Summer reading: Charlie Ohhhhh

Harkening back to last April and the 30 baseball book reviews in 30 days (linked here), more light to heavyweight reading before the summer gloom burns off:

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

From page 15 of the prologue:

"Charlie Finley was a man of inconsistencies -- miserly and autocratic one minute, charitable and paternal the next. The one characteristic that ran through his entire soul was control; it was how he brought oder to his different worlds. Control meant everything had to be done the Finley way. The baseball establishment vilified him for his new maverick ideas intended to improve the game, but the baseball world was changing. The baseball lords were losing control. And it would be the iconoclastic yet old-fashioned Charlie Finley and his rambunctious players who would unwittingly lead the baseball world into a new, uncertain era."

You think of Reggie Jackson's career, how it started with Charlie Finley's control freakishness, and then went to George Steinbrenner's world that was much of the same. How poetic.

A reporter once told Jackson that Finley deserved credit for driving the 1973 A's to the World Series, following up the won they took in '72, and would take again in '74 from the Dodgers. Jackson replied: Please don't give that man the credit. It takes away from what the guys have done. He spoiled what should have been a beautiful thing."

Hundreds of footnotes later, we find out more about Finley, the man, than we probably cared to know when we started.

Green and Launius, members of the Society for American Baseball Research, both of whom work in Washington D.C. for NASA (Green) and the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum (Launius). Somehow, they've launched this one into the baseball atmosphere, long overdue.

The end of the Finley regime with the A's in 1979 seems to have some current context: The team was playing before record-low attendance, and he was involved in a divorce proceeding against his wife, Shirley. "Finley stonewalled and fought the proceedings every step of the way," the authors write.

He eventually left in 1980 and said at his farewell press conference: "Before I leave the game, I'd like to see orange baseballs introduced. I'd like to see a three-ball walk, and I'd like to see a designated runner."

Finley would live to 1996, and before he died, he tried to buy the Chicago Cubs, start a new baseball league, form an international football league and market a new "double grip" football, with inverted dimples like a golf ball and stripes that went horizontally to help receivers and fans see it better in flight.

The book also has a paragraph from what Washington Post sports columnist Shirley Povich wrote about Finley upon his death: "Was he a genius or a crackpot, a career maverick or a buffoon, a liar, an angry man, an egomaniac, good for baseball or bad for baseball? He was all of the above."

How it goes down in the scorebook:

The East Coast had Steinbrenner. The West Coast had Finley. And baseball was much more interesting with both somehow involved. As interesting as this book is to read, as well.

And as long as we're on the subject: The recently new book, "Reggie Jackson: The Life and Thunderous Career of Baseball's Mr. October" by Dayn Perry of FoxSports.com, is somewhat disappointing, but maybe that's because it lacks, well, Jackson.

"I made two formal requests for an interview with Reggie," Perry says in the notes in the back. "His busines smanager Matt Merola assured me that he had passed along my requests, but I never received a response. As a result I wrote the book without my subject's cooperation, but thanks to my interviews with those who knew and covered Reggie and the wealth of reportage already out there, I was able to tell his story."

Kinda.

"At certain points in the book," Perry then admits, "I enter Reggie's head and presume to communicate his thoughts. I do so in the service of the narrative, and any thoughts I relay, while ultimately assumptions of what i believe he may have felt at certain instances, are informed by the facts and by what I came to learn of Reggie's inner workings."

Perry also says that two resources that were very helpful to him were Jackson's autobiography with Mike Lupica, a Maury Allen biography of Jackson, and a Bill Libby book with Jackson on the 1974 season.

Other than that, it's all fresh.