Months before the 1965 baseball season, Charles O. Finley stood before the South Central Business Association in Kansas City, prepared to give a talk to a group of prominent Kansas Citians. He wore a suit, but the businesslike look was offset by the record player sitting atop the table in front of him.
The folks in attendance had to be wondering: What music was this man about to play?
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At that point, Finley had owned the Kansas City Athletics for four years, and had to yet to produce a winning season. Standing in front of a skeptical audience, his goal was to instill optimism. He started slow, introducing a new coach, Whitey Herzog, and then saying, “I’ll be very disappointed if the Athletics do not finish in the first division in 1965.”
His tone was serious, his dark eyes firm. Moments later, he relayed the real hard-hitting news of the day: A 1,265-pound Missouri mule had been selected to serve as the club’s mascot. Beaming, Finley said the mule would be named “Charlie-O” — after himself — and would become the most famous mule in the country. Then he bent down and giddily turned on his record player. The folks in attendance awkwardly listened to the continuous piercing noise a mule makes when it brays.
Therein lies the essence of Charlie Finley: Entertain, often by way of animal. Though none of the zoo-keeping zealousness compared to his feelings for Charlie-O.
An insurance executive from Gary, Ind., Finley received court permission to buy 52 percent of Kansas City’s baseball club for a whopping $1,975,000 in December 1960. His first job as owner? Ensuring Kansas Citians he would not move the team. His second? Discussing lack of attendance (the A’s ranked ninth out of 10 teams in the American League in attendance the previous season).
In a Kansas City Times story that ran on Jan. 7, 1961, Finley said: “I’m not the least bit afraid of attendance. I have faith and confidence in my organization and in myself.”
There was no mention of any Missouri mule — yet. Early on, the plan centered around fireworks.
In June 1961, the club began shooting them off at random times during games. The noises bothered residents who lived near the stadium, so the city fined Finley, who would later tell reporters, “There’s a method in my madness.”
The method, however, did not lead to wins. The team finished 61-100 in Finley’s first year.
Although the club nearly moved to Dallas in 1962, Kansas City kept its team, and it improved, finishing 72-90. Finley, though, was unsatisfied. Rather than a roster overhaul, Finley overhauled the team’s drab uniforms. Instead of their traditional blue and white, the team would wear a kelly green cap, a gold vest-type jersey with “Athletics” in script and gold pants “in an effort to create as much interest as possible in Kansas City.”
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It was only the beginning. On April 9, 1963, which was that season’s Opening Day, fans in attendance could see something not seen before or since in the right field of a baseball stadium: sheep. A Kansas City Times story from that day reads: “Up behind the fence in right field, Mike Quigley, 14, a ball-shagger, sat on the grass in a false beard and shepherd’s outfit of Athletic gold and Kelly green. He was tending some sheep bedecked in Athletic gold and Kelly green.”
Eccentric KC A's owner Charlie Finley put sheep and goats at KC Municipal. Even came w/ a shepherd in this photo op. pic.twitter.com/1ZT3MwLTDw
— MLBcathedrals ⚾️ (@MLBcathedrals) October 12, 2013
“He had us paint sheep up on the hillside in different colors,” said George Toma, then the A’s groundskeeper.
“We all laughed about it because what the heck,” former infielder Wayne Causey said recently. “We never could get out of last place, so whatever goes. We let Charlie have his fun.”
Only in the Charlie Finley universe could a game be delayed not by rain, not by technical difficulties, but by a mule. It was May 12, 1965, and the Kansas City A’s were facing off against the formidable Chicago White Sox. The White Sox and their owner, John Allyn, made it abundantly clear that they weren’t fooling around. The team was in the midst of a race for the top spot in the American League and they weren’t about to invite chaos and histrionics into their ballpark. Before the series, Finley requested permission to allow the mule to enter the ballpark, and Allyn refused.
The White Sox had more important things to focus on such as baseball and winning — concepts that were foreign to the A’s in 1965. The team did not finish first, as Finley had projected. The A’s lost 103 games and finished last in the AL.
@Athletics Almost everywhere. Finley would have taken Charlie O. everywhere if they'd let him! pic.twitter.com/LxcSWVWllZ
— Ácbéam (@Acbeam) June 26, 2015
Naturally, Finley focused on marketing. And what better way to market his team than sneaking a mule into the one ballpark in baseball that had banned said mule?
“There was a knock on the dressing room door,” Causey recalled. “Two guys were dressed in delivery uniforms with a big cardboard box on a dolly. They said they had a delivery for the A’s. They let the guys in and opened the box. There was a little donkey in there.”
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The men brought Charlie-O down through the runway, pushed him out in the dugout, up the stairs and onto the field. The umpire then held the game up, and said, “Get that mule off the field or every player in the dugout is gonna be out of the game.”
“I told the gate attendants it was a monument that we were going to present to Satchel Paige, who was pitching for us then,” Finley told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 1991. “We got the mule inside and we pushed him out on the field. He delayed the game for about 10 minutes while he was running around.”
A few decades later, Finley’s tone didn’t exactly suggest regret. “I hired models to picket outside Sox Park with signs that read, ‘White Sox unfair to Missouri mules,’” he said.
But not everyone was as amused by the joke. In a Nov. 13, 1965 interview with the Kansas City Times, Herzog said he was in the bullpen at Comiskey Park when Charlie-O got loose. He remembered turning to his relievers and saying, “This is nothing more than a damned sideshow. Winning over here is a joke.”
You can’t blame him for feeling frustrated. The coaching staff was trying to put together a legitimate contender. The A’s had been in Kansas City for 10 years (this would be their 11th) without a winning season. Tensions were running high, and to make matters worse, the team’s owner — a man known for being stingy when it came to salary negotiations — was feeding a mule breakfast, lunch and dinner out of a silver bowl. He was insisting that Charlie-O travel with the team in an air-conditioned trailer. He was buying him his own hotel suite on the road, riding him in hotel lobbies, bringing him to restaurants, bringing him to the barbershop, bringing him to the bank — according to Finley’s niece, Nancy.
From a ballplayer’s point of view, the optics weren’t great. From Finley’s point of view, the optics were at an all-time high.
“New York Hotel greets Charley-O with music,” wrote the Associated Press on April 28.
“Charley-O Storms Chicago,” wrote the AP on May 12.
Nancy remembers writers showing up to Howard Benjamin Stable, where Charlie-O was kept, in the same way they’d show up to a press box or batting practice.
“The mule got more press than we did, in a way, because he was treated pretty good,” said A’s pitcher Blue Moon Odom. “He was taken care of better than we were.”
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There are stories of Ken Harrelson riding the mule around the infield. Some players didn’t mind him. Odom was not one of those players. A few newspaper accounts suggest that he was afraid of animals — a claim Odom disputes. He simply said that he wanted no part of it.
“Charlie wanted me to ride it one day, and I said I wasn’t there to ride a mule, I was there to play ball,” he said. “I didn’t sign a contract to ride a damn mule. If it was in the fine print, I didn’t see it.”
Odom attests that while Finley was “out of his damned mind,” he was also a revolutionary marketer. When he thinks back to Charlie-O, and the sheep grazing in right field, and a ballpark that was, in essence, a de facto petting zoo, he realizes that it created a sense of curiosity that swirled around the team. In 1965, it wasn’t hard to guess the outcome of a Kansas City A’s game. But would the mule get loose again? Would Harvey the mechanical rabbit, an automatic ball dispenser next to home plate that Finley had instituted in 1961, make an appearance? Would it shoot pheasants and pigeons out of the automatic ball dispenser? (According to newspaper accounts, this really happened.) What color would the sheep in right field be on that day?
These were questions that no one — except for Finley — had answers to. And that created intrigue.
Odom doesn’t see Finley’s affinity for animals as any different from his insistence that his ball players wear white shoes. It was all the same concept.
“Nobody else was wearing them, everyone else was wearing black shoes,” Odom said. “Other teams would call us the Ringling Brothers, like a circus. We had six different changes of uniforms. I think that brought a lot of other people into the ballpark because they wanted to see what we were going to wear.”
The A’s never had a winning season in 13 years in Kansas City. For many, their time there might seem like a dark period in the franchise’s history. But Finley had a different way of measuring success, and his team’s attendance increased by nearly 250,000 fans from 1965 to 1966. The mule wasn’t going anywhere.
Nancy Finley, niece of Charlie and daughter of A’s minority owner Carl Finley, was only 5 years old when she first met Charlie-O. She was an only child. She would travel on the road with the team at times, which can be a lonely existence, and the mule would travel, too, and she began to view him as a companion.
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When the A’s first announced that Charlie-O would be the new mascot, she likened it to “adopting a new pet.” Nancy still remembers visiting him at Howard Benjamin Stable, with carrots and sugar cubes in tow. She became so used to being around a live mascot, that she couldn’t — and still can’t — understand teams that don’t have one, that insist on running a performer out on the field.
“The elephant was just an image,” she said. “Charlie wanted something that was tangible. It wasn’t just a drawing, it was the real thing.
“I loved Charlie-O. He was real. It’s gotten me to see people dressed up as mascots and think it’s so odd. I always wonder who’s inside those costumes. I guess I’m just so used to having the real thing. It had suspense.”
When the A’s moved to Oakland in 1968, they brought Charlie-O with them. “We painted his hooves white,” Nancy said, with a laugh. After a prolonged period of losing in Kansas City, the Charlie-O era now included a prolonged period of dominance; the A’s won three straight championships from 1972 to 1974.
When Charlie-O died in December of 1976, Nancy remembered a shift in the energy at the Coliseum.
“You could really feel it,” she said. “Fans would show up a little early to home games so they could have a picture with Charlie-O, or maybe have their kids sit up on his back. And you didn’t have that anymore. I could sense a difference.”
A young boy rides the Charlie O' the mule through a parade in Piedmont. Charlie, named after then owner Charlie Finley, was the Oakland Athletic's mascot until 1976. pic.twitter.com/TOJ4fh7lG8
— Amazin’ A’s Craze (@AmazinAsCraze) April 3, 2020
In a padlocked safe in Nancy Finley’s California home, there are two small wooden boxes. They both read “Charlie O, 1956-1976,” in cursive. A piece of embroidered cloth, which depicts Charlie-O galloping while wearing his signature gold and kelly green uniform, covers them. Inside are his remains, cremated.
Nancy has kept his remains for over a decade now. She says they used to reside at the East Bay SPCA, a short walk from the Coliseum, but when rumors started to swirl of the team relocating to San Jose or Fremont, she decided to keep them in her own home.
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Since then, she’s been actively searching for a permanent home for Charlie-O. She wrote about this in her book, “Finley Ball,” and she posted it on her website. Nancy says she’s waiting for the right person to come along; someone who is willing to learn the history of the team, and its mascot, and why it meant so much to both her family and to A’s fans.
“I want to know if someone is truly interested,” she said. “I haven’t had anyone contact me about honoring him, about giving him a permanent home. But I don’t want to push it on someone. I’m not in a rush. I want to make sure that wherever he is, people know what his history is, they appreciate it and they respect him because he wasn’t visited when he was at the SPCA. And the reason Dad put him there was so he could be visited and people could pay their respects.”
It is clear from talking to Nancy that she viewed Charlie-O as more of an extension of her family than a mascot. She knows this sounds crazy. But, like her uncle, she isn’t terribly concerned about how her affinity for a mule will fare in the court of public opinion.
“I’m just looking to see who’s serious about putting together a ceremony for him,” she said. “Most people look at me strange. But I’ll find the right spot, a dedicated spot, something for Charlie-O.”
Until that day comes, he’ll stay in that padlocked safe in Nancy’s California home; embodying a period of A’s success, a period of A’s defeat, and the marketing genius (and madness) that was Charlie Finley.
(Photo: Bettmann / Getty Images)
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