page_title: History of the Oakland Athletics
section_title: The Johnson era
hierarchical_section_title: History of the Oakland Athletics / Kansas City (1955–1967) / The Johnson era
caption_attribution_description: English: The logo for the Kansas City Athletics baseball team from 1963 to 1967
context_page_description: The history of the Athletics Major League Baseball franchise spans the period from 1901 to the present day, having begun as a charter member franchise in the new American League in Philadelphia before moving to Kansas City in 1955 for 13 seasons and then to its current home on the San Francisco Bay in Oakland, California, in 1968.
context_section_description: In 1954, Chicago real estate magnate Arnold Johnson (1906-1960),  bought the Philadelphia Athletics and after 54 years on the Delaware River, moved them to Kansas City, Missouri. Although he was initially a hero for making Kansas City a major-league town, it soon became apparent that he was motivated more by profit than any regard for the baseball fans of Kansas City. He had long been a business associate of New York Yankees owners Dan Topping, Larry MacPhail and Del Webb, and had even bought Yankee Stadium in 1953, though the league owners forced Johnson to sell the property before acquiring the Athletics. He'd also bought Blues Stadium in Kansas City, home of the Yankees' top Triple AAA level Minor league baseball farm team, the Kansas City Blues of the second  American Association. After Johnson got permission from the American League  to move the A's from the "City of Brotherly Love" to Kansas City, he sold Blues Stadium to the city, which renamed it Kansas City Municipal Stadium and leased it back to Johnson. The lease gave Johnson a three-year escape clause if the team failed to draw one million or more customers per season. The subsequent lease signed in 1960 also contained an escape clause if the team failed to draw 850,000 per season.
  Normally, Johnson would have had to pay the Yankees an indemnity for moving to Kansas City, and also would have had to reimburse the Yankees for the costs they incurred for moving the Blues to Denver, Colorado (playing as the Denver Bears 1955-1962),  to make way for the A's.  Major-league rules of the time gave the Yankees the major-league rights to Kansas City.  However, the Yankees waived these payments as soon as the purchase was approved.  This, combined with the Yankees' thinly concealed support for the sale, led to rumors of collusion between Johnson and the Yankees.
  Rumors abounded that Johnson's real motive was to operate the Athletics in Kansas City for a few years, then move the team to Los Angeles (the Brooklyn Dodgers would later move there from New York City after the 1957 season).  Whatever the concern about the move to Kansas City, fans turned out in record numbers for the era. In 1955, the Kansas City Athletics drew 1,393,054 to Municipal Stadium, a club record easily surpassing the previous record of 945,076 in 1948; in fact, it was the third-highest attendance figure in the majors, behind only the all-powerful Yankees and the also recently relocated Milwaukee Braves in the National League (1953-1965). That number would never be approached again while the team was in Kansas City, and would remain the club record for attendance until 1982—the Athletics' 15th season in Oakland.  This was mainly because the A's were barely competitive; in five years under Johnson's ownership, the closest they got to a winning record was 1958, when they finished 73–81, eight games below .500 and 19 games out of first.
  Johnson's previous business ties to the Yankees resulted in several trades between the Athletics and the "Bronx Bombers" that helped keep the New York dynasty afloat. Invariably, any good young A's player was traded to the Yankees for aging veterans and cash. Over the years, Johnson would trade such key players as Roger Maris, Bobby Shantz, Héctor López, Clete Boyer, Art Ditmar and Ralph Terry to New York; in return, he did receive some talented younger players such as Norm Siebern and Jerry Lumpe, and the cash helped the team pay the bills. However, with few exceptions, the trades were heavily weighted in favor of the Yankees. This led to accusations from fans, reporters and even other teams that Johnson ran the A's as a Yankee farm team at the major-league level; ironic, since the old Kansas City Blues had been the Yankees' top minor league affiliate from 1936 to 1954.
  On the positive side, Johnson devoted attention to player development for the first time in the history of the franchise. Under longtime owner and manager Connie Mack (1862-1956), the A's did not or could not spend any money building a farm system, a major reason why Mack's Philadelphia teams fell from W
caption: Kansas City Athletics logo, 1963–1967
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