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Authors: Nancy Finley

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CHAPTER 18

THE SUSPENSE BUILDS

1971

I
n the 1960s and early 1970s, there was much hand-wringing about baseball's declining popularity. And as usual, the game's leaders were afraid to do much about it.

Charlie was constantly calling for rule changes that would produce more offense and speed up the game. He called for a designated hitter long before the American League added it. Today the All-Star game is played at night, as are most of the World Series games. Charlie was the first to call for that. “The kids can't see the games in the afternoon,” he said. “Neither can the working man in the steel mills or coal mines.”

Some of his other ideas went nowhere. For example, he talked about having a designated runner, and he wanted a clock to force quicker pitching, and he wanted baseballs to be a more visible orange. But many of Charlie's ideas were vindicated, despite the initial ridicule by other owners. The first World Series night games were played in 1971. The American League adopted the designated hitter in 1973.

But in the early '60s, Charlie chafed at the torpor of baseball's conservative old guard. “The pathetic, frustrating thing is that all the owners know baseball has slipped, but they don't do anything,” he complained. “Baseball faces more competition than the owners realize. Times have changed.” A decade later he was still unhappy.
Time
magazine quoted him in 1975 as saying, “I've never seen so many damn idiots as the owners in sport.”

Charlie lobbied his fellow owners and the American League's president, Joe Cronin, to try out a new wrinkle in spring practice: the three-ball walk. Employing all the salesmanship for which he was known, Charlie insisted that the innovation would speed up the game and deliver more excitement and higher scores—just the kind of thing needed to capture the attention of younger fans, who were turning to football and rock concerts for entertainment instead of baseball. Just three years earlier, after all, the owners had approved lowering the pitcher's mound with the same goal in mind.

Cronin finally agreed to Charlie's experiment in a spring training exhibition game on March 6, 1971, between the A's and the Milwaukee Brewers. The final score was A's 13, Brewers 9. There were nineteen walks and six home runs—perhaps not surprising, since hitters knew that pitchers had to throw strikes lest they walk yet another batter. There was indeed more offense, as Charlie predicted, but the extra scoring made for a longer game. Within that extended game, however, there was more action on the base paths, and there was a better chance for a team to come back from a big deficit. In other words, there was some merit to Charlie's three-ball-walk idea. But pitchers and traditionalists hated the experiment. It was never tried again, and Charlie was roundly criticized.

READY TO TRY AGAIN IN '72

Charlie had stockpiled four pitchers in his stable who were potential all-stars: Catfish Hunter, Vida Blue, Ken Holtzman, and John “Blue Moon” Odom. Relying on the time-honored principle that you can never have too much pitching, Charlie had ensured that strong starting pitching
would return to Oakland even if Chuck Dobson could not come back the following season (he couldn't).

Realizing that his team was on the cusp of greatness, Charlie wanted a new design for their uniforms, one that befitted his future champions. Not surprisingly, he was heedless of tradition. The jersey would be kelly green or “Fort Knox” gold with white numbers, “A's” on the front, and green and gold stripes around the hem of the sleeves. The caps would be kelly green with a gold bill and a white “A's” on the front. The beltless pants would have a green and gold stripe down the side and be worn with white shoes.

Charlie knew he would be criticized for the look, as he had been every year since he first introduced gold-colored uniforms in 1963. He didn't care. “I'm giving them more to snicker over,” he said when he unveiled the '72 uniforms.

Marvin Miller, the head of the Players' Association—the fairly new but unified labor union representing Major League Baseball players—wanted new terms in the collective bargaining agreement between players and owners. Miller had the full backing of his membership, and they were threatening to strike at the beginning of the '72 season if they didn't get what they wanted. If they went on strike and the season was delayed or (gulp) canceled, it would be a first in MLB history. The players said they were serious. Some of the hard-line owners wanted to call their bluff.

Charlie had finally assembled a team that, despite its stumble in the previous postseason, looked to be a sure-fire winner in 1972. The last thing he wanted was a season shortened or tainted by a needless conflict between the two groups. After a decade of mocking Charlie for doing things his own way, the owners now ignored the insurance expert in their midst as they negotiated with the players over insurance and pensions.

The season was set to start in the first week of April. Would the owners swallow their pride and ask Charlie for the help they so badly needed to save the season from going up in smoke? That would be the
intelligent move. But Charlie's experience with his fellow owners had taught him that that crowd could not be counted on to make the smart play.

CHAPTER 19

ANOTHER DIVORCE

1972

T
he tension between Charlie and Carl Finley started back in Kansas City, maybe as far back as 1963, when Charlie had to be reminded of his promise to provide our family with a home. The strain increased in 1967, when Charlie was getting ready to move the A's to Oakland and most front-office employees did not want to move with the franchise to the West Coast. Dad didn't want to move that far away either. Dallas would have been convenient for all of us.

Dad had known, of course, that Charlie was in regular communication with Oakland city officials since the early 1960s, but he never thought the move would actually happen. He told Charlie it would “have to be worth my time” to move. Dad had already moved once for the A's, and he had good friends in Kansas City, such as Howard Benjamin.

Once in Oakland, Dad obtained community college teaching credentials in business and industrial management. He eventually got a real estate broker's license and became certified to represent taxpayers before the IRS. Part of the reason he acquired all these credentials was that he
liked taking tests, but they also made him less reliant on staying in Charlie's good graces.

Charlie continued to call Dad very early every morning in Oakland as he had done in Kansas City. It was usually about four o'clock when the phone rang. They talked several times per day but Dad's mornings always started with this call. They would discuss just about anything—politics, women, movies, the stock market—but eventually, of course, they got around to talking about baseball and the inner workings of the Oakland A's. Talking to Dad was how Charlie got the inside dope on his team. If there was a labor war brewing in baseball (frequent in those days) or the commissioner was being a pain in the neck (even more frequent) or an important business decision about the ball club had to be made, Charlie knew whom to call. Dad knew it was part of being an A's executive, and over time the calls made him and Charlie closer, despite Charlie's near-constant need to be controlling.

Their work relationship had never been perfect, but Dad was the only man Charlie truly trusted and the only A's employee who had managed to survive the torrent of change in the front office. (Some also said Dad was the only one with enough patience to absorb Charlie's temper.) But Dad thought that Charlie was expecting him to manage the hockey and basketball organizations as well as the baseball team, while he was already over-worked with just the A's. Dad's frustration came to a head during their regular pre-dawn telephone call one day shortly before the start of the 1972 season.

I was doing my homework while Dad talked to Charlie, and I noticed an edge in his voice. The conversation escalated quickly, and Dad did something he almost never did—he screamed. I looked up and saw Dad's face turning red with anger.

“You can't fire me because I quit!” he yelled into the phone.

Dad without the A's? And just four years after he uprooted his life to move with the franchise to Northern California? Charlie's owning the A's without leaning on Dad to run the show? It was hard to say who was taking the bigger risk.

Just a decade earlier, Dad had left his promising career in education to join Charlie and the A's in Kansas City, and the change had proved financially detrimental. After he quit the A's, Dad wrote to a banker friend back in Kansas City about a loan he was having trouble repaying: “I never had problems like this before I entered baseball. In fact, I always paid cash and owed nothing. You can imagine that I would have never left what I had unless I received assurances that my fortune would be much improved. My fortune has been in one steady state of decline.” Without his baseball job and facing mounting debts, Dad went back to education, teaching at a community college near downtown Oakland. He also agreed to a book deal, signing a contract with William Bruns, then an associate editor with
Life
magazine, to write about his life as a baseball man with the Athletics, ending with the move to Oakland. Jim Bouton, an outspoken former Yankees pitcher, had invented the genre of the sports tell-all with his 1970 bestseller
Ball Four
. Until Bouton's book, the press and the players had been discreet about what went on behind MLB clubhouse doors, but Bouton revealed the behind-the-scenes boozing, womanizing, pill-taking, and off-color language indulged in by the titans of America's pastime. He became, in the words of one sportswriter, a social leper in the baseball world.

Would Dad dish the dirt on Charlie and the sometimes-ugly inner workings of Major League Baseball? It sure looked that way as the constant tap-tap-tap of Dad's Smith Corona typewriter sounded through our apartment. Working quietly but persistently on the manuscript throughout that summer of '72, he must have wondered if his “divorce” from Charlie would be as messy as the one from Mom.

For the first time in almost a decade Charlie did not have Dad in the front office taking care of everything. That would take some getting used to. Charlie hired Jimmy Piersall, a former Boston Red Sox outfielder, partly to take Dad's place in the front office. Piersall was as famous for his mental instability as he was for being a two-time All-Star in the mid-1950s. Charlie hired a lot of outcasts over the years, misfits whom the old boys club of baseball owners long had deemed unworthy. The Piersall hire fit that pattern.

Dad was pestered with phone calls from the A's front office and clubhouse, because without him everything was in chaos. It was “Do you know what so-and-so said today?” or, “You won't believe what I have to put up with! Please, please come back!”

But Charlie Finley and the Oakland A's would have to get along without him in 1972.

CHAPTER 20

REDEMPTION

1972

T
he 1972 A's season was the kind that baseball fans dream of. They won on Opening Day—a 1–0 nail-biter in eleven innings—lost the next game, and then won eleven of their next fourteen. On May 27, they took first place with a 21–11 record, and two weeks later they had a sparkling 33–13 record. Except for five days in late August, they would not relinquish the AL West division lead. They recaptured first place on August 29 and clinched the division a month later at the Coliseum, defeating the Twins 8–7. A few days later, Ken Holtzman won his nineteenth game, ending the season with a 19–11 record and a sterling 2.53 ERA. Charlie had traded for Holtzman in the winter before the '72 season, and it turned out to be one of his best moves. The trust forged a year earlier by A's manager Dick Williams and his hard-edged players paid dividends. The team stayed focused.

The ball players, of course, continued to fight with each other, recalls the
Oakland Tribune
's Ron Bergman. “If I wrote a story about clubhouse fights I saw, they'd have to change my beat to boxing.” It's hard to imagine
a team playing together as a unit, as the A's did, while frequently breaking out in fist fights in the locker room. Dad worried about players injuring each other, but he rarely intervened. “They just need to let off steam,” he told me.

The A's also weren't afraid to brawl with the competition. One ugly moment during the summer foreshadowed just how tough the journey to the World Series was to be for the A's. The Green and Gold were playing Detroit at Tiger Stadium on August 21, the first of a three-game series against Billy Martin's Tigers. Detroit pitcher Woodie Fryman beaned Sal Bando, who charged the mound, sparking a particularly nasty brawl between the clubs. There were no serious injuries, but it guaranteed a bitter October showdown between the American League's two best teams.

The A's '72 season is remembered for something in addition to great baseball—the players' facial hair. There are lots of stories in circulation about the origins of the mustaches that became a symbol of the franchise's '70s dynasty, many of them centered on a supposed pre-season faceoff with a newly bearded Reggie Jackson. But the facts are less dramatic. Charlie and Dad had seen an old-fashioned barbershop quartet, complete with handlebar mustaches, singing in a restaurant, and Charlie liked the look. Although Major League Baseball had been completely clean-shaven for sixty years, Charlie offered a three-hundred-dollar bonus to players who grew a mustache. Catfish Hunter and Rollie Fingers accepted the offer enthusiastically, and Fingers's fastidiously curled and waxed whiskers became his lifelong trademark. Other players were more reluctant, but by Fathers' Day—when the A's offered free admission to all mustachioed fans—the entire squad (including Dick Williams) had taken Charlie up on his offer.

THE AMERICAN LEAGUE CHAMPIONSHIP SERIES

The first game of the 1972 AL Championship Series was played in Oakland on October 7. The A's drew first blood, beating Detroit 3–1. Charlie—and everyone else connected to the A's—was jubilant. Billy
Martin was seething. Back at the bar in the Edgewater Hyatt, the hotel near the Coliseum where visiting teams stayed, he grew more incensed with each highball, replaying in his mind key plays from a game he knew the Tigers should have won. Billy didn't just want to win Game Two, he wanted revenge.

By the bottom of the seventh inning, however, Game Two wasn't going Martin's way. The A's were leading by five runs when Bert Campaneris came to bat. He had quickly become a nightmare for Detroit, getting on base four times in eight appearances so far in the series and scoring three of the A's eight runs. The Tigers tried a new way to stop him. The first pitch from the reliever Lerrin LaGrow was a fastball right into Campaneris's ankle, knocking him to the ground. The batter got up, incensed, and hurled his bat at the pitcher's mound, missing LaGrow's head by inches. It took three umpires to restrain an enraged Martin, who charged out of the dugout after Campaneris.

When order was restored, LaGrow and Campaneris had been ejected. Campy's ejection was a formality, as his ankle was too sore to play on for a few days. Though the A's won the game 5–0, they were furious, accusing Martin of ordering LaGrow to hit Campaneris. He angrily denied the charge, but he had once again shown that he was a master at getting inside his opponents' heads. Beaning Campaneris not only removed the slugger from the game—it got the MLB hierarchy involved. The American League president, Joe Cronin, suspended the normally sweet-tempered Campaneris for the rest of the ALCS, and it looked like he might be excluded from World Series as well. In the end, Commissioner Bowie Kuhn suspended him from the first seven games of the 1973 season but not from the World Series. As the teams headed for Detroit, the Tigers were down two games to none and on the brink of elimination. I hoped we could end this ugly series with Game Three.

The Tigers, however, fought back and won Game Three by a 3–0 margin. And in Game Four, they clawed back from a 3–1 deficit in the bottom of the tenth, scoring three runs to stave off elimination to win an October classic by a score of 4–3. The A's, who had been three outs away from winning the series, had blown a two-game lead and were
forced into Game Five. The winner would go to the World Series. The loser would be, well, the loser.

Blue Moon Odom took the hill for the A's in Game Five, while Woodie Fryman, whose errant pitch at Sal Bando back in August had incited the enmity between the two teams, started for Detroit. The Tigers scored a run in the first, and the ancient Tiger Stadium shook with the roar of fifty thousand fans. Odom, pitching on just three days' rest, settled down and was stingy over the next four innings. Fryman was even better, but the A's made him pay for every mistake.

In the second inning, Reggie Jackson—then speedy enough to start the game in center field—worked a leadoff walk, stole second, then went to third on Bando's fly ball out to right. Mike Epstein walked and, with men on the corners, Gene Tenace came up to bat. Dick Williams called for a double steal, and like so many of his moves, it worked. Tigers catcher Bill Freehan threw to second to try to nab Epstein, and Reggie sprinted home. He collided with Freehan, barely beating the throw home. The A's had tied the game, but Reggie had torn his hamstring.

In the fourth inning, George Hendrick, who replaced Reggie in the outfield, led off with a grounder to Tigers shortstop Dick McAuliffe, who made an error. Bando sacrificed Hendrick to second, and Tenace singled him home, giving the A's a 2–1 lead. That score held as the Tigers came up to bat in the bottom of the ninth. Vida Blue had relieved Odom in the sixth and had pitched three scoreless innings. Back on the field, Blue got two outs but also allowed a base runner. He and the A's now were one out from winning the series but one bad pitch from heartbreak. Tigers second baseman Tony Taylor stepped in the batter's box. Vida took the sign from Tenace and threw a pitch. Taylor swung and lifted a fly ball to center. Hendrick stood under the ball, watched it drop into his glove, and squeezed.

Just like that, we were going to World Series to face the Cincinnati Reds. Dick Williams and all the players poured out of the dugout and mobbed each other on the field.

Vida Blue, struggling through a mediocre year, had been taken out of the starting rotation and put in relief. At the post-game celebration a
fan told me there had been a fight between Odom and Vida Blue in the locker room. Blue apparently remarked to Odom that he fell apart during the game and Blue had to rescue him. The fan said we were an unruly team. “Yes!” I replied, “Isn't it great?”

THE 1972 WORLD SERIES

Oakland's “Swingin' A's” and Cincinnati's “Big Red Machine” would be known as the decade's two best ball clubs. Both franchises had been built painstakingly through excellent drafts throughout the '60s, and their farm systems, aided by a great trade or two, were bearing abundant fruit in 1972. This World Series would go down in history as one of the best, going all seven games and featuring six well-pitched games decided by just one run.

The A's were without Reggie Jackson. Unsung players and surprise heroes would make the difference. One of them was Gene Tenace, who was all the A's needed in Game One. Playing catcher, he helped starting pitcher Kenny Holtzman limit the Reds to two runs, and as batter, he provided all three of the A's runs. He scored the series' first runs by slapping a homer to left of Gary Nolan in the second inning, giving the A's a 2–0 lead. He then broke a 2–2 tie with a solo shot to left in the fifth inning. Rollie Fingers and Vida Blue shut down the Big Red Machine for the rest of the way, and the A's won 3–2.

Game Two went much the same way, featuring that time-tested combination of great pitching and clutch hitting. Starting hurler Catfish Hunter helped his own cause with a single in the second inning, knocking in center fielder George Hendrick. Left fielder Joe Rudi provided an insurance run with a solo homer in the third. The Reds' ninth-inning rally cut the lead in half, 2–1, but it died when pinch hitter Julian Javier swung at a Rollie Fingers pitch and popped out to first baseman Mike Hegan.

The baseball world was in shock. The young, hirsute A's had captured the first two games on the road and headed home to Oakland for three games. The underdog A's suddenly were in the driver's seat.

Game Three was like the first two contests—a tense, close, wellpitched nail-biter that hinged on just one or two key plays. The Reds won, 1–0. Odom was great. The Reds' Jack Billingham was better. He tossed eight shutout innings, surviving two errors from his defense.

Game Four was one for the ages. It symbolized this white-knuckle World Series—a close, dramatic game that featured great pitching, clutch hitting, see-saw scoring, and a one-run margin. After five innings, it felt like a replay of Game One. The A's pitcher Ken Holtzman was dealing a beauty, holding the Reds scoreless and clinging to a 1–0 lead, thanks to a solo homer off Reds ace Don Gullett in the fifth inning by Gene Tenace. That tight score stuck until the top of the eighth, when the Reds chased Holtzman with a rally that reliever Vida Blue could not stop. Both pitchers got tagged with a run and the sold-out Coliseum crowd had been silenced.

It was Reds 2, A's 1, going into the bottom of the ninth inning. As pinch hitter Mike Hegan came to bat to start the frame, the Oakland fans came to their feet, trying to will the hometown nine to a comeback victory. Reds ace reliever Pedro Borbon had other ideas. He retired Hegan. One out. The A's bats—save for Tenace's blast to left—had been quiet all night, knocking just six hits. Now, they were down to their last two outs. Gonzalo Marquez stepped into the batter's box, pinch hitting for George Hendrick, the Athletics' young center fielder. Marquez slapped a single, and the Oakland fans roared. Allan Lewis, a ligh-thitting but speedy outfielder nicknamed the “Panamanian Express,” ran for Marquez. Reds reliever Clay Carroll relieved Borbon to face Tenace. He promptly roped a single off Borbon, and now the A's, though still trailing by a run, had the tying and winning runs on base.

The Coliseum crowd was standing, screaming, and waving the white, green, and gold pennants Charlie had ordered to be given out behind the team dugout. Williams inserted pinch-hitter Angel Mangual, who rose to the occasion. He promptly laced a single, and Tenace ran home and threw his arms in the air and jumped as high as his thick, catcher's legs would allow.

When he landed on home plate, the A's had won Game Four, taking a three-games-to-one lead over the favored Reds. The Coliseum crowd, led by a jubilant Charlie behind the A's dugout, went crazy. While Carroll stared at the grass as he trudged off the field, a sea of A's players swarmed Tenace at home plate.

The Oakland A's now were just one win away from being world champs.

Game Five started out as every A's fan had hoped. With longtime ace pitcher Catfish Hunter on the hill, the sold-out Coliseum was rocking. After three innings, the A's led 3 to 1, and an inning later they led 4 to 2.

The Reds took the lead in the ninth, 5–4, on a Pete Rose single. Meanwhile Sparky Anderson continued to manage as if his life depended on it. The A's got men on first and third with one out in the bottom of the ninth, and Anderson brought in starter Jack Billingham, the Reds' sixth pitcher of the game. Bert Campaneris lifted a high fly ball in foul territory beyond first base. Joe Morgan raced over from second base, caught the ball, and fired it home to nail pinch runner Blue Moon Odom, who had tried to tag up from third base. Instead of celebrating a tying run by Odom, the Coliseum crowd was silenced by Morgan's knockout punch. Cincinnati won the game, and Morgan, without even getting a hit (he had gone 0–3 with two walks and still was batting just .143 in the series), had swung the series' momentum in the Reds' favor.

The teams flew to Cincinnati and played Game Six the next night. The Reds convincingly won 8–1. It was the series' lone game not decided by one run.

Within less than twenty-four hours, the A's had gone from being one or two plays away from winning the World Series to being on the verge of losing it. The series was now tied at three wins apiece.

Uncle Charlie and Aunt Shirley went back to the team's hotel in Cincinnati. Charlie was in a dark mood. He was uncharacteristically quiet, and he could not sleep well after midnight. This is when he called early to talk. It was about two a.m. in California. The phone woke me.
I listened to Dad's side of the conversation. This phone call lasted about an hour.

Charlie was asking Dad what he thought about the player lineup. I felt really good that Charlie was seeking Dad's advice, even though Dad was no longer with the team. Charlie knew that Dad and I would be watching the games. He invited us to attend the postgame party if we won.

With Game Seven just hours away, he knew exactly what was on the line. If the A's won, it would be sweet vindication. The '72 season was his twelfth as A's owner, and Charlie had spent most of that time battling a baseball establishment that loathed and ridiculed him. An A's victory would change the game—on and off the field. Charlie knew the baseball establishment was rooting against him personally as much as they were rooting against his loud green and gold uniforms, his white shoes, his mule mascot, and his mustachioed squad of brawling ball players.

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