Charlie Finley: The Outrageous Story of Baseball's Super Showman

Before the “Bronx Zoo” of George Steinbrenner and Billy Martin, there were the Oakland Athletics of the early 1970s, one of the most successful, most colorful—and most chaotic—baseball teams of all time. They were all of those things because of Charlie Finley. Not only the A’s owner, he was also the general manager, personally assembling his team, deciding his players’ salaries, and making player moves during the season—a level of involvement no other owner, not even Steinbrenner, engaged in. From modest circumstances in Gary, Indiana, Finley saw his semipro career cut short by the tuberculosis that nearly killed him in 1946. Yet fourteen years later, his success in the insurance business allowed him to buy the downtrodden Kansas City Athletics. Despite promising never to move, he relocated the A’s to Oakland in 1968, and soon reaped the benefit of his talented minor leagues. With the emergence of players such as Reggie Jackson, Sal Bando, Joe Rudi, Catfish Hunter, Rollie Fingers, and Vida Blue—as skillful on the field as they were eccentric off it—the A’s won five straight division titles and three straight World Series (1972–1974)—the latter feat equaled by only one other team in history. However, Finley could be an insufferable bully and impetuously self-destructive. His battles with Commissioner Bowie Kuhn were monumental; and, following the 1975 season, he tore his team apart in one of baseball’s most controversial moments. Drawing on interviews with dozens of Finley’s players, family members, and colleagues, G. Michael Green and Roger D. Launius present “Baseball’s Super Showman” (Time magazine’s description of Finley on the cover of an August 1975 issue) in all his contradictions: generous yet vengeful, inventive yet destructive. The stories surrounding him are as colorful as the life he led, the chronicle of which fills an important gap in baseball’s literature.