Charlie Finley

For other people named Charles Finley, see Charles Finley (disambiguation).

Charles Oscar Finley (February 22, 1918–February 19, 1996), nicknamed Charlie O or Charley O, was an American businessman who is best remembered for his tenure as the owner of the Oakland Athletics Major League Baseball team. Finley purchased the franchise while it was located in Kansas City, moving it to Oakland in 1968. He is buried in Merrillville, Indiana's Calumet Park Cemetery.

Early life

Finley was born in Ensley, Alabama, but was raised in Gary, Indiana, and later lived in La Porte, a small town 60 miles east of Chicago. In 1946 he had a bout of tuberculosis that nearly killed him. Finley made his fortune in the insurance business, being among the first to write group medical insurance policies for those in the medical profession.

Finley showed a penchant for flair and inventive business practices. Sometimes, when wooing prospective customers, Finley would drive the client through the richest section of Gary. Pointing out a large mansion, Finley would declare "That's my place there, but I'm having it remodeled right now." Finley's fortunes grew and he ended up owning a 40 story insurance building in downtown Chicago. When Finley bought his personal property in Laporte, he hired John Mihelic as his ranch caretaker. The property was a working cattle ranch which consisted of an 18th century 11 room colonial manor house and 9 barns and various outbuildings. Finley had a large mansion built on the property which featured rounded portico's and columns which resembled the White House in Washington D.C. Mihelic and his family then moved into the original house and lived there as manager and caretakers.

Finley had a large "Home of the Oakland A's" sign installed on the roof of another large barn where it could be viewed by vehicles passing on the Indiana toll road. It was to this place that Finley often brought the whole team and held picnics and pool parties attended by friends, business associates and locals, who mingled with members of the team and took numerous photographs.

Owner of the A's

In Kansas City

Finley first attempted to buy the Philadelphia Athletics in 1954, but 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.

On December 19, 1960, Finley purchased a controlling interest in the Kansas City Athletics from Johnson's estate (Johnson having died in March of that year); he then 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 (for which the Athletics had been criticized) and searching for unheralded talent. He also made significant investments in the minor league (farm) system for the first time in the franchise's history.

Charlie-O becomes the Athletics' mascot

Finley replaced the Athletics' traditional elephant mascot with a live mule. "Charlie-O" was paraded about the outfield, into cocktail parties and hotel lobbies, and into the press room after a large feeding to annoy reporters. (The mule died in 1976, at age 20.) Oakland Athletic's History

The "K.C. Pennant Porch"

After supposedly being told by manager Ed Lopat about the Yankees' success being attributable to the dimensions of Yankee Stadium, Finley 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, just 296 feet from home plate. However, a rule passed in 1958 held that no (new or renovated) major-league fence could be closer than 325 feet, so league officials forced Finley to move the fences back after two exhibition games. The A's owner then ordered a white line to be painted on the field at the original "Pennant Porch" distance, and told the public address announcer to announce "That would have been a home run in Yankee Stadium" whenever a fly ball was hit past that line but short of the fence. The practice was quickly abandoned after the announcer was calling more "would-be" home runs for the opposition than the A's.

Uniform changes

In 1963, Finley changed the team's colors to Kelly Green, Gold and White. In 1967, he replaced the team's traditional black cleats with white ones. Finley also started phasing out the team name "Athletics" in favor of "A's." (When Mickey Mantle saw the A's' green-and-gold uniforms, he jeered, "They should have come out of the dugout on tippy-toes, holding hands and singing," according to Baseball Digest).

World Series success

The A's (as they were officially known from 1970) moved to California in January 1968, just as the new talent amassed over the years in the minors (such as Reggie Jackson, Sal Bando, Joe Rudi, Bert Campaneris, Catfish Hunter, Rollie Fingers, and Vida Blue) was starting to gel. During the early 1970s, the once-moribund A's became a powerhouse, winning three straight World Series from 1972 to 1974 and five straight division titles from 1971 to 1975, in the existing Oakland Coliseum.

The beginning of Free Agency

In 1976, after losing Hunter to free agency, Finley started dismantling his club, attempting to sell Rudi and Fingers to the Red Sox and Blue to the Yankees. Kuhn decided to invoke the rarely-used "best interests of baseball" clause in order to void Finley's sales. Finley, in turn, hired famed sports attorney Neil Papiano and proceeded to file a $10 million dollar restraint-of-trade lawsuit against Kuhn and Major League Baseball. Papiano and Finley lost the case (Finley v. Kuhn). The court ruled that the commissioner had the authority to determine what is in the best interest of baseball. This lawsuit is widely recognized as one of the most famous, influential and precedent-setting sports-related cases in the history of American jurisprudence.

At the end of that season, many of the A's stars left the team due to free agency. The next year – only two years after winning a division title and three years after winning a World Series—the A's finished with the worst record in baseball. After that season, he tried to trade Blue again, this time to the Reds. Kuhn vetoed this trade as well, saying that it amounted to a fire sale. He also claimed that adding Blue to the Reds' already formidable pitching staff would make the race for the National League West a joke. (The Reds pitching staff had been decimated by free agency and injuries in the 1976–77 off-season and as such, the Reds finished a distant second to the Dodgers)

Selling the A's

Charlie O. & Carl A. Finley started scouting for new talent in 1977. Due to the start of free agency, they realized it was time to sell the team. Finley finally agreed to sell the A's to Walter A. Haas, Jr., president of Levi Strauss & Co. before the 1981 season. And then in 1981, the A's made it to the play-offs, which was a result of rebuilding the team. Carl A. Finley was asked to remain with the new owners as Vice President/mentor.

Gimmicks

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 pitcher Jim Hunter, he nicknamed him "Catfish," even fabricating boyhood stories about Hunter to give him press appeal. Finley refused to sign then-prospect Don Sutton to a contract, simply because Sutton didn't have a flashy nickname. He introduced ball girls (one of whom, the future Debbi 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, but hitters found it too hard to pick up the spin. The week of August 18, 1975, Charlie Finley was on the cover of Time Magazine and his orange baseballs were featured in the article. It would be his last major profile in a national publication.
• 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. On March 10, 1971, the Athletics walked 16 batters in one such experimental game.
• 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, and Finley was so upset at the rejection of the rule that he voted against his own Designated Hitter rule. However, the rejection 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 shortly into his second season.
• Hired Stanley Burrell (who would later gain worldwide fame as MC Hammer) as Executive Vice President when he was just a teenager to be his "eyes and ears."

Other sports ventures

Finley purchased the Oakland Seals of the National Hockey League in 1970, renaming the team California Golden Seals. Mimicking the A's, he changed the team colors to green and gold and had the Seals wear white skates instead of the traditional black skates, a move deeply unpopular with both players and fans. The Seals had a miserable season and finished last in the league in Finley's first year of ownership, but after a promising turnaround in 1971-72, he allowed five of his best players to bolt to the upstart World Hockey Association (WHA) after refusing to match the new league's salary offers. With continuing on-ice and attendance problems, Finley lost interest in the team, but could not find a buyer and sold the franchise back to the league in February 1974 at a profit. Finley's attempt to sell the team to an Indianapolis group who proposed to move the team there was rejected by the league in 1973.

In 1972, Finley purchased the Memphis Pros of the American Basketball Association, changing the team's name to the Memphis Tams, the name being an acronym for Tennessee, Arkansas and Mississippi. As was the case with the A's, he changed the Tams' colors to green and gold. While he hired recently retired Kentucky Wildcats basketball coach Adolph Rupp as team president, Finley took almost no interest in the team. He ran it on a shoestring budget, and often went weeks without communicating with his front office in Memphis about team business. Almost as soon as he bought the team, he began talks to move it to St. Paul, Minnesota while publicly insisting that he would keep it in Memphis. When word of these talks leaked out, Finley lost what goodwill he had with Memphis fans. After the season, he shut down the team office and tried to sell the team to a group in Rhode Island. When that sale fell through, he didn't bother to tell anyone at the league office that the Tams would play until August—holding up all of the league's television and radio contracts in the process. Even then, he didn't get around to hiring a coach until two days before the first preseason game. Not surprisingly, the Tams finished in the league cellar two years in a row, and Finley turned the team back over to the league in 1974.

In March 1987, Finley proposed a new football league. The league would merge with the Canadian Football League, and be renamed the North American Football League. The American cities would be made up of those that lost out on the United States Football League folding. The idea never got past the planning stages.

Indiana legend

Finley resided primarily in Chicago and LaPorte, 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 under coach Ken Schreiber. Finley sent the team equipment once, 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.

He died on February 19, 1996 three days short of what would have been his 78th birthday.

The Kansas City Beatles concert

When Finley owned the Kansas City Athletics, he promised the people of Kansas City that he would bring The Beatles to play in Kansas City's Municipal Stadium during the group's first tour of North America in the summer of 1964. Finley visited the group's manager, Brian Epstein, in San Francisco on August 19, 1964, where the Beatles were playing the first date of the tour. He told Epstein that he was disappointed that Kansas City was not among the group's itinerary, and offered first $50,000 and then $100,000 if the Beatles would schedule a concert in the Missouri city. Epstein refused, pointing out that on the only free date available, September 17, the band was scheduled for a day of rest in New Orleans. Finley left disappointed, but again encountered Epstein in Los Angeles a week later. Epstein again rejected Finley's offer of $100,000, noting that the band wanted to use their only day off to "explore the traditional home of jazz." Undeterred, Finley tore up the $100,000 check and wrote a new one for $150,000. Astonished, Epstein excused himself to talk to the group. John Lennon speaking for his bandmates replied, "We'll do whatever you want." Satisfied that, in exchange for forfeiting their only day off, the Beatles had earned what at the time was the highest fee ever for a musical concert, a staggering $4,838 per minute, Epstein accepted Finley's check. Although Finley is usually remembered by the people of Kansas City as the man who provided mediocre baseball while attempting to abandon the city for a more promising market, it should also be kept in mind that he did deliver on his promise to bring the Beatles to Kansas City. Finley had a photo of himself in a Beatles wig printed on the back of all concert tickets. It was the only concert on the Beatles tour that did not sell out.

Source: Mark Lewisohn, The Beatles Live!: The Ultimate Reference Book (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1986), 168–69.

Further reading

• Green, G. Michael and Roger Launius Charlie Finley: The Outrageous Story of Baseball's Super Showman, Walker & Co, 2010.
• Oakland Atheletics History, Nancy Finley King

External links

• Baseball Hall of Fame candidate profile
• BaseballLibrary - profile and career highlights
• Charlie Finley at Find a Grave