By the time Charlie Finley finally sold the Oakland Athletics, most people in baseball figured the team was leaving town one way or another. Finley had owned the club since buying into it in 1960, and his two decades in charge were legendary for both success and chaos, three straight World Series titles in the mid-1970s, running feuds with commissioner Bowie Kuhn, and a habit of selling off star players for cash that got several deals voided by the league office. By 1979 the A's had bottomed out, drawing barely 300,000 fans to a 108-loss season, and Finley had already tried once to move the franchise to Denver in a deal that fell through when local officials refused to let him break the Coliseum lease. This bound set of legal documents, prepared by Finley's own company, tells the story of what happened next: the actual Purchase and Sale Agreement dated August 20, 1980, transferring the American League franchise to a buyer who had no intention of moving it anywhere.

That buyer was Walter A. Haas Jr., the Levi Strauss chairman who paid $12.7 million largely as a gesture to keep the team in his hometown, an unusual motive in professional sports and one that shaped everything that followed. The documents include the closing statements, escrow agreement, trademark assignment, and the final bill of sale, along with a signature page bearing Finley's own hand as president of Charles O. Finley & Company, and Roy Eisenhardt's signature as general partner for the new Oakland Athletics Baseball Company, the Haas family entity that would run the club's business side for the next several years. What followed is remembered as one of the most stable, well-liked ownership eras in Oakland sports history, and this set of documents is the actual paper trail of the moment it began, the point where the A's stopped being Charlie Finley's team and became Oakland's team for good.