Finley Ball (16 page)

CHAPTER 30

MORE DEPARTURES

1976–1977

F
ew sights are as dreary as a rainy, gray January day in the Bay Area. But Dad seemed especially downcast that day in 1976, less than a month after the Tanner hire, as we walked through the rain to our car after a day of work. The source of his sour mood was the latest defection from the A's organization.

Carolyn Coffin, the team's longest-tenured employee—she'd been there since 1962, a year before Dad came—had given her notice. An astute reader of Charlie's moods, Carolyn was one of the few who could stand up to him and get away with it. She had recently passed the real estate exam and planned to cash in on the state's booming real estate market. I had known her since I was four. Now I was nearly eighteen and was sad to see her go.

Worse, it occurred to me that my over-worked dad would be expected to take on her load as well.

A MASCOT PASSES

The phone rang in Dad's Coliseum office, interrupting a chat we were having about where we would spend Christmas of 1976, which was just nine days away. I had joined Dad at work that day to help out, which I did as often as I could after Carolyn's departure.

Dad stared at the phone as it rang a second time. “That must be Charlie,” he said. He picked up the receiver, and I could tell immediately that it wasn't Charlie. Whoever it was had delivered bad news. Dad hung up the phone moments later and paused briefly before turning to me. “Charlie O died,” he said. The caller was Stan Cosca, the owner of Skyline Ranch in Oakland, who had been keeping Dad abreast of the beloved mule's failing health.

The Associated Press reported the passing of the A's mascot:

Charlie O, the Mule and mascot of the Oakland A's, is dead at the age of 20. Charlie O's keeper, Stanley Cosca, said he died peacefully of a liver ailment at the University of California-Davis Veterinarian Clinic Wednesday evening. “He was tremendously loved,” said Cosca, owner of the Skyline Ranch in Oakland and Charlie O's caretaker during his nine-year career with the A's. “He made so many people, so many children happy.” Charlie O was hospitalized on Dec. 8, Cosca said, and when word spread of his illness, baseball fans of all ages sent get well cards.

When Dad read the story, he noted with annoyance that Charlie O's career with the A's had actually lasted twelve years. The mule's three years in Kansas City were important because that's where he started. Dad could be a stickler that way; it was the old school teacher in him coming out. But he was unhappy for another reason as well: Dad and Charlie had been dissatisfied with Stan Cosca for a while.

When the team came to Oakland, Dad was eager to demonstrate the A's loyalty to their new hometown, and housing Charlie O in the city seemed like a nice gesture. Someone recommended Skyline Ranch, and
Stan's assurance that he had experience with mules was all Dad needed to hear.

For half a decade, it was a great arrangement. Stan took good care of the A's mascot and did a fine job whenever he brought Charlie O to the Coliseum for one of his many visits. But after a while, Dad started hearing rumors about Stan. In 1974, a reporter told him he'd heard that Stan was using the mule for events not related to the A's, including Stan's son's wedding. Dad didn't like that, and he knew Charlie wouldn't like it either. The A's were paying for Charlie O's stabling, food, grooming, veterinary care, and transportation, and he didn't think Stan should use the A's famous mascot for other purposes.

There were other complaints. When A's fans learned where Charlie O was boarded, they would drive to Skyline Ranch to visit him. Dad and Charlie thought that any fans who went to the effort to visit Charlie O should be able to see him, but there were reports that Stan was turning them away. Dad also heard a rumor that Skyline Ranch had charged a fee for some fans to see the mule. If this was true, where was that money going?

In time, Charlie and Dad started making surprise visits to Skyline Ranch whenever Charlie was in town. Dad and I would pick him up at the airport and go directly to the ranch for an inspection. I remember the look on Stan's face when we drove up—startled, like a deer caught in the headlights. Stan would drop everything and tell his wife to make us a meal, then the three men would sit down for a few drinks and a bite. On the way home from the stable, Dad and Charlie would laugh about Stan's nervous hospitality, but Charlie was worried. He was accustomed to people's getting flustered around him because of his reputation, but something about Stan's behavior alarmed him. As early as 1974, Dad and Charlie were voicing concern about Stan, wondering if he was becoming possessive of Charlie O. “Stan needs to understand that he's only boarding Charlie O, he doesn't own Charlie O,” Charlie said to Dad one night over a steak at Oscar's.

When the mule died in late 1976, Dad knew that fans would be nearly as sad as he and Charlie were. Charlie was in Chicago, so he asked
Dad to handle the mule's interment. Dad, as usual, made a sensible choice, selecting the Oakland SPCA, practically next door to the Coliseum, as Charlie O's resting place. The mule had once appeared on the cover of the SPCA's brochure and had occasionally made charity appearances for the organization. Charlie O was cremated, and his ashes were deposited behind a wall inside the SPCA. Joining his ashes were his green and gold blanket, A's hat, and reins. The mule's convertible trailer was donated to SPCA. For a time during the '76 season, A's fans could stop to pay their respects. We made sure this option was announced in print ads and that Monte Moore announced it during game broadcasts.

It wasn't only fans who missed Charlie O. Upon his induction into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2009—years after both Charlies, the man and the mule, had gone to their rewards—Rickey Henderson recalled how Charles O. Finley, the antic if parsimonious A's owner, called him up to Oakland in June 1979. “Charlie, wherever you at, and that donkey, I'd like to say thank you for the opportunity.”

To this day, I still get asked, “Whatever happened to Charlie O?” His ashes remained at the Oakland SPCA for many years. Today, I have the ashes in an urn in a huge safe in a secret place.

CHAPTER 31

TRIALS AND TRIBULATIONS

1976–1977

F
or Charlie, the months between 1976 and 1978 were about rebuilding the A's for the future. Charlie's and Dad's early morning phone conferences were about prospects and the future. There was talk of trades, as well. Before free agency sent the price of players' contracts soaring, none of the trades was intended to bring the A's a profit. Charlie and Dad focused on how the farm team and good trades could improve the team's skill and talent on the field.

Dad cautioned me not to say anything about what he and Charlie were doing to rebuild the team. The reason was simple—they were sick and tired of the unrelenting vilification of the sports media, and they didn't want to have to put up with reporters trying to stoke up some news about Charlie's team management. They were also preparing to settle a score with Bowie Kuhn.

FINLEY V. KUHN

Charlie was still enraged by Kuhn's decision to block his sale of several players during the 1976 season. He believed the commissioner had overstepped his authority, blocking routine transactions out of personal animus toward Charlie.

Charlie never backed down from such a fight. He filed a lawsuit against Kuhn in federal district court in Chicago, seeking ten million dollars in damages and taking their feud to heights rarely seen in sports. Nobody could recall an owner's suing an MLB commissioner before, but if the lawsuit was unprecedented, so was Kuhn's interference. So Charlie's and Kuhn's biggest battle yet would be settled in a packed Chicago courtroom.

The trial in
Finley v. Kuhn
began December 16, 1976, with Judge Frank McGarr presiding, and lasted several weeks. There were two issues: Were Charlie's sales truly not “in the best interest of baseball,” as Kuhn had claimed, and had Kuhn acted improperly when he blocked the deals, overstepping his authority as commissioner?

Charlie testified that he would have spent the three and a half million dollars that Kuhn denied him to keep his unsigned players, to add other teams' free agents to the A's roster, to replenish the farm team, and to pay the franchise's ongoing expenses. Neil Papiano, Charlie's attorney, called witnesses who described Connie Mack's famous “fire sales” with the Philadelphia Athletics, in which he had sold players for the 1977 equivalent of four and a half million dollars. There were several other instances of owners selling players for handsome sums, just as Charlie had done, with no interference from the MLB commissioner. Why, then, had Kuhn gone against precedent and blocked Charlie's sales?

Kuhn liked to depict himself as the game's protector. On the witness stand, he actually called himself, “the conscience of the game.” He argued that Charlie's “big cash deals” would have upset baseball's “competitive balance” and were unfair to Oakland baseball fans. Less than a year later, Kuhn would show how much he really cared about Oakland fans when he tried to help Charlie sell the A's to Denver oilman Marvin Davis, who had plans to move the club to Colorado. In trying to give the
entire Bay Area market to the San Francisco Giants—who had been underperforming on and off the field for a decade—Kuhn suddenly didn't seem to care much about “fairness” to Oakland and East Bay sports fans.

The sportswriter Jerome Holtzman attended the entire trial. Fifteen years later he recalled the farcical nature of much of the testimony:

[T]here was a parade of 20 witnesses, 13 for Kuhn, seven for Finley. I knew them all, except for a Northwestern University economics professor. This gave me an edge. I knew who was telling the truth. . . .

It was my first trial, and what surprised me was that all but two or three of the witnesses for Kuhn were constantly fudging. I was naive. Once the oath was taken, I thought, everyone told the truth and nothing but the truth. I was in Arizona covering the Cubs when McGarr's decision was announced in mid-March. By coincidence, a day or two later one of the club executives who had testified for Kuhn had come to Mesa for an exhibition game. I said to him, “You guys didn't tell the truth.”

I have never forgotten his response:

“Of course we didn't. We were co-defendants. We wanted the commissioner to win.”
¹

The trial ended January 13, 1977, and, while McGarr was preparing his ruling, Charlie fired another salvo in this ongoing battle: he sold a player for a lot of cash. He dealt middle reliever Paul Lindblad to the Texas Rangers for four hundred thousand dollars, a deal that, predictably, Kuhn tried to block. Charlie then fought Kuhn's stay on the Lindblad sale. It made for a strange and awkward battle, as both sides once again lawyered up over an issue which a federal judge was already trying to decide. Charlie stepped up the war of words, telling reporters that he had essentially told Kuhn “to go to hell.” As Kuhn scrutinized the Lindblad sale, Charlie famously declared, “Before, I called this man a village idiot. I apologize to the villages across the country, I should have said
he's the nation's idiot.” Perhaps fearful of looking bad in the eyes of the judge, Kuhn invented a solution with no precedent. He allowed the sale of Lindblad but placed an arbitrary cap on player sales of four hundred thousand dollars—the price, coincidentally, of the Lindblad deal.

Judge McGarr issued his ruling in
Finley v. Kuhn
on St. Patrick's Day—March 17, 1977—in favor of Kuhn. “The question before the court is not whether Bowie Kuhn was wise to do what he did, but rather whether he had the authority,” he wrote. Under MLB's arcane rules, the commissioner's power is “broad and unfettered . . . to prevent any conduct destructive of the confidence in the integrity of baseball.” Charlie appealed the district court's decision but lost again.

PREPARING FOR SOMEDAY

As the 1977 season began, only two players, Vida Blue and outfielder Billy North, were left from the “three-peat” World Series teams, and only a few other names were recognizable to the casual fan. Manny Sanguillen had arrived in the Chuck Tanner trade with Pittsburgh, a historic manager-for-player deal after the '76 season. In the winter, Charlie and Dad had added a fourth recognizable name—Dick Allen, a slugger who had starred for the Phillies throughout the 1960s and for the White Sox in the early '70s. Thirty-five and in the twilight of a fine playing career, Allen had a reputation as a rebel, but that didn't scare Charlie, who understood rebels. Allen embraced the A's custom of putting players' first names or nicknames on their jerseys, one of Charlie's many innovations that annoyed baseball's old guard. Allen put “Wampum” on the back of his uniform, a reference to his hometown of Wampum, Pennsylvania.

Allen became the subject of a series of disagreements between Charlie and the A's new manager, Jack McKeon. “To be a productive player, I would have [Allen] in the line-up five days a week,” McKeon recalled decades later. “Charlie wanted him playing every day and reminded me how much he was paying Allen ($100,000).”

Charlie could stomach a strong-willed manager who had an impressive record, as the leeway he gave Dick Williams showed. But he had little patience with a manager who was difficult
and
didn't win very much. So he fired McKeon after only fifty-three games, one-third of the way through the season, replacing him with third-base coach Bobby Winkles. The A's finished in seventh place—dead last in the American League West, just a year after barely missing the playoffs. 1977 was the A's first losing season since 1967 and their first ever in Oakland. The fans stopped coming, and attendance at the Coliseum fell to only 495,599 that year.

For fans accustomed to winning World Series titles, it was a terrible time. But looking at the '77 roster with the benefit of hindsight, anyone can see that Charlie was stocking the A's with talented young players who would become stars, just as he had done when he purchased the franchise in 1960. Tony Armas (age twenty-three), Mitchell Page (twenty-five), and Rick Langford (twenty-five) joined Mike Norris (twenty-two), Matt Keough (twenty-one), Steve McCatty (twenty-three), and other raw youngsters who someday would strike fear in the hearts of opponents. But the '77 season was not quite that someday.