Free Finley Ball by Nancy Finley Page B

“could look into a man’s soul and tell if he were a winner or not.” That may sound strange or even laughable to today’s numbers-crazy fans and reporters—and to the growing number of experts who value statistics and cold numbers over their own perceptions and intuition. But it was true. Charlie’s intuition would pay off a few years later, before baseball teams were relying on computers. Charlie could judge people and their intangibles better than anyone. And as Bergman pointed out, it’s hard to argue with the results, especially once he got involved with player personnel decisions.
    Charlie became known as a hands-on owner—what the sports media like to call a “meddler.” Though other people often held the title of general manager—including Frank Lane, Pat Friday, and Hank Peters—in reality, Charlie was the team’s real general manager, and Dad was his partner. Few player personnel decisions were made without Charlie’s and Dad’s consent or outright participation.
    When the A’s started winning, the jealous MLB owners concocted a revisionist history that minimized Charlie’s contribution to the team’s success. If Charlie’s role was to be diminished, then someone had to be credited for building this championship team. The man they came up with for that role was Hank Peters, who worked in the front office in the early and mid-1960s. Peters had a great career as a baseball executive, building winning teams in Baltimore in the 1970s and Cleveland in the late 1980s before retiring in 1992. But Peters left the A’s after the 1966 season, and he wasn’t around for major acquisitions like Vida Blue, the hiring of Dick Williams as team manager, or the excellent, one-sided trades that Charlie made for Ken Holtzman or Billy North or Ray Fosse. Those deals took the Athletics from mere contenders to world champions, and Charlie was the driving force behind all of them.
    Nevertheless, one part of the revisionist history is correct. Charlie had someone helping him and giving him advice on players. That man was Carl Finley.
    ROBBED
    To this day, Kansas City fans feel like they were robbed. They cheered those young players Reggie Jackson, Vida Blue, Catfish Hunter, Sal Bando, and many others when they were still green, only to see the glory and World Series titles go to another city after Charlie moved the franchise to Oakland. Accurately or not, that’s how many a forlorn Midwestern Athletics fan still sees it. Given how Dad’s contributions were overlooked, and still are today, I think he could relate to how those Kansas City baseball fans felt.

CHAPTER 11
    THE ROAD TO FREEDOM
    1966
    A fter we moved to suburban Overland Park, Dad started to spend more time at his office at Municipal Stadium, a half-hour drive from our house, and Mom grew suspicious. I suppose her doubts began when Dad brought home that autographed photo of Connie Stevens a few years earlier, and her suspicions only deepened when she saw the glamorous crowd, with plenty of young, attractive women, at Charlie’s post-game parties at the Muehlebach Hotel.
    Eventually, Mom discovered that her suspicions were justified. One rainy, wind-blown night, she found Dad’s new Ford Thunderbird in the parking lot of the Conga Room, a dive on the outskirts of town. She went inside and spotted Dad, wearing a cowboy hat, with the sultry young woman we’d met several months earlier in the restaurant with the Benjamins. Mom and Dad separated in January 1966, and Dad moved back into the Muehlebach Hotel. The next month Mom filed for divorce, citing “gross neglect and extreme cruelty.”

    The world Charlie inhabited, and into which he had drawn my father, was hard on marriages. Word around the franchise was that this same young woman had also had affairs with Charlie and Howard Benjamin. The Benjamins’ marriage and Charlie’s fell apart in due course.
    Mom and I