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). |