Kauffman Stadium
(Royals Stadium)

Home of the
Kansas City Royals
In 1955 Kansas City was in celebration. They finally had a Major League Baseball team to call their own. Little did they know that when the Philadelphia Athletics moved to K.C. from Connie Mack Stadium in Philadelphia, that it was merely a stop-over on Chuck Finley's mass migration to Oakland California; a move caught Kansas City by surprise. The A's had been playing baseball in the same ballpark that the Triple-A Kansas City Blues and the Negro League's KC Monarchs teams had used for decades... Kansas City Municipal Stadium (Muelbach Park). Kansas City however was promising Charles Finley that a contract extension to keep the Kansas City Athletics in K.C. would co-inside with a brand new ballpark for the team. With that, Charles Finley signed on the dotted line. Now that the contract extension now signed, Kansas City went ahead with plans to build not one, but two new stadiums for the city. This move was actually incontrary to what had been going on in professional sports stadia. At the time, classic ballparks were being torn down with terrible regularity for multi-purpose doughnut shaped sterile stadia. Examples of this kind of structure were Busch Stadium in St. Louis, Veteran's Stadium in Philadelphia, Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati, Atlanta Fulton County Stadium in Atlanta and perhaps the ugliest of them all... Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh.  In 1967 Kansas City bucked the trend and instead, began the planning process of building Arrowhead Stadium for the Kansas City Chiefs and an as of yet unnamed ballpark for the Athletics. With the lease signed, construction forged ahead. What K.C. didn't know is that Finley was begging the American League to allow him to move to the West Coast, complaining of low attendance figures. Finley had suffered from committment issues with Kansas City in the past, trying twice to leave K.C.... once in 1962 to Dallas, and then again in 1964 to Louisville (which would have been interesting).