"No box seats for this guy -- he's against us."

Walter O'Malley's familiar Spencerian scrawl across the application for Dodger tickets fairly screamed in blue crayon. It hit me as I sifted through thousands of letters -- most with fat checks attached -- that seemed to land in our makeshift Los Angeles office almost as quickly as the refugee skeleton office staff from Brooklyn.

This was January 1958, and O'Malley and the rest of us in the Dodger front office didn't yet know where in Los Angeles the ball team he had kidnapped out of Brooklyn was going to perform: Wrigley Field, a minor league crackerbox in a rundown part of town, the dilapidated Rose Bowl in socialite Pasadena, or the bathtub-shaped Coliseum, which pitcher Ed Roebuck called at first sight a "Grand Canyon with seats."

The ticket request that had been pontifically nixed by the Big Oom, as we called him, was from C. Arnholt Smith, the very large wheeler-dealer of San Diego, a village just a two-hour drive south of us.

O'Malley told us vaguely that he had heard some bad, bad things about Arnholt, and when the big bank and tuna fish man's name came up again the next day, the Big Oom mumbled something about Blackjack Smith, Arnie's brother, and "the horse-race crowd." Even in those days Walter carried a grudge against the nags, for if they were allowed to run at night or on Sundays they could siphon dollars out of his boxoffice.

Anyway, Smith's check, along with some silly excuse O'Malley asked me to invent, couldn't have been shot back to San Diego faster had it carried cholera or the bubonic plague. This raised a few eyebrows in our office, for there is nothing the Big Oom loves more than money.

So Arnholt Smith couldn't buy into the ballgame. Not right then.

Not too long after Banker Smith got this brushoff, Dan Topping and Del Webb, who then owned the New York Yankees, were having lunch during a break in baseball's winter meetings with a funny, nonstop talker named Trader Frank Lane. The Trader swapped ballplayers like bubble gum cards, and he had a thousand stories, a few of which were true. The ballplayers and reporters called him motor-mouth, but he was part of the backdrop at this annual flap, and big shots like Topping and Webb ate up his gossip.

Passing a window of the restaurant where the three sat, Charles O. Finley -- the "O" is for outrageous, some biographers insist -- pulled up short. When he saw the empty chair at their table, his eyebrows went up hopefully.

Those eyebrows are an arresting feature of Finley's face, which has more readable lines than the front page of the New York Times. "Eyebrows like Brillo pads," Wells Twombly once wrote. The eyes beneath them pierce and probe as Finley stares inside you. His hair, once red and curly to top off a handsome face, is white now, giving him a Foxy Grandpa look. He likes to put on a half-smile, as if he's in on some joke you're missing. "He who mischief hatcheth, mischief catcheth," it said under his picture in a 1936 high-school yearbook.

But he can switch masks quickly and turn on the somber dignity. Not long ago Charley was a defendant in a lawsuit brought by one of the battalion of people he has fired. To impress the jury, he testified in rambling sentences that seemed to drip with pontifical knowledge, if you could decipher them. "Even without the robes," one court observer wrote, "Finley looked and sounded more like the judge than the judge."

Incidentally, Charley tried to settle that suit out of court for five thousand bucks and a pitcher named George Lauzerique. The guy who was suing him, Bill Cutler, owner of the Spokane Indians, would have loved to have the pitcher, but it was no go.

Finley's voice is as startling as his looks. He sounds like an auctioneer, and the tones are deep in texture, well modulated, and trained to the utmost for use by a supersalesman.

His philosophy is interesting, to say the least. Once when Cutler pleaded for a week off to visit his wife and twelve children, who were a continent away from Oakland, Finley commanded him to take fifty bucks out of the Oakland club's petty cash fund. "Go out and get laid," he ordered, "then you won't feel so lonesome."

He has been described as a combination of Machiavelli, Barnum, and Billy Graham. "He hollers the loudest when he's not sure of something," says an intimate. Another describes him as a "routinely offensive business tycoon who is exactly what baseball deserves." When this schemer kidnapped his ball team out of Kansas City and hustled it into Oakland, California, Missouri Senator Stuart Symington said, tongue in cheek, "Oakland will find it's the luckiest city since Hiroshima."

One more thing: The man's a striver, an around-the-clock worker, and the miles he has on him and the hard knocks he's taken show in the sunken cheeks on the once-handsome face. In beating a bad-health rap that included a perforated ulcer and a case of pneumonic tuberculosis that pulled his weight down to ninety-seven pounds and hospitalized him for two years, Finley joined a very exclusive club in baseball that included Branch Rickey, who was on his back for two years with TB; Larry MacPhail, who won two bouts with cancer and many more with the bottle and a bad heart; and of course Bill Veeck, who lost a leg to war injuries as a Marine, quit the White Sox in 1961 on doctor's orders, and is back again now tempting fate as he runs the same store.

Finley, who begged for a seat that day at lunch with Lane and the late Webb and Topping, is the most controversial man in baseball today, and privately envied as a winner by the very men who denounce him most.

"In many ways he is the most remarkable man I ever met," says Reggie Jackson, a superstar on Finley's Athletics. "We are the only team in the game on which the owner is discussed more than the players."

Was there a note of admiration in the remark? How does Reggie really feel about his boss?

"Fuck Charley Finley," said Jackson without the slightest hesitation. "We win despite him."

Mike Epstein, who once played for Finley, came up with an unusual thesis. "The man gave us unity of purpose. Every player on the team hated him, and we were together in that at least."

During the period in 1961 when Charley O. was maneuvering for a seat at lunch with Trader Lane and friends, he had already been annoying the big boys in baseball for months, even years, trying to buy into their game at cut-rate prices. He had made millions -- dollars, not friends -- working the medical side of the insurance street. It had been Charley's own idea to sell the big medical associations disability insurance for their members, and he pushed so hard he had written forty thousand policies inside the AMA alone, in seventeen states. Big companies like Fireman's Fund, Continental Casualty, and Lumbermen's did his bidding. "Every smart doctor in the United States insures with Charley Finley," he once boasted. It wasn't strictly so, but there was enough truth there to bring him more than a million bucks a year in profits.

Once inside baseball, Finley wore out the other owners with his nutty ideas. Charley always seemed to be tugging at one of their sleeves to yak about yellow baseballs, fag-white spikes, or three-ball bases on balls. He was an idea man, but the notions he had about managers, broadcasters, and front-office promotions were regarded by the establishment as very far out.

Now, when this pest flashed his pal Lane the sip he'd like to come in and sit down, the Trader, no shrinking violet himself, suggested the idea to the Yankee big shots.

Webb almost had a convulsion. Turning aside to cough so that the man outside the window couldn't read his lips, the Yankee owner hissed an emphatic "No!" under his breath. Then, with some emphasis, he added "The man's a nuisance, who needs him?"So Charley Finley was shut out once more, and didn't get to sit down with the moguls. Not right then, but soon.

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