Review: Jason Turnbow, Dynastic, Bombastic, Fantastic: Reggie, Rollie, Catfish, and Charlie Finley's Swingin' A's.
(New York: Houghton Mifflin, Harcourt; 386 p.; $26.)
By Yours Truly
http://throneberryfields.com/2017/03/20/charlies-devils/It’s mentioned only in passing in
Jason Turnbow’s Dynastic, Bombastic, Fantastic: Reggie, Rollie, Catfish, and Charlie Finley’s
Swingin’ A’s. (New York: Houghton, Mifflin, Harcourt; 386 p, $26.) But what Finley did
to outfielder Ken (Hawk) Harrelson in
1967 gave a sneak preview into two things.
Finley showed what he was capable of doing to divide and conquer his own team, never mind that he often united the team
against him. And the Hawk showed what a player considered top drawer or with the visible potential to get there could earn on
a fair, open market, at a time when baseball owners continued abusing the ancient reserve clause to keep them chattel.
Brought back to Kansas City for 1967 after being dealt away to Washington in mid-1966, Harrelson’s decent enough season
would be disrupted 18 August. A rowdy team flight provoked Finley to trump up
an example of pitcher Lew Krausse (whose
father had once pitched for the team in Philadelphia), fining Krausse and demanding his benching. Which provoked in turn a
remarkable moment of his underlings standing up to Finley.
Then-and-future manager Alvin Dark refused to bench Krausse. Harrelson, pitcher Jack Aker, and other players signed a statement
criticising Finley for blowing the flight out of proportion. Then Finley fired Dark, fined Aker, and—after Harrelson refused to show
at a press conference Finley called to mulct an apology for a remark Harrelson denied making—put Harrelson on irrevocable waivers.
Harrelson cleared the waivers, the only manner in which reserve-era players could become free agents. Then, he found himself the
subject of a bidding war, and in short enough order part of an unlikely pennant race. The Red Sox—managed by future A’s manager
Dick Williams, but now without Tony Conigliaro following the latter’s beaning on the same day as the trumped-up Krausse incident
—won Harrelson with a $150,000 contract.
The Hawk probably contributed more in the clubhouse than on the field but it helped the Red Sox snatch the pennant and push the
World Series to a seventh game. He throve in Boston, having a career year in 1968, but en route a likely match in 1969 he was traded
mid-season to the Indians, where he finished what he started, and looked to have a shining future until leg injuries ended his playing
career by 1972.
Harrelson didn’t see
a third of the bounty Catfish Hunter would see after Finley tried scamming the Hall of Fame pitcher out of a
contracted insurance payment in 1974, leading to Hunter’s being declared a free agent after that season. And Turnbow hardly needed
to examine the Harrelson case in depth to make his pertinent points about Finley’s A’s.
That would have been a mere setup for the wipeout pitch that comes with the book, which is written soberly and with as much a few
instances of rolling eyes as arching eyebrows. The seeds of the early-1970s A’s greatness were planted when the Krausse/Harrelson
incidents emerged, but the garden would be destroyed by a sustained burst of Finley caprice that made what he did to Harrelson seem
benevolent.
By 1971, Finley built a team whose major common ground was learning, little by little, to despise the southern born, midwestern
self-made insurance baron who couldn’t distinguish between carnival ballyhoo and genuine promotion—to the point where the A’s
had a front office barely the size of a tiny appliance parts supplier—while micromanaging his organisation to the point where he treated
the men who played and managed the game and won the titles like plantation hands who didn’t know the meaning of gratitude.
As if Finley did. He swore the next World Series rings would be bigger and better than the 1972 rings, then presented his players
with cheap glass-filled rings for 1973 and 1974. And he never attempted to make himself at one with Oakland itself, just as he hadn’t
elsewhere when he bought the team as the Kansas City Athletics in 1960.
The A’s won five straight American League Wests and three straight World Series with a team that was six parts the Gas House Gang
and half a dozen parts the Hell’s Angels minus the motorcycles and the copious controlled substances. They took no quarter on the
field and less in the clubhouse, which was just as likely to host a brawl as a bridge game. “You’re early, but stick around,” pitcher Blue
Moon Odom once cracked to a reporter in the clubhouse. “We may still have a fight for you.”
Jim Bouton once described that rapacity memorably in an essay about their first championship manager, the tough but Finley-tortured
Hall of Famer Williams. Williams softened to an extent in Oakland, only beginning with letting his hair grow long and joining his players
in the Mustache Gang (which began when Hall of Fame reliever Rollie Fingers turned up with his long-famous handlebar mustache), still
tough, still little-nonsense, but not even an eighth of the tyrant he was with the 1967-69 Red Sox.
From what I know of the new Dick Williams and the bunch of guys on the 1972 Oakland team,
they didn’t have many rules. Oh, maybe they weren’t allowed to punch each other in public. No punching
a teammate, I suppose, in a nightclub. No screaming at each other when the wives are around. And don’t
embarrass the manager to more than two wire services during any one homestand.
—Jim Bouton, from “I Managed Good, But Boy Did They Play Bad.”
That probably helped their Series opposition to underrate them each time out. The embryonic, Teutonic Big Red Machine were astonished
by what they called the A’s “unpredictability” in 1972. The 1973 Mets—surging at the last minute, literally (dead last in August), to snatch
the National League East and the pennant (at the expense of the Machine)—had them on the ropes but seemed shocked that the A’s exploited
their spent and inadvertently mismanaged pitching staff. And the 1974 Dodgers simply thought the A’s were too classless to play them in a
Series.
If only those three vanquished teams knew how little it really seemed to mean to Finley. “Cheapness was certainly a factor in the man’s
decision to barely staff his front office,” Turnbow writes, “but there was also his uncompromising need to have a say—to have
the say—in
whatever went on. Other voices could be heard, of course, but only with the understanding that they merely provided suggestions. The
Owner made the decisions and the Owner took the credit.”
He’d already begun with a self-inflicted handicap when he alienated Vida Blue, his 1971 breakout star, in a contract negotiation so
acrimonious and demeaning to the popular lefthander that it left Blue soured on baseball as anything but a business, and helped forge
the skids onto which Blue would slide in due course.
Finley not only humiliated Blue but he used the Blue negotiation to cashier a scapegoat, Blue’s roommate, veteran Tommy Davis. Still a
useful hitter even as a part-time, Davis suggested Blue bring an agent aboard, and Finley retaliated by releasing Davis—and leaving
him to learn of it courtesy of Williams, who was forced to wait until Davis arrived at the park to tell him.
The Owner had several epic battles with Reggie Jackson (who wasn’t exactly the most popular Athletic in his own clubhouse, respected
and admired but not always loved as he craved), in which Finley’s need to dominate and humiliate often impacted Jackson’s performances.
Yet when Jackson foolishly picked a brawl with muscular outfielder/first baseman Mike Epstein over, of all things, Epstein’s guest ticket list,
and Epstein responded to a deep personal insult by beating Jackson senseless, Finley dressed Epstein down as an outsider out to ruin his
team by beating his “star player” up, then traded him after the 1972 triumph. (That was after Williams negotiated an armed truce between
Jackson and Epstein, prompting rookie reserve George Hendrick to pipe up, “Who the hell grabbed Epstein and broke up the fight? I wanted
to see Epstein kick the sh@t out of Reggie.”)
Finley wrote the ownership meddling book from which George Steinbrenner would learn and operate in his first, pre-Dave Winfield/Howard
Spira tenure owning the Yankees, hounding Williams relentlessly demanding explanations for just about every move the A’s made on the
field, leaving him prone over the latest Finley demeaning or debasement of a key regular or supporting player.
Sooner or later, Williams’s camel back had to be broken by a particularly dubious straw, and it had a name: Mike Andrews, once a fine infielder
who played for Williams’s 1967 Boston pennant winner, a two-time All-Star whom injuries sapped, but whom Finley brought aboard as a valued
sub, mostly to pinch hit. Playing in Game Two of the 1973 Series, Andrews committed a pair of twelfth-inning errors—one when a ball hopped
inexplicably through his legs, one a wild throw after charging hard enough to field it cleanly—in a game the Mets finally won.
Finley strong-armed Andrews into signing a statement attesting falsely that he was injured again, the better to strong-arm too-late acquisition
Manny Trillo onto the Series roster. Williams had had it. He let Finley know he would leave after the Series, win or lose. Turnbow records Finley
agreeing to let Williams go—until Williams did just that and the Yankees came knocking to ask him to succeed the departing Ralph Houk.
Yes, it’s reasonable to assume that if any team other than the Yankees had eyes for Williams Finley wouldn’t have demanded “handsome”
compensation long and loud. Even if the Yankees
had made him look even more foolish because they’d let Houk go to Detroit with time
left on
his contract.
Not that Finley was all that worried. There would still be players and returning manager Alvin Dark to humiliate. There would still be the
Hunter duplicities. There would still be the notorious Herb Washington designated runner experiment. There would still be nasty clubhouse
brawls such as the one Odom (by then a shell of his once-promising self) instigated with Fingers, when he made a wisecrack lancing Fingers’s
marital problems, leaving Fingers to play a World Series with stitches in his head.
And there would be salary arbitration over which Finley could continue trying his usual negotiating shenanigans and insults. There would be
the clumsy attempted fire sale involving Fingers, Blue, and outfielder Joe Rudi, after the Messersmith-McNally case ended the reserve era,
provoking yet one more public rumble between commissioner Bowie Kuhn. Within three years of winning a fifth straight AL West, the now-
shambolic A’s would finish dead last, beginning a three-season run of similar futility.
Finley was finally forced to sell the team he’d used, misused, and abused. By the time his final rebuilding of the team began to pay off—when
he brought aboard Billy Martin to manage for 1980—he’d sell to the Haas family two months before the Billyball A’s returned to respectability
and finished second in the AL West. When he died in 1996, only two of his former employees turned up for his funeral: Reggie Jackson and
Catfish Hunter.
“For Charlie Finley, it was lonely at the top,” Turnbow writes. “In the end he discovered that it was even lonelier at the bottom.” No amount of
bluster, ballyhoo, brickbats, or designated hitters could protect him from that.
Finley with Dick Williams, who managed back-to-back Series champions before trying to escape the asylum.
'72 Series MVP Gene Tenace, Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson, catcher Ray Fosse, on Mustache Day: The
Mustache Gang didn't have that many reasons to grin under Finley's paradoxical lash.
Hapless Mike Andrews, twelfth inning, Game Two, 1973 Series.
Fingers---the Hall of Famer was a marksman on the mound and sensitive enough off it to reject
needling about his marital problems.
Finley visiting the A’s dugout—it must have been his managers’ worst nightmare, considering his
micromanagement even during games.
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A personal memory: After the Mike Andrews flap in the 1973 Series, when the Series moved to Shea Stadium Karl Erhardt, the once-fabled
Sign Man in the Shea box seats, was fully prepared for the next Oakland error. Sure enough, when it happened in Game Three, as Hunter
committed a throwing error, Erhardt promptly whipped up the sign saying YOU'RE FIRED!
