Bobby Winkles, Who Quit Athletics' Finley While on Top, Dies at 90

Former Oakland Athletics manager Bobby Winkles, who quit the A's in May of 1978 rather than continue to work for Charlie Finley, passed away Friday. In addition to managing in Oakland, Winkles' Arizona State teams produced, among others, Reggie Jackson, Sal Bando and Rick Monday.

May 23, 1978 was supposed to be just another day covering baseball.

I wasn’t far removed from covering high school sports in the East Bay. And while I was still covering junior college football and basketball, those seasons were over, and I had what I thought was a great job – spending the summer covering the Oakland A’s and the San Francisco Giants when they were at home.

Not a bad way to try to pay off those student loans.

On that particular Tuesday, the first of a two-game series against the Milwaukee Brewers, I parked in the Oakland Coliseum’s “H” lot, just outside the “F” lot that was dedicated to A’s players and staff.

I was walking through the “F” lot, heading toward the player/media entrance on the lower east side of the parking area when Bobby Winkles came walking the other way. It was about four hours before first pitch. Even so, I was a little surprised that the Oakland A’s manager wasn’t in uniform yet.

I said hello and asked him if he’d forgotten something in his car. He was pleasant, said something along the order of “something like that,” and kept on walking.

I didn’t think anything more about it until about 90 minutes later when we got the word. Winkles, tired of butting heads with Oakland A’s owner Charles O. Finley, had called Finley and had quit.

He wasn’t getting something from his car. He was getting in his car and getting away from the A’s and the Coliseum and especially from Finley, never to return.

That was the first thing that came to mind this morning when I learned that Winkles had died Friday. He was 90.

Winkles’ managerial career in Oakland comprised just the end of the 1977 season and the first 39 games of 1978, so as a whole, so his time with the A’s was just small fragment of his career. A one-time minor league player, he’d built Arizona State baseball into a national power, winning three national titles in 13 Sun Devils season from 1958-1971, taking what had been basically a club sport and turn it in to ASU’s first national caliber sport.

He left ASU in 1972 to coach with the California Angels, and a year later he was the Angels’ manager after Del Rice was let go. Winkles had a decent first year, 79-83, but he was fired in the middle of 1974 with the Angels sitting at 30-44. (In a bit of irony, he was replaced by former A’s manager Dick Williams, who had quit Finley and the A’s after bringing home back-to-back World Series titles in 1972-73).

Winkles joined the A’s coaching staff just a couple of weeks after leaving the Angels and won a World Series ring with the 1974 team as manager Alvin Dark’s third base coach. After 1975 he left the A’s to coach for the Giants, but he was brought back by Finley to manage after the owner had fired Jack McKeon mid-1977.

Quitting aside, the 1978 season was the peak of Winkles’ managerial career. The A’s were a bad team and would lose 93 games, but Winkles got them off to a 14-3 start three weeks into the season and sat at 19-5 after four weeks. The A’s had split a Sunday doubleheader against the Chicago White Sox and were at 24-15 when Winkles told Finley to take his job and shove it. The A’s were 33 games under .500 the rest of the way with McKeon back at the helm.

Winkles never seemed to regret having quit the A’s job, although he never managed in the big leagues again. He would coach with the White Sox and Expos and later became a broadcaster with Montreal.

Winkles’ impact on the A’s went beyond his managerial stint. His Arizona State program churned out terrific baseball talent. Reggie Jackson, Sal Bando and Rick Monday, three pillars of the early A’s after the move from Kansas City, all played under Winkles at ASU.

He was among the five managers inducted into the initial College Baseball Hall of Fame in 2006.

Follow Athletics insider John Hickey on Twitter: @JHickey3

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