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bought his ball club by himself and, almost entirely without advice, developed and traded for the players who brought him the championship. (He is also a jock satrap, owning teams in two other sports—the California Golden Seals, of the National Hockey League, and the Memphis Tams, of the American Basketball Association—which he operates and oversees in the same shouldering style.) He designed the A’s’ uniforms. He designed their style of play. (This year’s policy of pinch-hitting for the second baseman as early as the second inning is a Finley invention, and reflects his conviction that baseball should open itself more to pinch-hitting and pinch-running specialists.) He used up nine baseball managers in ten years, and imposes strategy upon the incumbent, Dick Williams, like a Little League daddy. He is a man who must control every situation in which he finds himself, from arranging the seating at a dinner table to personally dispensing the last five hundred World Series tickets behind the Oakland dugout (an area he refers to as “my box”). He brings his team mascot, an enormous mule named Charlie O, to all the A’s’ public functions, indoors or outdoors. In his relations with his players, he has a fondness for the sudden paternal gesture—an arm around the shoulder and the whispered message that the athlete’s contract has just been upped by a few thousand for some deed well done. Last year, Finley tried to persuade Vida Blue to change his first name to True. Later, he publicly presented him with a new Cadillac, but this spring, when Blue held out for a very sizable increase in salary, Finley fought him with such unbridled vehemence that Blue fell into a state of embittered withdrawal that accounted in great part for his disappointing 6–10 record. Mr. Finley believes he enjoys excellent relations with most of his players, and would probably point to his new championship as the best evidence of their happiness. Yet considerable evidence suggests that the A’s were united and matured most of all by their shared individual resistance to the Finley style and the Finley presence. During the Series, Reggie Jackson talked to me about this. “The man is insulting and meddlesome,” he said. “This team found itself in the summer, but this is not the way to make a team.”
    Finley has already had a notable influence on baseball (scheduling the weekday Series games at night, as was done this year, is an idea he finally sold to his fellow executives), and now, with a hold on the championship, he will wield more power in the councils of the sport. His prime immediate projects for the game are the addition to the lineup of a designated hitter, who would bat for any other player (probably the pitcher) without requiring him to leave the game, and the use of a bright orange baseball in night games. I hate the first idea, and I would leave the second one up to the players to decide, but both deserve serious testing. Charlie Finley, one comes to realize, is impossible to ignore, like a mule in a ballroom.
    The third game, played on a sodden turf and by Pacific Daylight Saving Time, was an austere, nearly eventless affair that finally went to the Reds by a minimal 1–0. The time zone was perhaps the most important element of the game. The action began at five-thirty in the afternoon, which is prime evening tube time in the East and is also the beginning of twilight in California infields in October. The pitchers—Blue Moon Odom for the A’s and Jack Billingham for the Reds—were entranced with this crepuscular setting and struck out batters in helpless clusters. The only run of the evening (and only the second Cincinnati run in the past twenty-one innings) almost didn’t get into the books, for Tony Perez, rounding third in the seventh inning, slipped on the wet turf and went sprawling—a sudden baseball bad dream—but then got up and tottered home.
    The true bad dream for the Reds had been postponed only for a day.