When the A's Left Philadelphia, Hardly Anyone Came to Say Goodbye

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he Oakland A’s will play their final home game this week — a long-anticipated, sold-out event that will be an adventure in mass catharsis: surges of grief and anger and loss mixed with waves of gratitude from the team’s tight-knit community of fans for everything A’s players and Coliseum workers have given them over the past 57 seasons.

It couldn’t be more different from the A’s departure from Philadelphia, their original hometown: Hardly anyone came to say goodbye.

On a gloomy September Sunday 70 years ago, near the end of a season, The Philadelphia Inquirer summed up with one word — “dismal” — the Athletics lost to the Yankees in a virtually empty ballpark. On the team’s next opening day, they were playing halfway across the continent.

Why wasn’t the scene at Philadelphia’s Connie Mack Stadium even a little dramatic as the Athletics’ time in the city ended?

Long before the end of the 1954 season, Philadelphians knew the A’s were in trouble.

The team, owned by legendary manager Connie Mack and two of his sons, Roy and Earle, was broke. City officials and community leaders joined in a “Save the A’s” campaign to stoke enthusiasm for a team with a storied past: nine American League pennants, five World Series championships.

The A’s let it be known in mid-season that if they could draw 550,000 paying customers, they’d have a shot at avoiding bankruptcy and a sale that could well result in the team moving.

But the A’s were a very bad team that had been, with few exceptions, very bad for a very long time. In the previous 20 seasons, the team had won more games than it lost only four times and never finished better than fourth in the eight-team league. The team’s customary finish was last place, and in 1954, it was headed there again.

“The A’s kept announcing, ‘We need so many people per game to come so we can reach our 550,000 fans,’ and the fans just kept ignoring it,” says Bob Warrington, a Philadelphia baseball historian who’s written about the A’s departure.

“I think what the A’s failed to realize, certainly Roy and Earle, was that baseball fans are not customers,” Warrington says. “They’re fans, they’re supporters. And you can’t threaten them into coming to the ballpark by saying, ‘If you don’t come, you know, we may not be here next year.’ You’ve got to encourage them to come.”

So the “Save the A’s” campaign fizzled, even as an out-of-town bidder made a highly publicized offer to buy the team and relocate to Kansas City. As autumn neared and the New York Yankees arrived for the season’s last home series, attendance stood at just under 300,000 — a little more than half what the A’s say they’d need to avoid financial disaster.

The Yankees won the first two games in front of tiny crowds on Friday and Saturday. The attendance on Sunday, Sept. 19 was even lower — just 1,715 fans pushed through the turnstiles — as the Yankees swept the series. It was just another loss in a season that everyone wanted to forget.

Within days, the American League would open talks on the future of the franchise. In early November, Connie Mack and his sons sold the team to — and the league approved the franchise’s transfer to — Kansas City.

Why did it come to this? Did the A’s have to leave? Here are some of the major factors:

Dismantling the champions

Connie Mack had built two dynasties during his half-century running the A’s — one that reigned from 1910–14, the other from 1929–1931. Driven by concerns over the team’s financial prospects, he dismantled both. After 1931, Bob Warrington says, “Mack decided that he could do what he had done before with the first dynasty — sell off his best players and then build a new one. The problem is it didn’t work this time. The selloff of the second dynasty signaled the end of the Athletics as a team that could compete for the American League pennant.”

Lack of civic interest

Retired University of Pennsylvania historian Bruce Kuklick says that one reason the Save the A’s campaign failed was the lack of interest on the part of Joe Clark, the mayor of Philadelphia, in 1954. Although Clark had signed on to the effort, Kuklick says his interest was half-hearted at best. “He was very much a Protestant aristocrat who … just didn’t give a shit about baseball.” Kuklick argues that the failure to do more to keep the team in Philadelphia was shortsighted and notes that many cities in the 1950s — including Kansas City — had realized the value of investing in professional sports as “an amenity” for residents. “One of my many gripes about what happened then is that he basically refused to have the city support the team in any way at all,” Kuklick says.

Dynastic struggles

Mack’s longtime plan was to have his first male heirs, Earle and Roy, run the team when he was ready to step down. However, a disagreement over the direction of the A’s in 1950 led to a battle for control of the team. Roy and Earle succeeded in buying out other team shareholders and gaining, with their father, complete ownership of the team. But to raise the money, they were forced to mortgage the team’s stadium, Shibe Park, taking on a debt that would eventually sink them.

Baseball’s changing landscape

The National and American leagues and their 16 teams had been frozen in place for half a century through the early 1950s. That changed in the early 1950s as growing cities in the Midwest and West began seeking major league teams for themselves. Franchises in multi-team markets — New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Boston and St. Louis — were relocation candidates because, typically, one of the teams was struggling financially. Thus, the Boston Braves moved to Milwaukee in 1953, and the St. Louis Browns shifted to Baltimore and became the Orioles in 1954.

Mack in decline

Connie Mack turned 80 at the end of 1942. As the decade progressed, historian Bruce Kuklick says, the “deterioration of Mack’s mind” became obvious in poor trade decisions, mistaken instructions to players during games, and eventually, failure of his memory. “By the late ’40s, he would call out the names of stars of bygone days to pinch-hit.” He was finally replaced as manager late in 1950.

Despite all of the factors weighing against the Athletics, though, the team’s sale and move out of Philadelphia was far from inevitable.

At the end of the 1954 season, American League owners, led by the New York Yankees, appeared ready to approve the sale of the team to a Chicago business executive and real estate speculator named Arnold Johnson, who was prepared to move the team to Kansas City.

The Macks were divided on whether to accept the offer and were twice granted more time to decide. With a league deadline approaching, Roy Mack agreed to join a group of local business owners who were ready to buy the A’s and keep the team in Philadelphia.

But before the sale could be completed, Johnson intervened and promised Roy a bigger ownership stake in the team than he would have gotten from the Philadelphia group, along with a role running the team when it moved to Kansas City.

As detailed in Warrington’s history of the deal, Departure Without Dignity: The Athletics Leave Philadelphia, Roy essentially double-crossed his father, brother and the Philadelphia investors by voting against their proposal in a secret ballot of American League owners.

The A’s were Kansas City-bound.

Epilogue

Kansas City scrambled to double the size of Municipal Stadium in time for the Athletics’ April home opener. The franchise beat its previous attendance record by nearly 50% in its first year in its new home.

But the Kansas City version of the A’s was just as bad as its Philadelphia predecessor. Arnold Johnson didn’t field a competitive team after he moved the team in 1955, in large part because he developed a habit of trading away the team’s best young prospects to the New York Yankees.

Johnson died suddenly during spring training in 1960, and within a year, the Kansas City A’s had a new owner, Charles Oscar Finley, a Chicago-area insurance magnate who had been repeatedly frustrated in his bid to buy a team.

From the moment he gained ownership, he began trying to take the A’s elsewhere. The new homes he considered included Dallas-Fort Worth, Louisville, Milwaukee, Seattle and New Orleans.

During seven seasons as the owner of the Kansas City A’s, he introduced colorful uniforms, adopted a mule as the team mascot, put sheep out to pasture beyond his stadium’s centerfield fence and watched as his team posted one lousy record after another.

In 1967, the American League finally granted Finley permission to move to Oakland, leaving behind an angry Kansas City and beginning the 57-season era that ends in a mix of sorrow and outrage Thursday at the Coliseum. The team Finley brought with him, the product of his investment in young talent, was about to emerge as the one of the best in baseball history.

Recommended reading

• Departure Without Dignity: The Athletics Leave Philadelphia, Bob Warrington’s 14,000-word article for the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR).
• To Everything a Season: Shibe Park and Urban Philadelphia, by University of Pennsylvania historian Bruce Kuklick.
• The Grand Old Man of Baseball: Connie Mack in His Final Years, 1932–1956, the final installment of a three-volume Mack biography by Norman L. Macht.