It’s not going to happen, but the maestros who orchestrate Major League Baseball had to address the elephant in their room. Yes, MLB had discussed a rule change to allow teams, once every game, to designate any hitter to bat, regardless of where he was in the line-up.
This “Golden At-Bat” rule, or the Designated Hitter on steroids.
The laughter from the graveyard surely comes from Charlie O. Finley, once baseball’s greatest maverick owner. Finley made a live mule his team’s mascot and called him Charlie O. He introduced players with white shoes and long hair. He wanted to use orange baseballs, easier to see on television. Finley — denied buying and selling players for big bucks because it wasn’t “in the best interests of baseball” — forced the introduction of a draft and free agency…where they buy and sell players for big bucks.
The Golden At-Bat would be so Charlie.
Finley loved making headlines, usually featuring his name, but there’s a part of him that people either didn’t know or conveniently forgot. It goes beyond owning the once-famous Oakland A’s, the only team to win three World Series in a row that didn’t play out of Yankee Stadium.
It happens I covered the A’s triple crowns in the ’70s and the first World Series game I saw was in his home park, the Oakland Coliseum. History has made a bigger deal of Charlie’s A’s, but I do recall the word “dynasty” being in many stories. I also remember how, in an age when sportswriters were pampered, Charlie put writers from the other league (National) as far above the field as possible and fed us box lunches; American League writers didn’t have nosebleeds and were served three-course dinners.
Unknown or un-reported then was that he became a baseball maverick because tuberculosis hospitalized young Charlie for a year, long enough for him to see doctors needed disability insurance. Finley promptly made millions selling it, enough to make five attempts to buy a major-league team and, once he succeeded, Finley never forgot where he came from: Birmingham.
At Rickwood Field, still the oldest ballpark in the U.S. and the site of last year’s Field of Dreams Game, Finley had been a batboy when he was 12. By the time he bought the “Kansas City” Athletics, Birmingham had become a melting pot of racism, with no baseball team. Finley brought back the Barons, who innocently broke down racial barriers by integrating fans in the deep south for the first time and became a subtle, unheralded partner in the Civil Rights Movement. It took a book (Southern League) to tell the story.
Today, the Barons are Southern League’s defending champions, a farm team of the Chicago White Sox, one of the big-league teams Finley tried to buy. Like the man who did buy the Sox, Bill Veeck, Charlie was ever the promoter. He got The Beatles into Kansas City on a scheduled off-day during their first tour, paying them six times their going rate, $150,000 to play 31 minutes…in 1964, those were Juan Soto dollars.
Yet Charlie O, the man not the mule, was an egotistical con man disliked by many…even people who didn’t get box lunches.
