Finley Ball (9 page)

CHAPTER 15

NEW CITY, NEW BALLPARK, NEW LIFE

1970–1971

A
fter my parents' divorce in 1966, Mom and I had moved back to Dallas. She got a job as a school teacher but soon began a rapid descent into mental instability and financial ruin in which she cut me off from all contact with my father. By June 1970 we had been evicted from our home and were living in a motel. When the manager noticed that Mom seemed depressed and I looked neglected, she called Child Protective Services.

Two days after CPS took me from the motel, Dad showed up with his attorney. I can't describe the joy I felt. It was a miracle. I ran to him and sat on his lap, even if I was now a tall near-teenager. Dad told me that Charlie had said, “Get going and get that little girl here!” I would be living with him now. As we drove to Love Field, I asked him where we were going. “Home,” Dad said.

“Where's that?”

“Oakland,” he said with a smile. “Oakland, California.”

I had just turned twelve, and I never saw my mom again.

We landed in San Francisco and crossed a long silver bridge over the bay to Oakland. I asked where the Golden Gate Bridge was. Dad explained that we were taking the Bay Bridge, which connects San Francisco and Oakland. I said the Bay Bridge looked just as pretty as the pictures of the Golden Gate, yet I'd never heard of it. What was the difference?

“Publicity,” Dad said without hesitation. On the drive across the bridge Dad pointed to an island in the bay and told me it was Alcatraz and a lot of Indians lived there. I rolled down the window and inhaled the clean thinly salty air from the bay. It was so fresh and cool! I had never smelled anything like it before, and my stomach tightened up with excitement.

PENTHOUSE LIFE

My new home was at the top of a twenty-five-story luxury apartment building near downtown Oakland. I had gone from a seedy motel to a penthouse suite in a matter of hours! Charlie had leased the apartment, and Dad lived there, running the ball club while Charlie was back in the Midwest. There were three bedrooms—one for Dad, one for me, and the third for Charlie whenever he was in town to check in on the A's. (Dad and I would vacate the apartment when Charlie came.) Looking down from our penthouse perch on the sailboats on Oakland's Lake Merritt, I could see something that was visible only from above—large schools of fish rushing in from the Bay every afternoon. At night to the west I could see the lights of San Francisco and the Bay Bridge. To the east in the Oakland Hills, I could see the spires of the amazing Mormon temple, which looked like a castle to me.

I came to realize that life had so much more to offer than what I had known on the street in Dallas.

Dad had been living a bachelor's life until I arrived. Among the few decorations in the apartment were photos of Harry Caray's family atop the huge television in the living room. The legendary sportscaster, who was in the middle of his one and only season with the A's, often stayed
there with Dad and Charlie. Joe DiMaggio used to visit the penthouse when he served as a consultant to the A's in 1968 and 1969. He once cooked an Italian dinner there for Dad, and the two bachelors spent several Friday and Saturday nights together, relaxing and talking baseball.

THE COLISEUM

I couldn't wait to see a home game, but the team was on the road when I arrived in town. I finally got my chance a few weeks later when Dad's girlfriend, Sharon, picked me up on a Saturday morning and drove me to the four-year-old Oakland–Alameda County Coliseum on the southeastern edge of the city. We took a side entrance and walked through an underground tunnel, where it was dark and quiet, in contrast to the commotion and brightness up top.

Dad met us in the reception room of the front office. The walls were ugly gray cinder-block. He said they weren't finished yet, but Oakland had assured us they would be soon. Carolyn Coffin had a desk in the executive office. It was a huge room, which she had mostly to herself, and I could see that she had received quite a promotion for moving to Oakland. Carolyn was the mainstay of the front office. If it weren't for her, Dad told me, the front office would have fallen into chaos.

Carolyn could be tough, and sometimes she butted heads with Monte Moore, our broadcaster, whose office was next to hers. Monte was allergic to strawberries. When Carolyn got peeved with him, she would sneak into his office before he arrived and place a strawberry milkshake on his desk. Dad always managed to remove the milkshake in time.

Dad walked us through the stadium's tunnels and hallways to our box seats, next to the press. These were known then as luxury seats—a small, special section between the second and third decks. This was long before the luxury suites—enclosed rooms with televisions and bar and restaurant amenities—that have become the norm at pro sports games.

I had hoped to sit on the first level, behind the dugout, where other front office employees and players' families sat. But Dad preferred to
have us in the luxury seats so he could visit when he popped in to talk with the team's radio announcers, such as Monte Moore, who sat nearby. Dad had a phone in our box seats and another one next to him in the press box so Charlie could call him during games, which he did often.

In ways big and small, I noticed how things were different at the Oakland Coliseum from the Kansas City Municipal Stadium. The Coliseum was drab compared with K. C. Municipal Stadium, which Charlie had splashed with color everywhere. My first visit to the Coliseum was like watching the
Wizard of Oz
in reverse, going from color to black and white.

One thing that was the same was Harvey the mechanical rabbit, ensconced again near home plate, ready to rise from the ground with fresh baseballs whenever needed. The sight of him made me feel at home. But all the other crazy things I remembered from Kansas City were gone. There was no petting zoo with monkeys named after my family; there were no peacocks; there were no dyed sheep behind the bleachers. The only personal touch of Charlie's I could detect was his signature, which appeared before the game on the Coliseum's giant, electronic screen with the message “Charles O. Finley presents the Oakland A's.” I searched the field for familiar faces from 1966, that last year I had followed the team, but I found only a few. There was Catfish Hunter, pitcher Chuck Dobson, second baseman Dick Green, and shortstop Bert “Campy” Campaneris. The rest were a lot of young, new faces I didn't recognize.

Another familiar thing missing was summer weather. I felt chilly in the breeze coming off the bay on that June day, and I saw fans in sweaters and windbreakers. The Bay Area's brisk summer winds were strange to me.

PROBLEMS WITH THE NEIGHBORS

Dad and I stayed in the penthouse until the end of 1970, when we suddenly packed up and left in a hurry.

It turned out that Huey P. Newton, the head of the Black Panthers, was living in the suite next to ours. A third suite on our floor was occupied
by the FBI, which was very much interested in what was going on in Newton's suite.

My encounters with the Black Panthers were limited to the elevator. Phil Seghi, the A's director of scouting and minor leagues, lived on the seventeenth floor of our apartment building and paid me to walk his poodle, Jacques. One day Jacques and I rode in the elevator from the lobby to the seventeenth floor with three black men in leather jackets. I noticed that they pushed the button for the twenty-fifth floor. I didn't know who lived next to us, and I didn't know who these men were, but they were nice to me. One of them patted Jacques and told me how he wished his dog was as obedient. I rode the elevator with them several more times.

When the Feds learned we lived next to Huey Newton and associates, they approached Dad and Charlie, asking them to gather any information they could. Dad, who had once been a juvenile probation officer and had a cousin in the Dallas office of the FBI, was only too happy to oblige, and he started going through their garbage. Before long, the FBI warned Dad that it was planning a raid on Newton's suite, an operation that would involve breaking down doors. That's when Dad decided it was time for us to move on. Some time afterwards, a newspaper headline read, “Huey Newton, Black Panther leader, busted living lavishly in an Oakland penthouse.”

CATCHING UP

As Dad and I settled into our nice yet ordinary new Lake Merritt home, I realized I had missed a lot about the A's first two and a half years in Oakland. I was curious, so I asked Dad to fill in the gaps. I learned that whether the A's were in Kansas City or Oakland, whoever the manager was, whether the team was winning or losing, there were three constants as long as Charlie Finley was the owner—controversy, chaos, and change. Finley's A's were never boring. And, as I was learning, the years 1968 to 1970, just before I was reunited with Dad, had been anything but boring.

CHAPTER 16

COMING OF AGE IN OAKLAND

1970

A
team already brimming with youthful talent welcomed one more exceptionally promising player late in the 1970 season. A twenty-one-year-old pitcher named Vida Blue took the mound against the Minnesota Twins on September 21. After what had been a downbeat month, the A's finally had something to celebrate.

Charlie, however, was disappointed that the team had failed to make the playoffs. It was his tenth season as A's owner, and he had yet to taste any clubhouse champagne. Still, less than a decade after acquiring a franchise that had long been a national joke, his team was now a contender. At the end of 1970, the A's had produced consecutive winning seasons for the first time since 1949, when they were managed by an elderly Connie Mack in Philadelphia. They had finished just short of ninety wins both seasons, and they were still a young team, filled with prospects who were improving every day on the mound and at the plate. But for Charlie the cup was half empty.

During the off-season following the 1970 campaign, Dad reminded Charlie what their former manager Alvin Dark had said in 1967—that the team's bevy of minor-league prospects would bring them to the playoffs in 1971. Would Dark's prediction come true? First, Charlie had to find a new manager, one who would push them over the top and into the playoffs, once and for all.

Dick Williams, who had worked a miracle with the '67 Red Sox but had been fired before the end of the '69 season, spent the 1970 season as the third-base coach of the Montreal Expos, wondering if he would ever get a chance to manage again. But Charlie was keeping tabs on Williams. The team had talent but needed someone to wipe away the three decades of losing that the A's had suffered. Williams had done it in Boston. Could he do it again in Oakland? Charlie thought so.

CHARLIE'S OAKLAND PLAYGROUND

Dad had met his girlfriend, Sharon, two years earlier at an Oakland nightclub. I liked her immediately. She didn't come around the ballpark often. Dad preferred it that way, but she also had her own reasons. She didn't like Charlie—that much was clear. He hadn't made a good first impression on her when he and Dad shared the penthouse in the first couple of years in Oakland.

While Dad and Sharon were starting to date, Charlie and Harry Caray would carouse around town like two sailors on a weekend leave. In a way, that's what they were, these two middle-aged men from the Midwest living it up along the Oakland and San Francisco waterfronts, two thousand miles from home. After they had brought women back to the penthouse high above Lake Merritt, Sharon would come over and find bobby pins and barrettes in the sofa cushions. Charlie was, in Sharon's words, “a player.” For my part, I was adjusting to a new lifestyle, getting a PG-version of that Major League Baseball lifestyle that Mom had disliked so much.

In 1971, Dad and Charlie hired attractive young ladies as “ball girls.” Their job was to retrieve balls that were foul but didn't leave the field
and return them to the home plate umpire. Our first ball girls were Debbi Sivyer and Mary Barry. Debbi's sister, Cathy, was hired to work the switchboard. After her baseball days, Debbi married and, as Mrs. Fields, started selling chocolate chip cookies in Palo Alto. But her first claim to national attention was as one of the famous Oakland A's ball girls.

CHAPTER 17

THE CROUCH BEFORE THE LEAP

1971

I
sensed something special was building with this young A's team, if only from the changes I witnessed in Dad. As the season wore on, he became increasingly excited—and he was not an excitable man. I saw him emoting and smiling more, even as the tension grew with the importance of the games.

In 1971, Charlie's intuition in signing Vida Blue paid off. The charismatic rookie had one of the finest pitching seasons in baseball history. Right after he had signed Blue, Charlie attended a game in Oakland and mingled with fans, saying, “Shake the hand that shook Vida Blue's hand!” as though everyone already knew that Blue was someone special. They would soon figure it out.

I liked Vida. He always smiled and was friendly in our front office and at social events. He was perfectly positioned to be baseball's post–Golden Age star—a handsome, gregarious, intelligent athlete who just kept winning. Within weeks, he became a phenomenon, drawing big crowds wherever he went. By some estimates, in fact, one of every twelve
tickets sold at American League games around the nation that year was purchased just to see Vida Blue pitch.

Charlie held a “Vida Blue Day” in June, as soon as he recognized that Vida was having a special season. He flew in Vida's mother from Louisiana and gave Vida a baby blue Cadillac Eldorado in a pre-game ceremony in front of a huge crowd at the Coliseum. Charlie owned several Cadillacs of his own, and he considered himself a “Cadillac man.” So giving one to recognize excellence was something special in Charlie's eyes.

Vida was generous with the Cadillac, letting his friend and unofficial personal assistant, Spider Hodges—an Oakland jazz musician by night and a construction worker by day—drive the car. When Spider wasn't driving it, Vida also would let the A's teenage clubhouse attendant, Steve Vucinich, take care of it while the pitcher was on the road with the team.

DRESS FOR SUCCESS

On June 27, 1971, any woman wearing the provocative fashion of the day—short shorts known as “hot pants”—was given free admission to a doubleheader between the A's and the Royals at the Coliseum, and the first five thousand fans at the gate got a free bottle of Hot Pants cologne. The promotion was a success, drawing more than thirty-five thousand fans, including about six thousand women clad in hot pants. In between the two games, these women were ushered to the second deck where they sashayed from one foul pole to the other in a type of fashion show while the other fans showed their appreciation.

ALL-STAR BREAK

Reggie Jackson was one of three A's who made the All-Star team that year. On July 13, in the bottom of the third inning, in sold-out Tiger Stadium in Detroit, the twenty-five-year-old Jackson stepped into the left-handed side of the batter's box to face Pittsburgh's controversial Dock Ellis, the National League's right-handed starter. Reggie was pinch-hitting for
Vida Blue, the American League's starting pitcher. Like Vida, Reggie was clad in a uniform that Charlie loved and the baseball establishment loathed—“wedding gown white” shoes, gold socks with green stirrups, a gold helmet, and a white, buttoned jersey with a green “A's” stitched on the front upper right side and the number 9 on the lower left. The jersey was pulled over a green T-shirt with the sleeves cut jaggedly between the elbow and his bulging bicep. Reggie dug those bright white shoes into the batter's box dirt and blasted an Ellis curveball, sending it up, up, and away before it crashed into an electrical transformer atop the second deck in right field. Reggie stopped and stared at it for a few seconds before beginning his trot around the bases.

The monstrous four-bagger was what Bob Costas called “the biggest blast in All-Star history.” To the late Ernie Harwell, the Tigers' longtime play-by-play announcer, it was a historic moment in the sport. “That home run Reggie Jackson hit at Tiger Stadium was the hardest hit ball I ever saw,” said Harwell. “I didn't think it would ever land anywhere.”

The homer started a four-run American League squad rally that led to the AL's first All-Star win since 1962.

It was Reggie's 520-foot blast that everyone was (and still is) talking about afterward. While Vida's superstar season grabbed all the headlines that year—and wore down the young pitcher, who was unaccustomed to fame—a quieter but no less important development for the A's was Reggie's return to superstar form. He swatted thirty-two home runs, batted in eighty runs, and raised his batting average forty points to a solid .277.

The A's other young batters were coming into their own as well. Sal Bando, the team's captain and third baseman, was almost as good as Jackson, hitting twenty-four homers, ninety-four RBIs, and finishing the season with a .271 average. Catfish Hunter was having a great year on the mound. He finished with twenty-one wins and a 2.96 ERA—his best year yet.

In mid-September, the A's were one win away from earning the franchise's first postseason appearance since Connie Mack led the Philadelphia Athletics to the 1931 American League pennant. They closed
the deal, finishing with a 101–60 record—the second-best in all of baseball.

THE FIRST CHAMPAGNE

Charlie and Dad were thrilled when the A's division championship finally gave them the opportunity to pop celebratory champagne in the clubhouse for the first time in Charlie's eleven years as owner. Charlie set up American League playoff headquarters at the Edgewater Hyatt hotel on Hegenberger Road, a short distance from the Oakland Coliseum, on the other side of Interstate 880. Charlie O grazed outside the hotel in a specially built pen. Inside, the visiting national sports press ate from a bottomless buffet table of food and guzzled as much free alcohol as they could. There was lobster, ribs, steak, chicken, cookies, salads, beer, and champagne—only the best. Charlie Finley a cheapskate? Not that night.

DISAPPOINTMENT AND PROMISE

Nobody's enthusiasm—not the fans', not the players, not Dad's, not Charlie's—would be enough to topple the Baltimore Orioles in the American League Championship Series. Led by their fiery manager, Earl Weaver, and by twenty-game winner Jim Palmer and several others, the Orioles had too much experience and too much pitching. Baltimore swept the A's in three games.

Despite the disappointment of the early exit from the playoffs, Charlie's brilliant young players were coming into their own. The 1971 season had yielded the success that the team's talent had been promising, tantalizingly, for years. And the man voted MLB's Executive of the Year—Charles O. Finley—had already locked up Dick Williams in a two-year extension a few months before the season ended. Williams would be back for the '72 season. Dad was full of energy, and wore his gentle smile all the time. “Can you believe it?” he asked me. After everything, we were going to be contenders!

The optimism in the air affected Charlie too. If he could run a baseball team that brilliantly, why not something else? So he decided to expand his realm, acquiring a hockey team—the Oakland Seals—as well as a basketball team. I remember attending A's games during the day and Seals games at night. Dad told me to offer complimentary Seals tickets to my classmates and teachers, but the only one who was interested was my algebra teacher. I ran into him several times at games, smoking a pipe and looking content.