The long strange journey of the Athletics before they came to Oakland saw one failed team turn into another.  A thirteen year experiment beginning in 1955 brought the first season of the Kansas City Athletics.  The former Philadelphia team, it’s reverential powerhouse days behind it, was broke and was purchased and moved by industrialist Arnold Johnson. 

Johnson is not remembered very favorably.  That is normal for owners who move teams, but what is not normal is that he isn’t remembered fondly in the city where he brought a team either.  His concern is said to have been more for profits than for the people of Kansas City.  The team brought with it much excitement and the A’s enjoyed record attendance in their first year.  Unfortunately they never saw anywhere near those kinds of numbers again.

There were a number of unsavory suggestions of bad dealings going on with the New York Yankees that really kept the A’s from ever competing.  Johnson was a Yankee man, his friends were Yankee execs, he had an ownership stake in Yankee Stadium, and he owned the stadium of the Yankee minor league team, the Kansas City Blues, which he sold back to the city and then leased out with an escape clause.  Indeed the A’s were a bit closer to the Yanks than anyone really liked, and so it was said that any talent that the new Kansas City Athletics accrued would be immediately traded away to the Yanks.

It didn’t help that rumors began cropping up early on that Johnson had no intentions of keeping the team in Kansas City, and instead was going to take the team out to sunny Los Angeles after a few years.  Whether that was ever his intent, it never happened, the Brooklyn Dodgers claimed the LA territory first in 1958 and Johnson died in 1960.

The team was purchased from Arnold Johnson’s estate by Charlie Finley, who interestingly had been beaten out by Johnson earlier in Philly.  Finley made a good number of changes to the team, including changing the colors from blue and red to the now iconic Kelly and gold, but he couldn’t make them into winners.

He certainly made good efforts to endear himself to the populous, however, including updates to the stadium, public announcements that the team would stay, and the inclusion of Kansas City on the uniforms.  He absolved all connections with the Yankees and set out to create a winning ballclub.  Finley was nothing if not a showman and due to his visionary status and the winning club he would later develop in Oakland he is generally remembered well.

But, like Arnold before him, Finley was never really invested in Kansas City.  Things get a bit thorny at this juncture.  A contract was signed by Finley to move the team to Louisville, Kentucky in 1964.  The timing of this, a scant four years after acquiring the team, indicates that Finely was likely looking to move the team from the outset.  This deal, left to the approval of the American League owners, was rejected.

The consolation was brief for the people of Kansas City as the team was moved to Oakland for the 1968 season.  Fortunately for Kansas City, they only had one baseball-less year before the Royals came to town.

And so there are the broad strokes.  It’s not unusual for teams to have been more than one team formerly, but I don’t know of too many that switch multiple cities while retaining the same name and iconography like the A’s did.  But such is the strange twisty world of sports history.