In yesterday’s Sunday comics, Peanuts had a baseball joke. Lucy is aggravating Charlie Brown on the mound and he asks in the last panel, “I wonder if I could trade her to Charlie Finley.”
Peanuts comics are reruns of what Charles Schulz drew for 50 years until he passed away in 2000. He usually didn’t put something in that would be a contemporary reference, because he was smart enough to know Peanuts could run forever. But occasionally he did. Finley owned the Kansas City Athletics, who then became the Oakland Athletics, from 1960 to 1981. He was a character and promoter and wheeler-dealer who turned a terrible franchise into a 1970s powerhouse. The A’s won three straight World Series.
Sunday’s Peanuts ran June 5, 1976, when Finley was the best-known sports owner in the country. The A’s, who are currently awful, want to move to Las Vegas. Baseball fans know that the franchise began as the Philadelphia Athletics in 1901 as one of the American League’s first eight teams. Then they moved to KC in 1955 and Oakland in 1968.
Remember “Moneyball,” when the A’s under Billy Beane punched above their weight 20 years ago as a small-budget team, and they became a metaphor for using data to make decisions, vs. hunches? Beane is doing other things. He’s interested in soccer. The A’s are 12-49, for a .197 winning percentage, which, if that holds up, would be the worst in the post-1901 era, worse than the current title-holder, the 1916 A’s in Philly, .235.