Charlie Finley

Charles Oscar Finley (February 22, 1918 - February 19, 1997), Major League Baseball owner, was the flamboyant owner of the Oakland Athletics. Finley was a semi-pro baseball player in Indiana who had his career cut short in 1946 by a bout with tuberculosis that nearly killed him. Finley then made his fortune in the insurance business, being among the first to write group medical insurance policies for those in the medical profession.

Finley's Follies: the Kansas City and Oakland Athletics

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Charlie Finley

Finley's first attempt to buy the then-Philadelphia Athletics came in 1954, but the American League owners instead approved the sale of the team to Arnold Johnson, who moved the A's to Kansas City for the 1955 season. He later made an unsuccessful bid to buy the expansion Los Angeles A.L. franchise in 1960. (The franchise was purchased by Gene Autry and named the Los Angeles Angels.)

On December 19, 1960, Finley purchased a controlling interest in the Kansas City Athletics from Johnson's estate (Johnson died in March of that year). He bought out the minority owners a year later. Finley quickly started to turn the franchise around, refusing to make deals with the New York Yankees and searching for unheralded talent. After being told by manager Ed Lopat about the Yankees' success being attributable to the dimensions of Yankee Stadium, he built the "K.C. Pennant Porch" in right field, which brought the right field fence in Kansas City Municipal Stadium to match Yankee Stadium's dimensions exactly. League officials forced him to move the fences back after two exhibition games. Finley then ordered a white line to be painted on the field at the original "Pennant Porch" distance, and ordered the public address announcer to tell the crowd, "That would have been a home run in Yankee Stadium" whenever a fly ball was hit past that line. The practice was quickly abandoned after the announcer was calling more "would-be" home runs for the opposition than the A's.

He also started micromanaging the team, ordering players to change their style of play and firing any manager or releasing any player who publicly disagreed with him. He replaced the A's traditional elephant mascot with "Charlie O," a live mule, and paraded him about the outfield and even into cocktail parties and hotel lobbies, and into the press room after a large feeding to annoy reporters. When third baseman Sal Bando departed the team as a free agent and was asked if it was difficult to leave the Athletics, Bando responded, "Was it hard to leave the Titanic?" The mule died in 1976, at age 20.

Finley made changes to the team’s uniforms. In 1963, Finley changed the team’s colors to "Kelly Green, Fort Knox Gold and Wedding Gown White." In 1967, he replaced the team’s traditional black cleats with white ones. In 1970 (after the move to Oakland) he added an "apostrophe-s" to the traditional "A" logo, and began phasing out the team name "Athletics" in favor of, simply, "A's."

Finley moved his franchise from Kansas City to Oakland, California in 1968 and quickly turned the new Oakland Athletics into a dynasty, winning three straight World Series' from 1972 to 1974 and five straight division titles from 1971 to 1975. A major embarrassment for baseball resulted from Finley's actions during the 1973 World Series. Finley forced player Mike Andrews to sign a false affadavit saying he was injured after the reserve infielder committed two consecutive errors in the 12th inning of Oakland 's Game Two loss to the Mets. Other A's and manager Dick Williams rallied to Andrews's defense. Commissioner Bowie Kuhn forced Finley to reinstate the player. Williams resigned after winning the Series, and Finley replaced him with Alvin Dark.

After losing Catfish Hunter to free agency, Finley started dismantling his club, attempting to sell Joe Rudi and Rollie Fingers to the Boston Red Sox and Vida Blue to the Yankees. Commissioner Bowie Kuhn voided the deals, saying they were not in the best interests of baseball. Finley was in the process of rebuilding the team again in 1981 when he sold the team to Walter A. Haas, Jr., president of Levi Strauss & Co..

Finley was fond of gimmicks, dressing his players in non-traditional green and gold uniforms and offering his players $300 bonuses to grow moustaches. For star relief pitcher Rollie Fingers, the handlebar moustache he grew for Finley became a trademark. After signing pitchers Jim Hunter and John Odom, he nicknamed them "Catfish" and "Blue Moon", even fabricating boyhood stories about Hunter to give him press appeal. Finley refused to sign then-prospect (and future Hall of Famer) Don Sutton to a contract simply because Sutton didn't have a flashy nickname. He introduced ball girls (one of whom, the future Debbie Fields, went on to found Mrs. Fields' Original Cookies, Inc.), and advocated night games for the World Series to increase fan interest. Finley also was an outspoken advocate of the designated hitter rule, which he pushed until it was adopted by the American League. He suggested many other innovations that were tried and rejected for various reasons, including:

• Orange baseballs - Tried in a few exhibition games, hitters found it too hard to pick up the spin.
• A three-ball walk and two-strike strikeout - Tried in spring training one year, he thought it would lead to games with more action. Instead the result was more walks and longer games.
• A mechanical rabbit that would pop up behind home plate and deliver new balls to the umpire - Finley installed one, which he named 'Harvey,' at the A's home ballparks in Kansas City and Oakland, but the idea never caught on anywhere else and was dropped by the A's after 1969.
• A designated runner - This idea was rejected for several reasons by Major League Baseball, but it didn't stop Finley from experimenting on his own in 1974, hiring a college sprinter named Herb Washington exclusively to pinch run and steal bases. Washington stole 29 bases, but was caught stealing 18 times and frequently picked off by opposing pitchers. He was let go after only one season.

Depite these gimmicks and various other promotions during Finley's ownership of the Athletics, the A's were a mediocre draw at best during the 21 years of his ownership, both in Kansas City and in Oakland, despite winning five divisional championships and three World Series in the latter venue. Average yearly attendance for Finley-owned teams was just under 743,000. The high-water mark for attendance came in 1975, when 1,075,518 came through the turnstiles. For years later, in 1979, only 306,783 fans bothered to attend.

The Finley era in baseball came to an end after the 1980 season. His wife sued for a divorce, and would not accept part of a baseball team in a property settlement. After a deal to move the Athletics to Denver fell though, he sold the team to San Francisco clothing manufacturer Walter A. Haas, Jr., then president of Levi Strauss & Co..

Other Sports Ventures

Finley purchased the Oakland Seals franchise in the National Hockey League in 1970, renaming the team the California Golden Seals. He sold the Seals in 1974. From 1972-1974, Finley owned the Memphis Pros of the American Basketball Association, and again changed the team's name to the Memphis Tams, the name being an acronym for Tennessee, Arkansas and Mississippi. The Tams were taken over by the ABA in 1974 and renamed the Memphis Sounds. In both cases, the team's colors were changed by Finley to Kelly green and gold. Both teams were abysmal failures both at the box office and on the ice or court, respectively.

Indiana Legend

Finley maintained his homes in Chicago and LaPorte, Indiana, a small town 60 miles east of Chicago, even as he owned the Oakland A's. Even though he would make frequent trips to Oakland, he would run the team from the Midwest, earning more derision as an absentee owner. Still, Finley was popular in his hometown of LaPorte, where he remained involved in the community late into his life.

While Finley was building a championship team in Oakland, the LaPorte High School baseball team was becoming a powerhouse. Finley would send the team equipment every season, including the white shoes the Oakland A's made famous and that the LaPorte High School team would use until the late 1990s.

Finley would occasionally throw a party whenever the A's would be in Chicago to play the White Sox. He bused the players to LaPorte ("God, we hated that," Bando told Sports Illustrated in 1999) and his local friends would mingle with the likes of Reggie Jackson, Vida Blue and Catfish Hunter.

Quote

• Sweat plus sacrifice equals success.