Nay for Quality

The fascinating thing about Charles O. Finley, 49, is the way he brings out the worst in other people. In the seven years that Millionaire Finley has owned the Kansas City Athletics, he has managed--accidentally or deliberately--to raise more dust than a prairie twister. Managers have violently disagreed with him, players have rebelled, fans have hanged him in effigy. Those incidents were nothing compared with the howler that hit last week when Finley's fellow American League owners voted to 1) allow him to move the Athletics to Oakland, Calif., next season, and 2) expand the league from ten to twelve teams in 1969, granting new franchises to Kansas City and Seattle.

On the floor of the U.S. Senate, Mis souri's Stuart Symington called Finley "one of the most disreputable characters ever to enter the American sports scene." In Cincinnati, National League President Warren Giles deplored the American League's hasty, unilateral decision to expand. Giles was right, but his moral position was a little weak: the National League, after all, did not bother to consult American League owners before moving into Los Angeles, San Francisco, Houston and Atlanta. That still did not make the motives of Finley & friends any nobler or any less obvious. Moving the A's to Oakland will cut into the Bay Area monopoly enjoyed for ten years by the National League's San Francisco Giants. And Seattle is the last big TV market area still untapped by baseball.

One sure result of the expansion is more money--mainly for the owners, although some of it may find its way into players' pockets.* The loss will be in the quality of the game. Good ball-players already are in short supply and the caliber of expansion teams created on such short notice is bound to be dreadful. Witness the New York Mets.

And will the National League be forced to expand, too? A new team in Dallas would reduce the Houston Astros' market, and a team in San Diego would hurt the Los Angeles Dodgers. Milwaukee is available, but it has a memory. Suppose the National League sticks to ten teams. The American League undoubtedly will play a longer season, thereby complicating the scheduling of the World Series. Where was the Commissioner of Baseball in all this? He seems to have struck out.

*One American Leaguer got his raise--a fat one--last week. Carl Yastrzemski, the league-champion Boston Red Sox's slugging leftfielder, signed a 1968 contract calling for a $55,000 boost to $100,000.

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