Charles O. Finley by Bob Sanders

While baseball history is loaded with personalities of quixotic bent, I fear the awkward takeover by corporate America is draining the great pastime of its inclination for color. Rather than providing today’s fans with the kind of endearing looniness associated with past decades, baseball today offers such boring serious money oddities as Alex Rodriguez and Madonna, a tawdry attempt by an interim owner (Sam Zell) to sell re-naming rights to a stadium (Wrigley Field) and a commissioner of the game (Bud Selig) whose 16 sappy years in office was preceded by a career as a car salesman. Bearing considerable physical resemblance to Woody Allen, there appears to be a significant casting opportunity should Selig’s life ever be filmed. We’re talking boring.

Things are getting so dull that I’m beginning to miss the good old days of George Steinbrenner whose ownership of the New York Yankees has included 20 managers over a 23-year stretch plus the firing of one (Billy Martin) five times. 

I miss the crazies. Charles O. Finley was one of them and even in death provoked laughter. That was in 1996 when he departed for the great skybox, an event immediately followed by the kind of funny lines he would have enjoyed. The use of humor in connection with a death may seem a bit macabre, but Finaly was, as the saying goes, different. Maybe the most succinct observation about his quite unique life was by way of a squib in the Seattle Post Intelligencer’s sports section suggesting, “if Charlie Finley’s in heaven, you can bet the color white is out.” Baseball’s Finley was responsible for team uniforms utilizing such shades as Finley Green and Graffiti Gold thus  making golfers look by comparison like Amish carriage drivers. 

Over the years I had a number of conversations with the quixotic Finley, a reporter’s delight. He was highly quotable and did bizarre things such as celebrating victories by riding a mule around his Kansas City Athletics’ infield. Adding to the merriment was a recorded musical background featuring a braying mule set against what sounded like Looney Tunes accompaniment. 

Finley was a genuine eccentric full of ideas—most of them bad. All he really needed was an idea editor, something the egocentric Finley would never consider. Take the stupendously strange case of Betty Caywood, an absolutely gorgeous example of what back then in less gender-sensitive times was called a “TV weather girl.” Her moderate success in Chicago somehow suggested to Charlie O. that what baseball needed was a female color announcer for his team—the prettier, the better. Caywood then began a brief tenure attempting to bring greater understanding to the grand old game.

Possessed of minimal information about baseball, she became entranced during a lengthy at bat by slugger Rocky Colavito of the visiting Detroit Tigers. The 6’5” Colavito hit something like a dozen foul balls—most of them towering—at which point Caywood cooed: “Oh, I just love Rocky’s high balls.” 

My most vivid memory of Charlie O. involved one of his loopiest inventions: “The Pennant Porch.” Enormously frustrated because he felt the confines of his ballpark did not accommodate a largely left-handed long ball hitting lineup, Finley initiated a conference of carpenters. They quickly erected additional stands in right field to turn routine fly balls into home runs.

Finley, however, had conveniently ignored one of baseball’s firm rules: fences down the foul lines have to be a minimum 325 feet from home plate with the grandfathered-in exceptions of old-time ballparks. 

Threatened by the American League president to tear down his creation, the devious Finley then had a three-foot alley sawed to the wall--a move of such flagrant deception (the press quickly named the result a “Half-Pennant Porch”) to qualify the colorful owner as baseball’s all-time Machiavelli. 

It was then that Mel Durslag, an outstanding sports writer, did a free-lance piece for TV Guide for whom I then worked. Durslag’s effort was a paean to Finley’s creativity which eventually produced World Series night baseball—a development that took more than 40 years from the first major league nocturnal contest in 1936 in Cincinnati. Could any sport be more spectacularly numb than baseball?

Following a look at an advance copy of Durslag’s enthusiasm, I called Finley, read him the story and suggested he do a promotional spot for my magazine while seated in his half pennant porch while, of course, wearing an A’s baseball cap. 

A lengthy pause was followed by: “Well, Bob, that’s a very interesting idea, but I can’t do it.” 

“Howcum?” 

“Well,” said the man whose mode of transportation around an infield was by mule, “it lacks  dignity.”

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Comments

[Poindexter P. Parkenfarker]

Ah, how I miss Finley's Designated runner...