Corporate ownership comes to baseball

During baseball’s golden years, teams were owned by men who treasured the game and dabbled in the business. In the 1950s, the teams were bought by corporations whose executives hoarded the business and dabbled in the game. These new owners changed the nature of baseball. They blurred traditions, alienated players and lost the loyalty of the fans. When a company adulterates its product, alienates its workers, loses customer loyalty (think of your parents’ favorite car company), the company often fails.

Who were some of these new owners, and how did they turn baseball from America’s secular religion into just another industry that has lost touch with its customers?

In 1954, after years of financial struggle, Hall of Fame manager Connie Mack was forced to sell his Philadelphia Athletics to a Chicago real estate investor, Arnold Johnson, a close business associate of Del Webb and Dan Topping. , two real estate investors who had purchased the New York Yankees from the estate of Jacob Ruppert.

When Ruppert bought the Yankees in 1915, they were the third-best team in New York, far behind the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers, a perennial Second Division successor to the Highlanders. They had played their games at Hilltop Park until 1913, when the Giants allowed them to play at the Polo Grounds. Between 1915 and his death in 1939, Ruppert built the Yankees into the most successful team in professional sports history. He bought Babe Ruth from the Red Sox, built Yankee Stadium and the Yankees’ farm system, hired Ed Barrow from the Red Sox as General Manager, and hired Miller Huggins and Joe McCarthy as Field Managers. All three were elected to the Hall of Fame and Ruppert and his three managers were four of the men most responsible for creating baseball’s golden years. From 1921 to 1946, the Yankees won fifteen American League championships and ten World Series under him.

Arnold Johnson, the real estate investor who bought the A’s from Connie Mack in 1954, then undertook a series of tie-in transactions worthy of a member of Congress. He bought Yankee Stadium from his partners, Del Webb and Dan Topping, leased it back to them, bought Blues Stadium, home of the Kansas City Blues (the Yankees’ main farm team), and to avoid conflict of interest regulations against ownership interests in two major league teams (the Yanks and Athletics), he sold Yankee Stadium to his own attorney without a written contract. That got Johnson’s American League approval to buy the A’s and then, by promising to bring a major league team to town, Johnson got Kansas City to buy Blues Stadium, rename it Municipal Stadium and pay to upgrade it to the A’s. Major League standards. As a final touch, Johnson turned over the construction contract for the improvement to the construction company owned by his former partner Del Webb, who was believed to have ties to organized crime.

The final touch was agreeing to a three-year lease on the newly renovated stadium, with an escape clause that allowed him to terminate the lease if the new team, now called KC Athletics for Kansas City, couldn’t get a loan. million in attendance during any of the three years.

During 1954, the Philadelphia Athletic’s attendance had fallen below 300,000 and Johnson’s insistence on the escape clause sparked rumors that his real intention was to move the team to Los Angeles, which at the time had yet to attract fans. Brooklyn Dodgers. However, becoming a major league baseball city so excited Kansas City that in 1955 the KC Athletics finished sixth and drew 1.4 million fans to Municipal Stadium, the second highest in the league.

In 1956, however, they finished last, attendance dropped to one million, and in the following years it steadily declined. Johnson began selling and trading his best players to his former associates, Yankees owners Webb and Topping. He traded Art Ditmar, Bobby Shantz, Clete Boyer, Ryne Duren, Ralph Terry and Héctor López to the Yankees, and in 1959 he sent them Roger Maris, who the following year broke Babe Ruth’s record of sixty home runs in a single season. . Ruth’s record had stood since 1927, but in 1960 Maris reached sixty-one and was voted the Most Valuable Player in the American League. The Yankees won the pennant with three former Athletics in the starting lineup and four former Athletics among their top pitchers. During Johnson’s brief tenure as owner, the Yankees and A’s traded some fifty-seven players, and despite the acceptance by the American League that there was no conflict of interest, baseball fans began to refer to the A’s as the team. Yankees major league farm. .

In 1960, Johnson died of a brain hemorrhage and another businessman, insurance salesman Charles O. Finley, bought control of the A’s from Johnson’s widow. Finley’s first act was to buy a bus, drive it to Yankee Stadium, and set it on fire as a sign that the special relationship under which Kansas City had been selling its best players to the Yankees was over. After Finley burned the bus, he performed a second burning ceremony. This time he withheld what he said was the Municipal Stadium lease with the escape clause and burned it too. But it was a blank lease that he had bought at a local stationery store.

Secretly, Finley was in talks to move his newly purchased team to Dallas. When that didn’t work out, he opened negotiations to move it to Louisville. The A’s uniforms bore the Kansas City initials KC, and Finley thought he could save money and keep the KC uniforms by changing the team name to the Kentucky Colonels. American League owners vetoed the move to Louisville, Finley couldn’t think of another city where he could wear KC uniforms, and the A’s temporarily stayed in Kansas City.

Finley felt that baseball was too slow and boring for new 1960s fans. To add excitement (and save the expense of buying the two traditional uniforms, white for home games and gray for road games) , changed the A’s colors to “Fort Knox gold, Kelly green, and white wedding dress.” He replaced the traditional black spikes with white ones.

Other innovations he introduced or attempted to introduce were orange baseballs instead of white ones, sheep grazing with dyed wool on outfield grass to avoid mowing, designated hitters, designated baserunners or “pinch-offs”, and the change from the traditional four balls and three strikes per batter, to three balls and two strikes. When he tested that innovation in an exhibition game, Athletic pitchers walked sixteen batters and slowed the game even further. Another innovation he proposed was a “pitch clock” that awarded batters an automatic ball if a pitcher took more than twenty seconds between pitches.

Between 1961 and 1968, with attendance declining, the A’s finished 10th three times, ninth twice, eighth once, seventh once, and sixth once. During that eight-year period, Finley changed coaches ten times and infuriated players with strict cost controls: putting them in cheap hotels, flying them on low-cost flights instead of charters, giving them ripped uniform pants and old jerseys from two years. At the same time, he turned the team’s poor performance to his advantage by cleverly using the player selection procedure whereby the teams with the worst records got the top picks.

From 1965 through 1967, Finley drafted Rick Monday ($104,000 bonus), Reggie Jackson ($85,000), and Sal Bando ($25,000) and signed as free agents Bert Campaneris ($500), Catfish Hunter ($50,000), Gene Tenace, Joe Rudi, Rollie Fingers ($37,500 combined) Vida Blue ($35,000), Claudell Washington ($3,800) and pitchers Blue Moon Odom, Chuck Dobson and Diego Segui. Finley also made clever use of the reserve clause that tied players to the team they had first signed with until that team agreed to release or trade them.

In 1968, after years of finishing last in the league standings and last in attendance, Finley was hated by his players and despised and mistrusted by fans. After trying to move the team to half a dozen different cities, he finally managed to move the A’s to Oakland in 1968 and had the honor of being condemned on the Senate floor as the most disreputable character ever to be involved in professional sports. . . The same senator who issued that condemnation called Oakland the luckiest city since Hiroshima.