The Kansas City A's & The Wrong Half of the Yankees

by Jeff Katz

During the second half of the 1950s, folks derisively referred to the Kansas City A's as a farm team of the New York Yankees. Trades between the two - often lopsided - were commonplace, and it seemed every time the Yankees needed that one final piece for yet another pennant run, the A's filled the gap. While most knew that A's owner Arnold Johnson was somewhat affiliated with Yankee owners Dan Topping and Del Webb through his joint ownership of Yankee Stadium, The Kansas City A's and the Wrong Half of the Yankees digs into the deeper business entanglements among the three. In addition to the questionable trades and his earlier purchase of The House that Ruth Built, Johnson's purchase of the then - Philadelphia A's shows signs of Yankees clout. Through periodicals, letters, conversations with contemporary players and executives, and an analysis of player records, author Jeff Katz has compiled a chronological account of how, through the hands of a friend and business partner, the Yankees controlled two of the eight American League teams during the second half of the 1950s.

Genres: Baseball, Nonfiction

213 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 2007

Reviews

[Doctor Moss · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I was a kid, I would look at the back of the baseball cards for many of the New York Yankees’ stars of the 1960s, and I saw that they had also played for the Kansas City A’s. Why was that? Why was Kansas City trading so many star players, even including Roger Maris, to the Yankees? And who were they getting back? The A’s were terrible, and the Yankees dominated the American League. Something smelled pretty bad, even to a little kid.

This book tells the story.

In the early 1950s, the Philadelphia Athletics were a failing franchise. Performance on the field was awful, attendance was laughable, and the long time icon of the franchise, owner and former manager Connie Mack, was in his late 80s, no longer a day-to-day presence.

Baseball had started a move west — the Braves had moved from Boston to Milwaukee. Other cites — Houston, Toronto, Los Angeles, and San Francisco — were hungry for baseball teams. Kansas City was home to the Yankees’ top minor league team, the Kansas City Blues. The city would have loved a major league team.

Arnold Johnson stepped in to try to buy the A’s and move them to Kansas City. But he had very close and suspicious ties to New York Yankees’ owners, Del Webb and Dan Topping. The three were partners in the Automatic Canteen Company, a food vending machine business. The ties tightened when Webb and Topping worked out a sale of Yankee Stadium to Johnson, so they were now Johnson’s tenants.

The Yankees’ owners also sold the Blues’ stadium in Kansas City to Johnson. All of those sales were at bargain prices, and ownership of the Blues’ stadium put Johnson in a favored position to bring a team to Kansas City. It’s hard not to just say that the Yankees’ owners were manufacturing the sale of the A’s to Johnson, as a kind of informal partner.

There were other groups and individuals trying to buy the A’s, some to keep the team in Philadelphia and others to move it to Kansas City or Los Angeles. The Yankees’ owners again stepped in, using their power and influence to help Johnson’s bid win. It’s not clear at all that it was the best bid, and American League President William Harridge appeared to hold the bids from other parties to higher standards and a tougher approval process.

Once the deal was done, and the team was moved, the trades started. The Yankees, throughout the 1950s, traded for whoever the A’s had that fit their needs. And, in return, the A’s got has-beens, non-prospects, and just plain discards (there were a few exceptions, especially outfielder-first baseman Norm Siebern). From 1956 to 1960, the A’s finished last or next-to-last in the American League every year. The Yankees finished first all of those years except 1959.

The Yankees harvested the A’s for players like Roger Maris, Ralph Terry, Clete Boyer, Art Ditmar, and Hector Lopez. In Terry’s case, they used the A’s as a true farm team, trading a young Terry to the A’s, where he could get needed experience before re-acquiring him less than two years later. Terry then became a star in the Yankees’ 1960s’ rotation.

Boyer’s case may have been even more outrageous. The A’s signed Boyer to a “bonus baby” contract, which at the time required that Boyer stay on their major league roster for two years, even though he was still in his teens. Once his time was up, the A’s traded him to the Yankees.

Maris was originally signed by the Cleveland Indians. The A’s worked out a trade to acquire him, where he played for a year and a half before predictably being traded in 1959 to the Yankees as part of a big, lop-sided trade. Maris then won the American League Most Valuable Player Award in his first year with the Yankees.

That Johnson and the Yankees’ owners were in cahoots is obvious. And we can see the genesis of it in the story that Katz tells in this book. The Yankees arranged Johnson’s acquisition of the A’s. And through various financial manipulations, Johnson paid almost nothing for the team. He was beholden to Webb and Topping, and it looks like he paid them back.

It’s not as if no one noticed. Johnson even gave testimony to Congress to try to dispel the obvious perception that the A’s were really a major league farm team for the Yankees. But the trades went on throughout the decade of the 50s.

Johnson died suddenly in 1960, and the trades stopped just as suddenly.

[Andrew McHenry · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a good history of the Arnold Johnson era of Athletics history. Katz traces Johnson's history as a business collaborator with the Yankees' owners, giving a detailed account of his maneuvering to acquire the franchise when it was in Philadelphia, the successive cooperation of American League officials and even some Kansas City advocates, and the eventual lopsided trades that benefitted the Yankees.

This book makes for a good contrast with one other in this genre: John E. Peterson's book on the KC Athletics, which covers the full span of the team history in Kansas City, is more neutral towards Johnson, and gives a detailed analysis suggesting that bad trades weren't the problem for the A's, but rather a failure to extend bonus offers to incoming potential stars. Even taking Peterson's perspective into account, Katz's first-hand evidence is overwhelmingly compelling: the players on both sides knew of the collusion, and it was common-knowledge that successful play or lack thereof could result in a trade between KC and New York.

My wife said at the start, "This sounds like the type of book that would make me mad." It does, particularly from a Kansas City fan's perspective. I found myself in a bit of cognitive dissonance, cheering for the Philadelphia bidders and against the prospect of the franchise relocating to Kansas City. The irony with that is that today's Royals are the direct heirs to the A's history in KC; without them there'd probably no MLB franchise in KC today.

Overall this book is good reading that makes for a deepened understanding of the history of American League baseball in the 1950's -- and it was no golden age, but an age of corrupt collusion where Kansas City got shafted.

[Tara · Rating 3 out of 5]

He makes a compelling, eye-opening case, but getting through the first half particularly was a bit of a slog that took longer than it should, trying to keep straight all the moving parts of who sold what for how much. 3***1/2

[Chris Witt · Rating 2 out of 5]

If you want to read every tiniest detail about what went went on behind the scenes (or may have gone on behind the scenes) with Arnold Johnson's acquisition of the Philadelphia Athletics' franchise and subsequent move to Kansas City in the mid-to-late 1950's, then this book is for you.

But it's a tedious read.

The book does lay out what I feel is a pretty irrefutable case that Johnson acquired the A's in order to use them as a minor league team for the New York Yankees. Johnson had business partnerships with other Yankees' owners both before and during the run of the Kansas City A's. (Not after they left K.C., but only because Johnson died in 1960. Does that count as a spoiler?)

The Yankees could move players who needed a little more seasoning over to Kansas City and, if they panned out, they would recall them.

There is also some discussion of the case of Clete Boyer. Boyer was a "bonus baby" - defined as a player who had signed a contract of $4,000 or more. To keep the league's wealthiest teams from stock-piling the most talented players, Major League Baseball rules that no team could have more than 2 of these players on their roster at any given time and that any such player had to remain on a team's 40-man roster for a minimum of 2 years before they could be waived. The A's signed Boyer (who had been scouted by the Yankees for the last few years leading up to his being drafted) and, after two impressive seasons with Kansas City, was traded to New York for essentially spare parts within days of being eligible to be dealt.

From 1955 to 1650 - a six-year run of A's ownership by Johnson - the New York Yankees won five pennants. It might be time to put an asterisk next to those achievements.

[Taylor · Rating 2 out of 5]

For the first 20 years of their existence the Kansas City Royals were the model expansion franchise. They won the AL Western Division title in 1976 -the first of seven playoff appearances in the next 10 seasons. In sharp contrast, the second 20 years have been eerily reminiscent to Kansas City sports fans to that of their predecessors from 1955-1967. The Kansas City A's were an abysmal rendition of the AL franchise that won five World Series championships in Philadelphia and later four more in Oakland. During their Midwest layover the team never climbed higher than 6th nor finished better than 12 games under .500. Author Jeff Katz does a convincing job exposing the "incestuous" relationship between the Kansas City A's and the dynastic New York Yankees of the same period. From the longstanding business relationship that existed between the owners of the two clubs to the utter lack of due diligence on the part of the MLB powers-that-be a shameful chapter in the sport's history took place. The second half of this book illustrates the trades and their unbalanced nature which overwhelmingly favors the Yankees. Katz uses photos of baseball cards to showcase the players involved and his hypothesis is well-argued. The first half, however, is an exhausting analysis of the politics leading up the Kansas City relocation and makes for an excruciating read. Albeit not as excruciating as the Royals play over the last two decades. That notwithstanding, Katz provides a valuable history lesson to any student of baseball or Kansas City sports.

[Brett Rohlwing · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is kind of a conspiracy theory book, but it doesn't involve the Trilateral Commission or Scientology. Rather, it's about whether the old Kansas City A's, the major league baseball team formerly of Philadelphia and now in Oakland, was for a time a kind of secret farm team for the dominant New York Yankees throughout the 1950s. Why did the A's agree to make so many lopsided player trades in favor of the Yankees for so many years?

Jeff Katz makes a pretty good case for the fact that it did happen, but doesn't clarify all that well why the A's owner at that time - Arnold Johnson - agreed to do this. He hints at a few possibilities, though.

[David Blankenship · Rating 4 out of 5]

While there is no smoking gun to undeniably prove collusion between these two teams, the author lays out in sometimes painstaking detail the connections between the two teams. And while many of the trades show more about close relationships between front office personnel (such as is common in the 2010s between the Royals and Braves), the A's got the short end enough times to give weight to conspiracy theories. More damning may be how the Yankees seemed to push for the favorable ownership of a man who had become the owner of Yankee stadium.

Interesting read, but one would have to be a huge baseball fan who also sees conspiracies everywhere.

[Danielle · Rating 3 out of 5]

More reasons for KC to hate the Yankees. The coup de grace: December 11, 1959: K.C. sends Roger Maris, Kent Hadley, and Joe DeMaestri to N.Y. for Norm Siebern, Hank Bauer, Marv Throneberr, and Don Larsen [at the end of his career.] Sure, it was the K.C. Athletics not the Royals, but . . . .