"Blue Moon" and "Charlie O."

 “I always wanted to be a player, but I never had the talent to make the big leagues. So I did the next best thing. I bought a team,” Charlie O. Finley

Ron Cohen loaned me Larry Colton’s “Southern League: A True Story of Baseball, Civil Rights, and the Deep South’s Most Compelling Pennant Race.” The author (above) pitched at the University of California when Cohen was a student there and went on to play for the Macon Peaches in the Southern League. The book opens in a tiny duplex in Macon, Georgia with Kansas City A's owner and super-salesman Charlie O. Finley wooing 19-year-old baseball phenom Johnny “Blue Moon” Odom, who had starred at the same segregated high school, Ballard-Hudson, that musicians Little Richard and Otis Redding had attended. “To seal the deal,” Colton wrote, "Finley helped cook dinner - fried chicken, okra, corn bread, and black-eyed peas." The bonus, worth an unprecedented $75,000, included a new Ford Galaxy. Odom signed the contract and would be playing for the Birmingham Barons, a Southern League A's affiliate, in a city known as "Bombingham." The previous year, Eugene "Bull" Connor had used fire hoses and police dogs against peaceful demonstrators during Martin Luther King's Birmingham Crusade, and segregationists connected to the Ku Klux Klan had bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church, staging ground for civil rights activities, on a Sunday morning, killing four young girls. On June 18, 1964, shortly after the season began, a cop pulled Odom over, questioned whether the car was his, and began threatening him, saying, "Are you trying to be a smart-ass?" until he realized Odom was the Barons’ new bonus baby. Then he said: "This is your lucky day. I’m going to let you go, but let me give you some advice. This is Birmingham. It’s real important you stay in the nigger part of town.”

John "Blue Moon" Odom

Finley had grown poor up in Birmingham, the son of a steelworker, had once been a batboy for the Barons, and moved to Gary, Indiana, as a teenager when his father, out of a job, found work at one of United States Steel Corporation's mills. He graduated from Horace Mann High School, took classes at Gary College while working in the steel mill and playing first base for an industrial league team, and during World War II, after an ulcer kept him out of the marines, got a job in an ordnance plant, moonlighting, at his father-in-law's suggestion, as an insurance salesman. In 1946 he contracted tuberculosis and spent a year in a sanitorium fighting to breathe. He lost a hundred pounds but began selling disability insurance to doctors he came into contact with. Colson wrote:

Within two years of his release, he'd sold policies to 92 percent of the doctors in the Chicago area. He soon expanded nationally, and within a few years he was a multimillionaire, with a 21-room farmhouse on 260 acres near LaPorte.

In September of 1964,, with his A’s destined to lose 100 games that season, the flamboyant Finley paid the Beatles $150,000, three times what their normally fee, to perform at Kansas City’s Municipal Stadium before a crowd of almost 40,000. As an encore, the Fab Four played “Going to Kansas City.” Finley hired a mule named “Charlie O” as the team mascot, advocated for orange baseballs, hired sexy ball-girls, installed a mechanical rabbit to pop up and deliver balls to the home plate umpire, and dressed players in colorful green-and-gold uniforms. In 1968 Finlay would move the Athletics to Oakland and assemble a cast of characters that included Colton’s teammate, Cuban escapee Bert Campaneris, as well as “Catfish” Hunter, Reggie Jackson, Rollie Fingers, and "Blue Moon" Odom. The colorful A’s, who played in Philadelphia when I was a kid, won three straight World Series championships beginning in 1972. Author Colton retired with a sore arm in 1968 after a brief stint with the Phillies.