Kansas City vs. Oakland: The Bitter Sports Rivalry That Defined an Era
256
Kansas City vs. Oakland: The Bitter Sports Rivalry That Defined an Era
256Hardcover
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780252042652 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Illinois Press |
| Publication date: | 08/15/2019 |
| Series: | Sport and Society |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
Striving for the Big Leagues
STRICTLY SPEAKING, KANSAS CITY had hosted major league baseball multiple times prior to the 1950s. Each stint in the "big time" had been brief and without distinction, if not without drama. One such team, the Kansas City Cowboys of the National League, lasted only as long as the 1886 season. They played their home games on a grassless field and amassed a dismal 30-91 record before disbanding. According to baseball historian Lloyd Johnson, "Several gun incidents, on the field and off, convinced the Eastern baseball establishment that Kansas City was too rough for their ball players."
The gunplay was symbolic of the city's turbulent history. "Most of the forces that have disturbed this nation have surged into Kansas City, and very often have met there opposing forces driving in from another quarter," one chronicle of the city noted. Its central location made it a prime distributor of agricultural products (especially meat and wheat) from the West to the East and of manufactured goods in the opposite direction. But it also stood on the dividing line between the North and the South, making it a Civil War flash point while bequeathing to it a complicated race relations legacy that the city still would be grappling with more than a century later. In addition, Kansas City represented a battlefield between gentility and vice. It had created stylish residential and retail districts through developer J. C. Nichols as well as a picturesque boulevard system. It also had spawned boss Tom Pendergast, whose Democratic machine bilked the city out of millions and contributed to its scandalous image during the 1930s.
By the mid-1950s, Pendergast was long gone and Coronet magazine was hailing the citizenry for having "turned lawless, graft-ridden, bankrupt Kansas City into a model metropolis." The Kansas City Star — which had opposed Pendergast — was one of the nation's most influential newspapers, "the voice of [a] wide swath of Middle America, stretching from the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains." Its editor Roy Roberts was a Republican kingmaker who had helped launch the political career of Dwight Eisenhower. Yet not everything was well with the Star and its morning paper, the Times. The federal government had launched an antitrust investigation of the Star in 1952, possibly spurred by President Harry Truman's dislike (Truman had gotten his political start in Kansas City through Pendergast). The investigation into the paper's monopolistic practices led to an indictment, trial, and guilty verdict, and the Star was forced to divest itself of its radio and television stations. Kansas City had its own worries. For years the stockyards at the confluence of the Kansas and Missouri Rivers had made the city a literal "cow town," but a 1951 flood had devastated the yards and other industries. The city also faced as pike in crime, a decline in convention business, and an outdated airport. Those problems received national press attention, the Coronet article notwithstanding. As historian George Ehrlich writes, "Everything was not up to date in Kansas City, and the point was repeatedly driven home."
Amid that emerging sense of drift and dissatisfaction, Star sports editor Ernie Mehl received a news tip in March 1953: baseball's Boston Braves were moving to Milwaukee, the first major league team move in fifty years. The Milwaukee Journal and other city boosters had successfully lobbied the franchise, which had been drawing poorly in Boston, to move to a new ballpark that the city had just built. Kansas City and Milwaukee had been longtime rivals in t he minor league American Association, prompting Mehl to wonder whether his hometown might boost its fortunes by successfully following Milwaukee's path to the big leagues.
Since its abortive major league forays in the previous century, Kansas City had hosted some wonderful baseball teams and players. The Kansas City Blues were one of the top farm clubs of the New York Yankees, featuring future stars including Phil Rizzuto and Mickey Mantle. However, the Blues were completely subordinate to the needs of their parent team. Players could be summoned to New York at a moment's notice, producing frustration and resentment among Blues fans. (As one fan declared, "I for one am sick and tired of these raids the Yankees make on the Blues every year.") Kansas City was also home to the Monarchs, the greatest franchise in the history of the so-called "Negro leagues." The Blues and Monarchs shared the same home field — what later became known as Municipal Stadium — and at times the two teams drew mixed crowds of whites and African Americans, with the Monarchs occasionally staging exhibitions against white players and beating them. Still, race relations in Kansas City were such that one white baseball fan recalled never attending Monarchs games: "But for that invisible but granite wall of racism and unthinking indifference, we would have seen Ernie Banks, Kansas City's own Satchel Paige, and others, including the legendary 'Buck' O'Neil, the Monarchs' manager. What knuckleheads we were."
Now it seemed possible that Kansas City might obtain its own major league franchise, provided that (like Milwaukee) it could persuade an existing team to move; expansion was not then on the horizon. Ernie Mehl took the lead in June 1953 with a series of columns in the Kansas City Star touting the benefits of big-league ball. Soon the editorial pages of the Star and Times took up the cause. "A big league team would put Kansas City's name on the front page of all newspaper sports editions in the country and every day of the week for half the year," the Times wrote. "Such advertising is tremendously important in practical business terms." The Star pointed to the passionate reception that the baseball Braves were receiving in their new home, saying that if a major league team could arouse such a response in "ultra-conservative old Milwaukee," one could only imagine what might happen in "already lusty and enthusiastic Kansas City." Baseball fans from across the region petitioned city hall to back the effort. "Let's get that major league club in here and quit taking the back seat," one fan said.
Even if Kansas City boosters saw their hometown as superior to "ultra-conservative" Milwaukee, they were highly unlikely to land a team as good as the Braves, who had had a strong group of players when they moved from Boston, along with a prodigiously talented young outfielder named Hank Aaron, who would soon make his major league debut. The Braves became immediate winners in Milwaukee and set attendance records there. In contrast, Kansas City had to set its sights on the bottom feeders of the big leagues. The city missed its first target — the woebegone St. Louis Browns — when the American League voted in 1953 to move that team to Baltimore to become the Orioles. By the day after the vote, the Star's Ernie Mehl already had shifted attention to another struggling American League franchise, the Philadelphia Athletics (or "A's" for short). Mehl told his readers that "there is a strong belief that the Athletics shortly will be compelled to move," but he added that "there is only one possible solution to a realization of the goal here and that is to work with the New York Yankees."
Indeed, for Kansas City to get the Philadelphia team, the Yankees almost certainly would have to back the move. They dominated the American League on the field, and as one New York sportswriter observed, they also seemed to have a "strange stranglehold" over league operations. Moreover they owned not only the Blues but also the Blues' ballpark. Although there were efforts in Kansas City to buy the park from the Yankees, in December 1953 Chicago entrepreneur Arnold Johnson bought both the Blues' stadium and New York's Yankee Stadium.
Johnson, it turned out, already had close business ties to Yankees co-owners Del Webb and Dan Topping. The Yankee Stadium deal was designed to provide tax breaks for everyone involved, with Johnson promptly leasing the stadium back to the Yankees' owners. Yet now that Johnson also owned the Kansas City ballpark, Ernie Mehl asked him about seeking a major league team to go with it. At first Johnson demurred, but with the backing of a coalition of Kansas City civic and business leaders, he decided by the summer of 1954 to pursue the Philadelphia A's. There was an implicit condition, though: voters needed to approve a bond issue that would raise money for Kansas City to buy the ballpark from Johnson and expand it to big-league specifications. The Times lobbied for the bonds in a front-page editorial ("the progress and the growth of the city hinge on the result"), and on the day of the vote Mehl wrote, "Today Kansas City either goes or does not go major league." The bonds passed easily.
Arnold Johnson's efforts to buy the A's and move them to Kansas City encountered obstacles. Some American League team owners outside New York greatly distrusted Johnson's ties to the Yankees. They also were skeptical of Kansas City being big enough to support major league baseball — one account holds that the skeptics "believed the city's boosters were counting corn stalks and heifers in their population claims." Philadelphians mounted a campaign to keep the A's, and after it already had been announced that the team would head west (moving the Star to proclaim in another front-page editorial that it was "one of those genuinely great days in the history of a city"), Kansas Citians were shocked to hear that Philadelphia business interests would apparently buy the A's instead. In the end, though, Johnson made his offer attractive enough to sway the team's owners, and with the backing of the Yankees, the American League finally approved the move to Kansas City in November 1954.
The Philadelphia Athletics had been wildly successful at times during their long history under owner-manager Connie Mack, but they were in shambles when Arnold Johnson bought them from Mack's sons Roy and Earle. (Apart from being inept owners, the two sons loathed each other.) The sorry state of the team did not discourage Kansas City. It quickly renovated and expanded its ballpark during the winter of 1955. Few people seemed concerned that the project was overseen by a construction company owned by the Yankees' Del Webb. When the A's arrived in Kansas City for their April home opener, they paraded through a downtown crowd of at least 150,000, and then they drew nearly 1.4 million spectators during the 1955 season, second in the league only to the Yankees. A p romotional film called Kansas Citians "the most rabid baseball fans in t he country" and boasted that the A's had been "transplanted from Philadelphia to grow strong and sturdy in the rich, fertile soil of the mighty Midwest."
Soon enough, disenchantment set in. After finishing sixth in the eight-team league during their first season in Kansas City, the A's sank to last in 1956, losing 102 games. They would not rise above seventh for the next three seasons after that as attendance declined from its early peak. And while the Milwaukee Braves won back-to-back National League pennants and beat the New York Yankees in t he 1957 World Series, the Kansas City A's began trading many of their best players to the Yankees — Bobby Shantz, Clete Boyer, Ryne Duren, Ralph Terry, Art Ditmar, Hector Lopez, and most notoriously, Roger Maris. The Maris deal in December 1959 provoked Chicago White Sox president Bill Veeck to condemn what he called the "unholy alliance" between the A's and Yankees. Veeck would criticize the American League for having moved franchises to Kansas City and Baltimore instead of to such larger, booming cities as Los Angeles and San Francisco. In fact Veeck charged that the Yankees' Del Webb had orchestrated the A's' move to Kansas City with the ultimate goal of "getting control of a franchise which he could eventually move to Los Angeles himself." As it happened, the National League staked claim first on the West Coast in 1958, with the Brooklyn Dodgers moving to Los Angeles and the New York Giants moving to San Francisco. Other cities across the country were following the examples of Milwaukee and Kansas City in aggressively pursuing big-league sports.
Arnold Johnson shrugged off criticism of himself and the A's' deals with New York. He said that he was just trying to help his team: "Every time a top player is traded certain risks are involved. We are willing to take these risks." Roger Maris — who had not wanted to leave Kansas City — would win back-to-back Most Valuable Player awards in New York while breaking Babe Ruth's single-season home run record. Meanwhile, the team that had sent him to the Yankees headed to spring training in Florida in 1960. "This could be our year," Arnold Johnson proclaimed just before leaving an A's intra-squad game on March 9. He got in h is car, drove six blocks, and collapsed against the steering wheel, sounding the horn for ten minutes until a woman called police to complain about the noise. A few hours later, he died in the hospital.
History would judge Johnson harshly. Baseball scholar John Peterson says that although the much-maligned Yankees trades were not wholly one-sided in t hat they brought the A's a few decent players in return, Johnson did little to rebuild the team's farm system. Another writer, Jeff Katz, asserts that Johnson maintained the Kansas City A's as a d e facto Yankees farm team, just as the Kansas City Blues had been: "While it is impossible to prove collusion, the pattern was made abundantly clear, and the case is strong." Katz also argues that the Star's Ernie Mehl was "the water carrier for the Yankees' lies." Perhaps that assessment is unduly harsh, but Mehl had said bluntly that working with New York was the only way to get a major league franchise. He also was loyal to the last to the A's' late owner. "That Johnson had gone into this purely for financial gain, as some said, was ridiculous," Mehl wrote the day after Johnson's death. "We knew him to be honorable."
Even so, Mehl now strove to find local ownership for the A's, presumably to avoid the charges of carpetbagging and collusion that had been levied against Johnson while also lessening the threat that another city would take the A's from Kansas City. "I am bitter when I read in those Eastern papers that this city is dead, because that means that we who live and work here are dead," the sports editor told a business luncheon. "That's not so, and we have a chance to prove it." If attendance for 1960 fell below 850,000, the A's could cancel their stadium lease and leave town, and there was already interest in New Jersey, Dallas, Houston, and Minneapolis–St. Paul in obtaining the team. A ticket drive boosted attendance enough to maintain the lease (even though the A's finished last again), and for a time it looked as though local ownership might materialize as well. In December 1960, the American League provisionally approved a Kansas City group's bid to buy the team, despite reservations about the group's financing. Then Charles Finley — who like Arnold Johnson was from Chicago — pledged to top whatever bid the local group might make. The league approved the sale of the A's to Finley the week before Christmas.
Joe McGuff, then the A's beat writer for the Star, lamented that there had not been enough financial support to secure home ownership. Yet he labored to be optimistic: "For better or worse, Charles O. Finley and Kansas City have been joined together in t he bonds of major league baseball. It is a tenuous union, but there is a possibility that in time it will grow stronger." There was in fact a brief honeymoon. Finley was a tireless, ebullient promoter who could be charming when the mood struck him. He declared that the A's would never abandon Kansas City ("brother, I mean to tell you, I'm here to stay!"), and he staged a public burning of what he said was the escape clause allowing him to leave if attendance declined. He also promised that there would be no more trades with the hated Yankees — and he burned a bus that he said represented the shuttle that had carried players from Kansas City to New York. Appropriately enough, Sports Illustrated in June 1961 called Finley a "ball of fire"; the magazine also claimed that he was "the kindliest owner in baseball." He had specially adapted a box seat to accommodate Kansas City's rotund and sonorous mayor, H. Roe Bartle. When the Yankees came to town with their star pitcher Whitey Ford, Bartle happily heckled him: "I remember you when you were a Kansas City Blue, Whitey! You're still bluuuuuuue!" As for Finley, the mayor's praise was unstinting: "He holds the heart of the city in the palm of his hand."
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
1 Striving for the Big Leagues 21
2 Chiefs vs. Raiders, Part I 48
3 A's vs. Royals, Part I 72
4 Chiefs vs. Raiders, Part II 93
5 As vs. Royals, Part II 118
6 "Triumph and Tragedy" 139
Conclusion 161
Notes 181
Index 223