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.
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?
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.”
Ah, how I miss Finley's Designated runner...
Posted by: Poindexter P. Parkenfarker | August 06, 2008 at 11:07 AM