Swoonin’ A’s, Part I: Welcome to the bigs

By Phil Ellenbecker
Three weeks and nine games into the 1955 season, Kansas City received a rude how-di-do to major league baseball.
Not that the Athletics’ first season in the American League and Kansas City’s first in major league baseball, after a move from Philadelphia, had been a honeymoon up until then. The A’s entered their Saturday, April 23 game with Chicago with a 2-6 record.
Then the bottom fell out. The White Sox raked through six Kansas City pitchers for 29 hits en route to 29-6 shellacking before before a crowd of 18,338 at Municipal Stadium.
It got ugly before it got uglier. Chicago jumped on Kansas City for a 4-0 lead in the top of the first, but the A’s closed to 4-3 in the bottom of the inning. The White Sox responded with seven runs in the second and three more in the third for a 14-3 lead, then made it more unsightly with six more runs in the sixth and seven more in the seventh and eighth frames.
Starting pitcher Bobby Shantz, the American League’s 1952 MVP while the A’s were in Philadelphia, absorbed most of the damage, surrendering nine runs, eight earned, in 1 2//3 innings. But no one got off easy for the KC pitching staff this day. Lee Wheat (two earned runs in 1/3 inning), Bob Trice (5 ER, 1 1/3 IP), Moe Burtschy (6 ER, 2 1/3 IP), Bob Spicer (5 ER, 1 2/3 IP) and Ozzie Van Brabant (2 ER, 1 2/3 IP) all had hefty damage done to their ERA.

Bobby Shantz, the 1952 American League MVP, gave up nine runs in 1 2/3 innings of the Kansas City Athletics’ 29-6 loss to the Chicago White Sox on April 23, 1955, nine games in the first season for the A’s in Kansas City.

(Season stats for those who mopped up for Shantz: Wheat, 22.50 ERA in two innings pitched; Trice, 9.00 ERA, 10 IP; Burtschy, 10.32 ERA,  11.1 IP; Spicer, 33.75, 2.2 IP; Van Brabant, 18.00, 2 IP. The A’s had the AL’s worst ERA that year of 5.35.)
(Wheat, Trice and Van Brabant were gone for good from the major leagues by next season. Burtschy and Spicer were gone after 1956. Burtschy, who had a blazing fastball but was constantly plagued by lack of control, actually wasn’t too bad in his final season: 3-1 record, 3.95 ERA in 43 IP; Spicer, on the other hand, 19.29, giving him a final major league ERA of 27.00 0 in 5.0 innings.)
Thirteen White Sox runs on April 23 came across courtesy of the long ball. Bob Nieman was the biggest basher, unloading a three-run homer in the first inning and a two-run shot in the third en route to a 3-for-4 day with seven runs batted in from his No. 5 slot in the lineup. Those were Nieman’s fourth and fifth homers of the season — nearly halfway to an 11-homer season with 53 RBI and a .283 average. (Nieman was a pretty solid hitter in a 13-year career with a .295 average and a best number of homers of 21 in 1959).
Sherman Lollar, the No. 8 hitter, also padded his stats with two solo homers, his first two four-baggers of the year, as he went 5 for 6 with 5 RBIs. Minnie Minoso went 4 for 5 with 5 RBIs, including a two-run homer.
Perhaps if Jim Finnegan hadn’t erred on Minoso’s grounder in the top of the first it might have been different. Maybe. Chico Carrasquel singled to center leading off the game and Nellie Fox flied out. Carrasquel scored on Finnegan’s error and two batters later Nieman unloaded his first homer, scoring Minoso and George Kell. Shantz retired the next two batters.
After the A’s came back with three in their half of the first, including a two-run homer by Bill Renna, Lollar led off the second with a homer as the White Sox began to pull away with seven runs.
And that’s about all you need to know. Ugly from the start. And the rest, you could say, is history. Ugly history. All the way through 1967. And then onto Oakland and better days.

The swoonin’ A’s: Glimpses at some lowlights and highlights of the Kansas City A’s, 1955-1967

By Phil Ellenbecker
Hi, welcome to “The Swoonin’ A’s.” I’ve never tried to be a blogger before but I thought I’d try it by trotting out one of my favorite subjects — the hopelessly hapless Kansas City A’s, who spend 13 ignominous seasons at Municipal Stadium The Athletics’ finishes in those years in the American League, in order — sixth, eighth, seventh, seventh, seventh, seventh (consistency!), eighth, ninth, eighth, 10th, 10th, seventh and 10th (AL was eight team through 1960, 10 teams after that). Five last-place finishes, never better than .500, best record 73-39, .474 winning percentage in 1958, good for seventh place; most wins, 74 in 1’66, also good for seventh place, best finish for K.C. since the AL went to 10 teams and equivalent to its sixth in the first year in the city in ’55. Those were the best finishes for the A’s in their 13 years.
(The title for this blog comes from “The Swingin’ A’s,” the Athletics’ slogan during the late 1960s and early 1970s and which appeared on their team logo.)
For a truly informed opinion on the A’s in those years, find Bill James’ 1986 “Baseball Abstract” and read his essay on what it was like to be a fan of the A’s back then. An excerpt:
“Under current conditions it would be very difficult, if not impossible, for any baseball team to become as bad as the Kansas City Athletics were … Thirteen straight losing seasons … not many teams have ever had thirteen … even the Browns. Even the St. Louis Browns, the hapless Brownies … yes, even the Browns never had thirteen consecutive losing seasons.
“This one fact, however depressing, testifies only to the duration of the frustration; there was more to it than that. The A’s not only never had a winning record, they never came close to having a winning record. They were never in any danger of having a winning record.”
The most entertaining parts of James’ essay were about Charlie Finley and all the crazy ideas he brought aboard when he became the A’s owner in the 1960s. There were many, but my favorite was Finley’s effort to move the fences in at Municipal Stadium, because he figured the reason the Yankees won so many pennants was their short porch 296 feet, down the right-field line. The new right-field dimensions would be named “Pennant Porch.” When informed that current rules prevented him from moving in the fences closer than 325, Finley had a line painted in the outfield where he wanted to have the fences placed. Then he instructed the public address announcer to, whenever a ball was caught past the  line, to say, “That would have been a home run in Yankee Stadium.”
When it became apparent that far more batted balls were flying beyond the pseudo fence line by opponents than Athletics, the order was withdrawn.

This is the logo the Kansas City A’s used from 1955-1962, inherited from the white elephant mascot Connie Mack used for the A’s in Philadelphia.

This is the logo the Kansas City A’s used from 1962-1967, incorporating the green and gold colors Charlie Finley brought to the team when he took over as owner.

I came along too late as a Kansas City baseball fan for the A’s (I started with the Royals in 1969), but I developed an early interest in them when I discovered some 8×10 photos of A’s player that my brothers had collected on visits to A’s games when they were kids. (I can still recall some of them — Hector Lopez, Joe DeMaestri, Virgil Trucks, Ned Garver; wish I know what happened to them.) The fascination kept growing through the years.
What added to the fascination was how well the A’s did after they left Kansas City. Three straight world championships from 1972-74, and added success since then.
Along the way I’ve collected a few stories and box scores through the years, and now I’m attempting to put them together in a written fashion. I’ve tried to have fun with this, going beyond a straight-forward account to throw in some what I thought to be interesting sidenotes and trivia. In other words, I just wrote what I damned well pleased. Isn’t that what blogging’s all about?
This is by no means meant to be anywhere near a comprehensive look at the highs and lows of the Kansas City A’s from 1955-1967. It’s just some things I’ve come across. If anybody out there reads this and has anything to add — either story ideas or stories you have written — feel free to chip in.
Hope you enjoy and that this wasn’t a complete waste of time.
P.S. It’s just a coincidence, I believe, that each of these game accounts involve the Chicago White Sox, although the White Sox are one of my favorites teams besides the Royals. When the A’s and White Sox hooked up back then, wacky things seemed to happen.
Also, all of the detail in these accounts came from retrosheet.org and baseballreference.com, which I consider to be the greatest contributions ever to the internet.

First blog post

This is your very first post. Click the Edit link to modify or delete it, or start a new post. If you like, use this post to tell readers why you started this blog.