day.28  In addition, fans wearing mustaches were admitted free.  Several of the A’s besides Noren shaved immediately after the game, only to grow their mustaches back during the pennant drive. As Sal Bando explained, “We had success as a team so everybody stayed with it.”29 

The Reds were favored to win the 1972 World Series.  It was a close series that went the full seven games.  Game Seven was tied, 1-1, after five innings.  Gene Tenace, who had homered for Oakland twice in Game One, broke the deadlock with an RBI double off Pedro Borbón.  Then Sal Bando drove in an insurance run with another double.  With the score now 3-2, Rollie Fingers was called in from the bullpen for the ninth inning.  When he enticed Pete Rose to fly out to left field for the third out, the Bikers had beaten the Boy Scouts.30  The A’s had established themselves as the pre-eminent team in the American League West, winning a division title each year from 1971 to 1975.  Their prominence on the field, however, did not signify an instant eradication of dress codes elsewhere.   Other teams retained their opposition, especially the Cincinnati Reds.

Despite playing barely .500, the Montreal Expos found themselves in an unexpected pennant race in 1973.  General manager Jim Fanning acquired veteran outfielder Felipe Alou from the New York Yankees.  As John McHale reminisced in 1993, “Now you have to understand that we did not allow mustaches on the team at that time.  When Felipe arrived, he had this beautiful mustache.  We didn’t know what to do and in this case, we decided to allow him to keep his mustache.  By the time we were ready to tell him, he had already shaved in the clubhouse.”31 

Ironically, the Expos were less charitable when younger players Steve Rogers, Tim Foli, and Dale Murray arrived at spring training with mustaches.  Bob Dunn of the Montreal Star witnessed McHale’s reaction and compared it to “Louis Pasteur discovering a stream of bacteria loose in the lab.”32  Foli shaved grudgingly, arguing that he “wouldn’t want to take it to court but I probably could have.”33

Foli was referring to a controversy from 1973 involving Cincinnati outfielder Bobby Tolan.  As the Reds fought the Los Angeles Dodgers for their division title, Tolan stopped shaving. Sparky Anderson ordered him to “shave or take off that uniform.”34 Tolan refused and was suspended for the rest of the season without pay.35  Then he filed a grievance through Marvin Miller and the Players Association.  At the hearing, the union lawyer asked Anderson if he objected to Tolan’s Afro and his beard. The manager replied, “No, but he’s not wearing the uniform.”36 Tolan won the hearing and the Reds lost the pennant to the New York Mets.  By December, both Tolan and Grimsley were traded to other teams. 

The Oakland A’s won their third consecutive World Series in 1974, over the Los Angeles Dodgers.  Owned by one Walter (O’Malley) and managed by another (Alston), the Dodgers allowed mustaches but not long hair or beards.  So did the Yankees.  From the time he purchased the Yankees in 1973, George Steinbrenner was paranoid about the image beards and long hair would convey to the public. At his first spring training with the Yankees, Lou Piniella remembered Steinbrenner barked at Bobby Murcer and Gene Michael to “put those caps on [and] look like Yankees – and you, Michael, get a haircut!”37  Bronx Bombers felt free to grow their hair long during Steinbrenner’s subsequent exile from baseball.  When Steinbrenner returned in 1976, he was incensed about player photographs he saw in the team yearbook.  Marty Appel was the director of public relations at the time:

“Look at this!” Steinbrenner screamed at Appel as he pointed at the players, “Hair’s too long!  Hair’s too long! Hair’s too long!  Hair’s too long!  I can count twenty players with their hair too long in the photos you chose.  Now I’m not saying that I’m putting you out on the street over this, but I am saying you better get it fixed.”38  Rather than affront Yankee tradition, Appel recalled the entire press run.  The yearbooks were not reissued until June, thereby forfeiting two months of sales.  Oscar Gamble joined the Yankees in 1976 wearing a legendary afro.  Mindful of the Bobby Tolan grievance, team president Gabe Paul worried about how to approach Gamble to trim his afro.  To Paul’s surprise, Gamble had no objection.  Finding a barbershop open in Fort Lauderdale on a Sunday morning, on the other hand, was a far more difficult task.39  Reggie Jackson, Thurman Munson, Goose Gossage, Dave Winfield, and Don Mattingly were among the Yankees who attempted to test Steinbrenner’s patience by allowing their hair or beards to grow. 

Many teams soon followed Oakland’s lead in reversing their dress codes.  The Angels dropped theirs in 1974 when they hired Dick Williams.  According to batboy Paul Hirsch, they could not impose one set of rules for the players and another for the manager.40  Steve Rogers and his teammates could grow beards however they wanted by 1977 as Williams left Orange County for greener pastures in Montreal. What if Dick Williams had managed Cincinnati instead?  The Reds continued to be the most stubborn team on the issue of grooming standards. Meanwhile, as Sparky Anderson’s coaches received promotions to manage other teams, they took the Reds’ dress code with them. 

In 1976 third-base coach Alex Grammas left Cincinnati to manage the Milwaukee Brewers.  His new club featured several players with Fu Manchu mustaches, including Jim Colborn,

Darrell Porter, George Scott, Robin Yount, Gorman Thomas, Kurt Bevacqua, and Pete Broberg.41  All were required to shave under Grammas.  A year later, Vern Rapp left the Reds to manage the St. Louis Cardinals.  Asserting that he “didn’t come here to be liked,” Rapp drove a wedge against Al Hrabosky and Ted Simmons, when he prohibited mustaches and long hair.42 “The Mad Hungarian” was famous for his pitching antics and credited his intimidating presence to his Fu Manchu mustache.  The long-haired Simmons was the player representative and with his support, Hrabosky threatened to file his own grievance. Hrabosky relented and shaved his mustache before posting a ghastly ERA of 4.38.43  Grammas was released in 1977 and Rapp barely lasted through April 1978. 

Meanwhile, after nine years in Cincinnati, Sparky Anderson re-emerged in June 1979 to manage in Detroit.  Already familiar with his feelings on facial hair; many Tigers shaved without being asked, including Reds alumnus Champ Summers.44 If Anderson banned mustaches on the Tigers, someone failed to notify Jason Thompson or Aurelio Rodriguez.45  Both players did not shave and were playing for different teams in 1980. 

By the end of the 1970s, many of the attitudes viewed as radical or subversive a decade earlier were accepted as mainstream.  To paraphrase Herb Tarlek from WKRP in Cincinnati, the battle between the dungarees and the suits had largely been won.  Nobody bothered to alert the Reds that the white flags had been drawn.  Only on February 2, 1999, when the Reds traded for outfielder Greg Vaughn to Cincinnati, was their facial hair ban repealed.

The 1972 World Series marked a turning point in the evolution of grooming standards in baseball.  Facing the conservatively dressed Cincinnati Reds, the underdog Oakland A’s won a tightly fought seven-game Series wearing long hair, mustaches, and green and yellow polyester.  As is the case with any form of social evolution, attitudes in baseball toward self-expression among the players did not change overnight.  Opposition among managers and executives remained, particularly on the Reds, whose policy against facial hair remained intact until the final year of the 20th century.  Did “the Mustache Gang” define the Oakland A’s players and if so, did they envision themselves as vanguards of change?  Not if you asked Sal Bando, they did not.  When interviewed on the subject, Captain Sal admitted that “we might have worn our hair longer and had mustaches but probably in today’s political climate most of us were conservative anyhow.”46  Perhaps the greatest legacy of the 1972 World Series was what transpired on the diamond 12 Octobers later.  The San Diego Padres faced the Detroit Tigers in 1984, a World Series rematch between Dick Williams and Sparky Anderson.  Many of the Padres players wore long hair and mustaches, as did several of the Tigers.  And nobody noticed.

Acknowledgments

Jim Charlton, Dan Epstein, Paul Hirsch, Sean Lahman, Bruce Markusen, Scott Schliefer, Fred Taylor.

Sources

Appel, Marty, Now Pitching for the Yankees: Spinning the News for Mickey, Billy, and George  (Toronto: Sport Media Publishing, 2001).

Bouton, Jim,  Ball Four: The Final Pitch (North Egremont, Massachusetts: Bulldog Publishing Inc., 2000).

Epstein, Dan,  Big Hair and Plastic Grass: A Funky Ride Through Baseball and America in the Swinging ’70s.  (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2010).

Gallagher, Danny, and Bill Young,  Remembering the Montreal Expos (Toronto: Scoop Press, 2005).

Green, G. Michael, and Roger D. Launius.  Charlie Finley: The Outrageous Story of Baseball’s Super Showman  (New York: Walker Publishing Company Inc., 2010).

Hill, Art,  I Don’t Care If I Never Come Back: A Baseball Fan and His Game (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980).

Jackson, Reggie, and Kevin Baker,  Becoming Mr. October (New York: Random House LLC, 2013).

Kashatus, William,  September Swoon: Richie Allen, the ’64 Phillies, and Racial Integration.  (State College, Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, 2004).

Kates, Maxwell, “Alex Grammas,” in Mark Pattison and David Raglin, eds., Detroit Tigers 1984: What a Start! What a Finish! (Phoenix: Society for American Baseball Research, 2012).

Markusen, Bruce, A Baseball Dynasty: Charlie Finley’s Swingin’ A’s  (Haworth, New Jersey: St. Johann Press, 2002).

Miller, Marvin, A Whole Different Ball Game: The Sport and Business of Baseball (New York: Carol Publishing Group, 1991).

Piniella, Lou, and Maury Allen, Sweet Lou (New York: Putnam Publishing Group, 1986).

Posnanski, Joe, The Machine: A Hot Team, a Legendary Season, and a Heart-Stopping World Series – the 1975 Cincinnati Reds (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2009).

Reston, James, Collision at Home Plate: The Lives of Pete Rose and Bart Giamatti (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1991).

Robertson, John, Rusty Staub of the Expos (Scarborough, Ontario: Prentice-Hall of Canada Ltd., 1971).

Williams, Dick, and Bill Plaschke,  No More Mr. Nice Guy: A Life of Hardball (Orlando: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990).

Daugherty, Paul,  “Reds Keeping Stiff Upper Lip,” Toledo Blade, March 10, 1992: 15.

Goldstein, Richard,  “Frenchy Bordagaray is Dead; The Colorful Dodger was 90,” New York Times, May 23,  2000).

Grayson, Harry,  “Wally Schang, One of Catching Greats, In Six Fall Series,” Evening Independent, September 18, 1943, 10.

Kay, Joe,  “Reds Lift Ban on Facial Hair,”  Bryan (Ohio) Times, February 16, 1999, 13.

Pepe, Phil, “Fingers, Reds Losers in Mustache Dispute,”  Ottawa Citizen, March 26, 1986, B2.

Tarantino, Anthony,  “Hair Affairs,” San Diego Union-Tribune, April 24, 2006.

 “Maury Means Pirate Flag, Says Ex-Teammate Tommy Davis,” Baltimore Afro-American, December 20, 1966, 11.

“Allen Benson,”  Washington Senators Press Photo, 1950.

Notes

1 Bruce Markusen, A Baseball Dynasty: Charlie Finley’s Swingin’ A’s, 171-172.

2 Markusen, 172.

3 Daugherty, 15.

4 Joe Posnanski, The Machine: A Hot Team, a Legendary Season, and a Heart-Stopping World Series –  the 1975 Cincinnati Reds, 60.

5 Posnanski, 60.

6 Dan Epstein, Big Hair and Plastic Grass: A Funky Ride Through Baseball and America in the Swinging ’70s, 174.

7James  Reston, Collision at Home Plate: The Lives of Pete Rose and Bart Giamatti, photo insert.

8 Posnanski, 115-116.

9 Markusen, 85.

10 Reggie Jackson and Kevin Baker,  Becoming Mr. October, 9. The “white girl” referred to, Jennie Campos Jackson, was actually a light-skinned Mexican American of Mestizo ancestry).

11 Harry Grayson, “Wally Schang, One of Catching Greats, In Six Fall Series,” The Evening Independent, September 18, 1943, 10.

12 “Allen Benson,” Washington Senators Press Photo, 1950.

13 Richard Goldstein, “Frenchy Bordagaray is Dead; The Colorful Dodger was 90,” New York Times, May 23, 2000.

14 “Maury Means Pirate Flag, Says Ex-Teammate Tommy Davis,” Baltimore Afro-American, December 20, 1966, 11.

15 John Robertson, Rusty Staub of the Expos, 18.

16 Robertson, 18.

17 William Kashatus, September Swoon: Richie Allen, the ’64 Phillies, and Racial Integration, cover.

18 Jim Bouton, Ball Four: The Final Pitch, 20.

19 Markusen, 85.

20 Dick Williams and Bill Plaschke, No More Mr. Nice Guy: A Life of Hardball, 136-137.

21 Williams, 137.

22 Williams, 137.

23 Phil Pepe, “Fingers, Reds Losers in Moustache Dispute,” Ottawa Citizen, March 26, 1986, B2.

24 Markusen, 102.

25 Markusen, 101.

26 Markusen, 101.

27 Williams, 137.

28 Epstein, 173.

29 Markusen, 101.

30 Markusen, 171.

31 John McHale’s speech at the Montreal Expos’ 25th-anniversary gala dinner, January 14, 1993.

32 Danny Gallagher and Bill Young, Remembering the Montreal Expos, 42.

33 Gallagher, 43.

34 Daugherty, 15.

35 Marvin Miller, A Whole Different Ball Game: The Sport and Business of Baseball , 241.

36 Daugherty, 15.

37 Lou Piniella and Maury Allen, Sweet Lou, back cover.

38 Marty Appel, Now Pitching for the Yankees: Spinning the News for Mickey, Billy, and George, 235-236.

39 Appel, 181-182.

40 Correspondence with Paul Hirsch, January 18, 2014.

41 Maxwell Kates, “Alex Grammas,” in Mark Pattison and David Raglin, eds., Detroit Tigers 1984: What a Start! What a Finish!, 201.

42 Epstein, 176.

43 Epstein, 176.

44 Art Hill, I Don’t Care If I Never Come Back: A Baseball Fan and His Game, 190.

45 Hill, 191.

46 Markusen, 172.

The organization had not gone into spring training as World Series champions since 1931, when Connie Mack’s Philadelphia Athletics won their second straight title. But as winter gave way to spring in 1973, Connie Mack was long gone, and the Athletics had been sold and twice moved, first to Kansas City, then Oakland. And the team was owned by a man who threatened any employee who called his team any name other than the A’s, Athletics be damned.

Not that Charles Oscar Finley wasn’t generous. Coming off his 1972 world championship, the A’s owner was as generous as he would ever get. In fact, Finley drew the ire of the other owners in baseball for his benevolence. And when he developed the best team in baseball, those who would criticize his methods and flair looked as though they had a mouthful of sour grapes.

Manager Dick Williams was the one who jury-rigged a World Series lineup without Reggie Jackson, ordered a fake pitchout that caught Johnny Bench looking with two men on, navigated six one-run games in a seven-game Series, and made so many trips to confer with his pitchers that the rules on postseason mound visits became more rigidly enforced,1 but it was Finley who spent all winter being feted. In addition to nights in his honor in both Gary, Indiana, and his adopted hometown of LaPorte, Indiana, the A’s owner also picked up “Hoosier of the Year” from the Indiana Society of Chicago. More than a thousand people came to a “Thank You Charlie Finley” gala in Oakland.2 And to top it off, Finley became the only team owner ever named The Sporting News’ Sportsman of the Year – it not being lost on the recipient that the newspaper was the traditional “baseball bible.” Finley gave interviews to any and all who asked, taking Parade Magazine on a tour of his 21-room, 1,280-acre LaPorte spread and tossing out pearls of wisdom: “If anyone will pay the high price of success, he can attain it. But the price is high. You have to do more work than your competitor, and sacrifice some of your competitor’s enjoyments.”3

Finley was on top of the world when he arrived in Mesa, Arizona, for spring training in 1973. Unlike some owners who spent all of spring training – and most of the season –around their clubs, Finley operated at a distance of about 2,100 miles from his team. Even while serving as its general manager.

Yet Charlie Finley got to 1973 spring training ahead of several players – holdouts Vida Blue, Dave Duncan, and Ken Holtzman, plus Joe Rudi and team captain Sal Bando, signed but not yet delivered (the former moving his family and the latter driving cross-country). Finley wanted to be on hand to personally hand out 1972 World Series rings to his world champion ballplayers. And what rings they were.4

Each A’s World Series ring, valued at about $1,500 in 1973 (roughly $8,100 in 2013 dollars), was individualized with the player’s name while “WORLD CHAMPIONS 1972” encircled a full carat diamond. The teams that Oakland defeated to claim the pennant (Detroit Tigers) and World Series (Cincinnati Reds) were listed on each side of the ring. Underneath Charlie Finley’s signature was his motto: “S + S = S,” Finley’s self-proclaimed and oft-quoted formula of “Sweat plus Sacrifice equals Success.” The high price for success he told the Parade reporter about was now displayed on his finger – and the fingers of his employees.

Finley also provided players with full-sized replicas of the World Series trophies and charm bracelets with a half-carat diamond for each ballplayer’s wife.5 All this largesse infuriated the other major-league owners, whose taste for jewelry selection had never approached this level of ostentation or expense. That only made the equation even more successful by Finley’s reckoning. 

A shrewd businessman, Finley had raised himself up from humble beginnings in the steel mills to business tycoon by selling affordable group disability insurance to doctors, making as much as $43 million in premiums per year.6 Finley did not get where he was by being afraid of change. He and his wife, Shirley, came up with the kelly green and Fort Knox gold uniforms that ended a decades-long embargo on garish baseball threads; he paid a $300 mustache bonus in ’72 to each of his hirsute A’s, ending a half-century without facial hair in the game; he kept fans’ eyes on the field by hiring beautiful ballgirls to man Oakland-Alameda Coliseum’s expansive foul territory; and he had plenty of ideas about how to shake up the game in fair territory as well, proposing everything from orange baseballs to night World Series games to designated hitters and designated runners. The only thing that bothered the other owners more than Finley’s showmanship and uncompromising manner was that his ideas not only worked, they made them all more money. Well, except the designated runner – and the orange baseballs. The balls proved hard for players to grip and were abandoned after three spring-training games in ’73 at the behest of the commissioner.7 Finley would, however, get the day-glow balls in the hands of players warming up at the 1973 All-Star Game in Kansas City, a colorful calling card as if to say that the owner had not forgotten Kansas City – or his dislike for the place.8

March of 1973 marked the A’s fifth spring in Arizona. Finley relocated the team’s spring home from Bradenton, Florida, to Rendezvous Park in Mesa in 1969, one year after he relocated the club’s summer home from Kansas City to Oakland.9 Finley bought the Kansas City franchise in December 1960, after the death of Arnold Johnson, who’d bought the Philadelphia Athletics from Connie Mack and moved them to the Midwest. The Kansas City A’s were bad under Johnson and were worse under Finley. He grew frustrated with the stadium, the city, the league, and the confines that forced him to remain in a struggling market. After the A’s stuck it out for 13 seasons in Kansas City –seven of them under Finley – he finally coerced the American League into allowing him to move the team. He’d looked all over the country, but Oakland was a fresh market – albeit one with the San Francisco Giants nearby – and, most importantly, Oakland had a new stadium. Yet it was not exactly love at first sight, for owner or audience. Though they played better than the team ever had in Kansas City, Oakland attendance never approached one million in the club’s first five seasons by the Bay.

Though coming off a championship season, the 1973 A’s did not draw any better in Arizona than they had in Oakland. The A’s had their highest spring-training attendance since their move from Florida: 21,206 … for the month. That translates to 1,515 fans per spring-training home game.10 The 1972 world champion A’s drew 921,323 in Oakland, only 14th among the 24 major-league teams. The attendance situation was a sore enough point that World Series hero Gene Tenace discussed it with the press in Mesa. “Sometimes I find myself feeling sorry for [Finley] because we don’t draw better in Oakland,” said Tenace. “I hope attendance picks up this year, but I won’t believe it until I see it.”11

Sympathy, however, was an emotion rarely articulated by A’s players about their boss. And while many players received raises for the coming season, playing hardball was the way Finley generally did business: alternating a hard-line approach between platitudes in his unique brand of salesmanship that launched a mountain of insurance policies. Though Ken Holtzman soon came to terms for 1973, Finley still had holdouts in catcher Dave Duncan and star hurler Vida Blue. Duncan told the press that this was only the latest money squabble in a cycle that dated back to 1963, when he turned down 17 other clubs to sign with Finley.12 Blue’s problems were more recent and more bitter. The lefty’s 1972 contract negotiation had been so acrimonious that Commissioner Bowie Kuhn had stepped in – Finley referred to it as butting in. Kuhn made the 22-year-old star and the 54-year-old tycoon stay in a room until they agreed on a figure. Even after they decided on $63,000, the two fought over how it would be announced to the press.13 So after a down year by Blue in ’72, Finley was looking to cut the southpaw’s pay.

Also unhappy in camp in ’73 was George Hendrick. The outfielder, who had started five games in center field during the World Series in place of injured Reggie Jackson, came to Mesa in the spring to once again serve as a spare outfielder. If he was lucky. Finley told Hendrick to expect to remain in Arizona, playing for Triple-A Tucson. The first overall major-league draft pick in 1968, Hendrick would become the first player to win a Silver Slugger award at two positions, but at age 23, he was hitting just .200 in his first 100 major-league games. He did not endear himself to his owner by asking for a trade.

Though Finley publicly bluffed that he would trade Blue, he wasn’t about to chuck away a 22-year-old Cy Young and MVP winner, no matter what happened in ’72 or how much each person loathed the other’s business practices. Blue and Finley agreed on a $53,000 contract in the final week of ’73 spring training.14  A blue-chip stud pitcher was gold in the days before free agency, when players were indentured to a team for as long as the owner saw fit. Or as long as a team could afford them, now that salary arbitration had just entered the game as the result of an 11-day lockout at the start of spring training in February of ’73.15 Even with arbitration entering the game – it would hit Finley especially hard in the coming years – Vida Blue was irreplaceable. Not everyone on the roster was indispensable, however. “If we have to get along without Duncan,” the owner said as he headed back to the Midwest, “I’m sure we can.”16

So Duncan, who’d turned up his nose at Finley’s $40,000 contract offer, wound up the Opening Day catcher … in Cleveland. On March 24 Finley sent Duncan and Hendrick to the Indians for catcher Ray Fosse and spare infielder Jack Heidemann. (It turned out that Heidemann, not Hendrick, spent the summer of ’73 in Tucson; he never played an inning in Oakland before being sold back to the Indians a year and a day after Finley acquired him.)

In Fosse the A’s received a better bat behind the plate. Though he was never the type of hitter he’d been before Pete Rose slammed into him in the 1970 All-Star Game, Fosse was an experienced backstop revered by Cleveland’s pitching staff. The trade also assured that Gene Tenace would be an everyday player in 1973. A part-time catcher who played in just 82 games during the 1972 season, Tenace became the starting catcher for the postseason. He responded by hitting four World Series home runs, single-handedly outhomering the Big Red Machine and becoming the Series MVP. But Tenace’s arm was exposed by the Reds, who stole 11 of 13 bases against him. Dick Williams moved Tenace to first base and Duncan took over behind the plate for Game Seven, cementing Tenace’s reputation as a good backup catcher but not good enough to be an everyday receiver for a championship club.

Finley spun stories about a bad shoulder as the explanation for shifting Tenace to first base in 1973, then the owner reversed course during Duncan’s spring holdout because the A’s needed someone to catch. Sure, bringing in a new catcher for a world-championship pitching staff in the final week of spring training was a risky move, but Charlie Finley liked taking risks – he’d already taken plenty since his club claimed the world championship.

Barely a week after the 1972 World Series ended, Finley went about reimagining the Swingin’ A’s. He acquired Paul Lindblad, a 31-year-old southpaw who grew up outside Kansas City and had been signed by Finley when the team was still there. (Finley had traded Lindblad, Don Mincher, and Frank Fernandez to the Washington Senators in May of 1971 and got back Mike Epstein and Darold Knowles.)

After getting Lindblad back, Oakland’s owner/GM then shipped out 34-year-old reliever Bob Locker to the Chicago Cubs to bring in outfielder Bill North, ten years younger than Locker. North, unhappy and unproductive in Chicago, had been displaced in his natural center-field position by Rick Monday, whom Finley had shipped to Wrigley Field after the 1971 season in exchange for Ken Holtzman. Finley, who spent most of his time in Chicago, kept tabs on the Cubs throughout the year, including their numerous exhibition games at Mesa. Finley fleeced the Cubs for two of the keys to his A’s dynasty: Holtzman, who with Catfish Hunter and Vida Blue gave Oakland three aces in its rotation; and North, who supplied speed to track down balls in center field while combining with Bert Campaneris to give the A’s a lethal top of the batting order.

As happened with Dave Duncan in March, Finley passed another personal headache on to someone else. First baseman Mike Epstein, a vocal foe of Finley’s in the Oakland locker room, was shipped to Texas a month after the 1972 World Series. The A’s got back reliever Horacio Pina, the second deal in a month for a durable Rangers reliever. Pina’s 15 saves and 60 appearances for the Rangers, not to mention Texas teammate Lindblad’s league-leading 66 games, added two veteran arms to an already outstanding A’s bullpen headlined by Rollie Fingers and Darold Knowles. The A’s came into 1973 with four solid relievers who had been among the top ten either in saves (Knowles), appearances (Lindblad), or both (Fingers and Pina). And this was an era when a team was fortunate to have one or two reliable relievers.

Never one to stand still, Finley kept dealing. By the time the 1973 season began, the A’s had a dozen players who had not been on the team the previous season. Among those shipped out was Matty Alou. The 33-year-old outfielder-first baseman was sent to the Yankees in return for Rich McKinney, a versatile if not overly successful contact hitter. As if to show that the owner had nothing against the Alous – he’d dumped brother Felipe after only two games in 1971 – Finley acquired the third Alou brother, Jesus, in July 1973 and he played a key role in the ’73 postseason.

Constantly bringing in new veterans meant that old hands had to be dispatched. Finley released infielder Larry Brown plus relievers Joel Horlen and Marcel Lachemann, but among the released veterans was one name better known than the rest, and whose absence would be felt in 1973.

Orlando Cepeda, an 11-time All-Star and a future Hall of Famer, had batted .289 in 91 plate appearances for the Braves before being acquired for Denny McLain on June 29, 1972, in a deal of former MVPs both seemingly on their last legs. Literally. Cepeda had such knee trouble that it was nearly impossible for him to play the field; he appeared in an Oakland uniform in just three games – all as a pinch-hitter in July. Cepeda’s physical issues and his place in the upper salary tier for the early 1970s at $90,000, explain Finley’s considerations for the release of “Baby Bull” on December 18. For Cepeda’s part, even though he played just three games for the A’s, he had endured more than enough from the Oakland owner. When Finley, a phone addict decades before the cellular phone, insisted that Cepeda call him from Puerto Rico or be released, Cepeda opted to end his A’s tenure.17  Exactly one month after his release, Cepeda joined the Red Sox as the first player ever signed to the position many were still calling the designated pinch hitter.

Finley had long lobbied for the designated hitter, but when it was finally approved in the American League on January 11, 1973, he was caught without someone on his team equipped for the role. In spring training the A’s lost several chances to experiment with the new position because the National League refused to allow the DH in any games they were involved in, and three of the other seven Cactus League teams hailed from the NL. Finley, not surprisingly, was outraged at the Cubs, Giants, Padres, and especially National League President Chub Feeney: “When will they wake up?”18

With fewer games to get the hang of the new rule, the A’s seemed to wing it when the season began. Speedy Bill North was Oakland’s DH choice on Opening Day, becoming the first designated hitter to bat leadoff. Manager Dick Williams would use five other players who combined with North to bat just .231 with two home runs and six RBIs in the newly created position over the first month of the season before Finley acquired the Phillies’ Deron Johnson, who had collected 194 homers in a little over 5,000 plate appearances, and had also played for Finley in Kansas City in the early 1960s.

Johnson filled what became the prototypical DH profile: a veteran slugger with something left in the tank who was better off without a mitt. Johnson hit 19 homers and knocked in 81 runs while batting .251 and hardly missing a game for the A’s. But Oakland discard Orlando Cepeda hit .289 with 20 homers and 86 RBIs for Boston in ’73 to earn the first Outstanding Designated Hitter Award.

Finley couldn’t win ’em all. At least until October. 

Sources

Parts of this story were adapted from the author’s book on the 1973 season, Swinging ’73: Baseball’s Wildest Season, published in 2013 by Lyons Press, Guilford, Connecticut.

Books

Clark, Tom, Champagne and Baloney: The Rise and Fall of Finley’s A’s (New York: Harper & Row, 1976).

Green, G. Michael, and Roger D. Launius, Charlie Finley: The Outrageous Story of Baseball’s Super Showman (New York: Walker & Company, 2010).

Markusen, Bruce, Baseball’s Last Dynasty: Charlie Finley’s Oakland A’s (Indianapolis: Masters Press, 1998).

Rosengren, John, Hammerin’ Hank, George Almighty and the Say Hey Kid: The Year That Changed Baseball Forever (Naperville, Illinois: Sourcebooks, 2008).

Williams, Dick, and Bill Plaschke, No More Mr. Nice Guy: A Life of Hardball (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich Publishers, 1990).

Newspapers and Magazines

Associated Press, “Rule Will Limit Trips to Mound by Dick Williams,” Schenectady (New York) Gazette, October 3, 1973.

Bergman, Ron, “Finley Denies Blue Trade Rumor,” Oakland Tribune, March 5, 1973.

Bergman, Ron, “Finley Leading A’s Holdouts 4 to 3,” Oakland Tribune, March 3, 1973.

Levitt, Ed, “Finley and Feeney,” Oakland Tribune, March 13, 1983.

————, “Pressure on Tenace,” Oakland Tribune, March 5, 1973.

Orr, Robin, “Sports Millionaire Charles O. Finley,” Parade Magazine, January 28, 1973.

Websites

baseball-almanac.com

baseball-reference.com

oakland.athletics.mlb.com/oak/downloads/y2011/2011_media_guide.pdf

sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=2635604

springtrainingonline.com/teams/oakland-athletics.htm

throughthefencebaseball.com/1973-the-last-time-kc-hosted-the-all-star-game/23892

Notes

1 Associated Press, “Rule Will Limit Trips to Mound by Dick Williams,” Schenectady Gazette, October 3, 1973.

2 G. Michael Green and Roger D. Launius, Charlie Finley: The Outrageous Story of Baseball’s Super Showman (New York: Walker & Company, 2010), 180.

3 Robin Orr, “Sports Millionaire Charles O. Finley,” Parade Magazine, January 28, 1973.

4 Ron Bergman, “Finley Leading A’s Holdouts 4 to 3,” Oakland Tribune, March 3, 1973.

5 Ed Levitt, “Pressure on Tenace,” Oakland Tribune, March 5, 1973.

6 Robin Orr, “Sports Millionaire Charles O. Finley,” Parade Magazine, January 28, 1973.

7 Green and Launius, Charlie Finley, 182.

8 Eric Aron, “1973: The Last Time Kansas City Hosted the All-Star Game,” throughthefencebaseball.com/1973-the-last-time-kc-hosted-the-all-star-game/23892, July 9, 2012.

9 springtrainingonline.com/teams/oakland-athletics.htm

10 2011 Oakland A’s Media Guide, oakland.athletics.mlb.com/oak/downloads/y2011/2011_media_guide.pdf

11 Ed Levitt, “Pressure on Tenace.”

12 Ron Bergman, “Finley Denies Blue Trade Rumor,” Oakland Tribune, March 5, 1973.

13 Green and Launius, Charlie Finley, 157-8.

14 Bruce Markusen, Baseball’s Last Dynasty: Charlie Finley’s Oakland A’s (Indianapolis: Masters Press, 1998), 193.

15 espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=2635604

16 Ron Bergman, “Finley Denies Blue Trade Rumor.”

17 Markusen, Baseball’s Last Dynasty,182-3.

18 Ed Levitt. “Finley and Feeney.” Oakland Tribune, March 13, 1983.