In the annals of sport New York Yankees baseball holds an exalted place. No team in all of organized sports has won as many championships. The Yankee roster includes immortals like Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, Whitey Ford and the irrepressible manager Casey Stengel. Yankee Stadium is such hallowed baseball ground that it had to literally start crumbling before the team would consider abandoning "the house that Ruth built" (a new Yankee Stadium will soon be built close to the old one). There are even those who believe that the team's logo has magical powers.
           In 1954 Douglass Wallop wrote a novel called "The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant", which soon was made into the hit musical "Damn Yankees". In Wallop's story a fan of the losing Washington Senators sells his soul to the Devil to defeat the Bronx Bombers. However, at the same time that the Yankees were becoming the stuff of song and story the organization was involved in some real-world business dealings that would further strengthen the great team but at a cost that could injure the national pastime.
          The new book "The Kansas City A's and the Wrong Half of the Yankees" by Jeff Katz is subtitled, "How the Yankees Controlled Two of the Eight American League Franchises During the 1950s." Katz tells a detailed story of the behind-the-scenes dealings that resulted in Kansas City, Missouri moving up to big league status at the price of becoming (as everyone then called it) "the Yankees major league farm club". The hapless St. Louis Browns had been sold and moved to Baltimore to become the Orioles, the Boston Braves had decamped to Milwaukee and the Philadelphia Athletics looked like a candidate for transplanting. The A's were still owned and managed by the venerable Connie Mack and his family. Any move of a major league baseball team would require the approval of other team owners. The negotiations happened in pretty much a closed system due to baseball's unique exemption from anti-trust laws.
          With narrative and timeline charts, Katz goes step by step through the complex and often secretive moves that finally resulted in the purchase of the A's by Chicago businessman Arnold Johnson. But Johnson's close association with Yankees owners Del Webb and Dan Topping allowed for a series of player trades between 1955 and 59 that strengthened the Yankees and outraged other teams and fans. The list is long and impressive and includes Enos Slaughter, Bobby Shantz, Clete Boyer and finally Roger Maris.
          Kansas City fans were disgusted and Yankee fans could be embarrassed by a circumstance that led to five AL pennants in six years. Even players traded from cellar-dwelling Kansas City to first-place New York were upset. For several years there was a dark cloud over all of organized baseball, and football emerged as America's favorite spectator sport.
          Jeff Katz is a graduate of Binghamton University and a retired stock trader who now lives in Cooperstown, where he currently serves as a village trustee and is close by the research collections of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. He is a member of the Society for American Baseball Research and a contributor to The Baseball Page web site. Katz's imaginative tale of pitcher Sandy Koufax extending his career is included in the anthology "Play It Again: Baseball Experts on What Might Have Been.".
          Katz joins Bill Jaker to discuss "The Kansas City A's and the Wrong Half of the Yankees". You can enter the conversation by calling during the 1pm live broadcast to 1-888/359-9754 or post a comment to WSKG.Radio@Gmail.com.

NEXT TIME: The tremendous changes in medical science over the past two centuries can be traced in one county. The Broome County Medical Society observed its 200th anniversary with a 300-page review of its history. Dr. Francis Gilroy, a Binghamton ophthalmologist who edited the book and wrote the chapters covering the past fifty years, visits OFF THE PAGE on Tuesday, June 26th to share "Reflections on Medicine in Broome County".

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