Rick Kaplan
Staff Writer

OAKLAND – Roger Maris, Reggie Jackson, Catfish Hunter. World Series champions. Yankee gods.

And former A’s.

Few in New York even remember that Maris was an K.C. Athletic first. Or that the “invincible” Yankees of 1927-28 were utterly destroyed by the mighty Philadelphia A’s of 1929.

Our Reggie wears a Yankee cap in Cooperstown. That hurts. At least Catfish stuck with us.

And there was the Berkeley Brawler, Billy Martin. Wanting to be a Yankee for life, he was demoted to the A’s (the Kansas City version). For a New York loyalist, it was the equivalent of a degrading banishment to baseball Siberia.

Click below for more!Could there be some bad blood here? A simmering rivalry?

Uh-uh, no. Rivalries are more like the Yankees and Red Sox, the Raiders and the Broncos. The Dodgers and the Giants, Stanford and Cal, Oakland Tech and Mack. All nice, solid rivalries.

But the A’s and the Yankees?

No, this is not just a rivalry, or even a feud. This is about loyalty and betrayal, about history and conquest.

This is a war.

Not a war of guns and bombs, of course, but a war just the same, a war fought with bats and balls and lots of money. This is a clandestine war that has in fact been raging for nearly one hundred years, complete with covert operations, Benedict Arnold-like turncoats, and palace intrigues.

Sounds implausible? Keep reading.

Following the 1959 campaign, the Yankees obtained Roger Maris from the Kansas City A’s for the forgettable Marv Throneberry, normal Norm Siebern, a post-perfect Don Larsen, and a weathered Hank Bauer.

You see, Yankee owner Dan Topping, according to David L. Fleitz, writing for BaseballAlmanac.com, had “arranged for one of his business friends, Arnold Johnson, to buy the A’s and move the club to Kansas City” in 1955. Adding to the intrigue, and innuendo of collaboration, Arnold Johnson also happened to own a sizable piece of Yankee Stadium, at the same time as his club was ostensibly competing with the Yankees.

Before the Maris trade, Harry Craft, the K.C. manager, who apparently didn’t know who Arnold Johnson’s friends were, told a reporter, “We want to keep Maris. We think he can be another Mantle.”

Many baseball lifers (and, no doubt, a few law enforcement officials) have already questioned the suprisingly public and scandalous character of the overwhelmingly lopsided player transactions between the Yankees and the A’s during the late 1950’s.

Pitcher Ralph Terry came to the Yankees in 1959, a year before Maris, and went on to shut out the Giants 1-0 in the classic seventh game of the 1962 World Series (after having given up Bill Mazeroski’s historic blast in the seventh game in 1960). And a long line of important supporting characters, the likes of Clete Boyer, Hector Lopez, Bob Cerv, Enos Slaughter, Ryne Duren, Art Ditmar, Bobby Shantz, Duke Mass,and Bud Daley, shuttled back and forth between the unofficial Yankee farm club in K.C. and the Bronx as needed.

Ten players on the powerhouse 1961 Yankee World Series champs came from the Kansas City A’s.

The character of this parasitic relationship certainly shifted with the acquisition of the A’s by the rabidly anti-Yankee Charley Finley in 1960 after the death of Arnold Johnson.
(Although, inexplicably, Finley sent Bud Daley, the A’s best pitcher, to the Bronx in June of 1961 in exchange of for Art Ditmar. Daley won eight games for the Yankees, while Ditmar was 0-6 for the A’s.)

There were skirmishes with Topping and company over Finley’s “Yankee Pennant Porch,” a notorious chalk line across the right field grass at Municipal Stadium in K.C. that rudely reminded everyone about the skimpy dimensions of the home run-friendly right field corner in Yankee Stadium. And, in 1981, none other than Billy Martin valiantly led his young troops in a guerilla campaign, a.k.a. Billy Ball, that nearly stole the AL pennant from his former clan from the Bronx.

But, in the meantime, the bleeding of the A’s talent still continued intermittently.

After a decade of mediocrity, the still well-endowed Bombers were re-arming in the mid-1970’s. Catfish Hunter, the soul and stopper of the Athletics’ 1972-74 World Champion staff, was lured to New York in 1975. Then, after leaving Oakland and summering for single season in Baltimore, Reggie Jackson arrived in the Bronx in 1977. And, as we all know, he brought his Oakland-brewed post-season magic with him.

Ken Holzman and Mike Torrez, who became the pitching hero of the Yankees’ 1977 World Series victory, further strengthened the Yankees at the expense of their former Oakland club. An argument could be made that the 1977-78 champion Yankees were resurrected upon the ashes of the 1972-74 Athletics.

Yet, somehow, despite the resiliency to keep bouncing back from the ravages of Yankee imperialism, and a franchise resume that should easily earn the Athletics their rightful place among the elite teams in baseball history, they always seem to be inexplicably brushed aside as perennial bridesmaids, rather than worthy opponents.

The imperial Yankees have won most of the battles decisively and reaped the spoils. But the truth is that the talent-rich and dollar-poor Athletics, nomadically barnstorming from Philadelphia to Kansas City to Oakland, relentlessly continue relocating, resupplying, and coming back for more.

In 1914, in the same year as the assasination of the Austrian archduke Ferdinand that helped to trigger World War I, and only thirteen years after the American League was organized, the A’s were in the red $50,000. This being quite a sizable sum at the time, Connie Mack, the A’s owner and manager-for-life, was forced to turn down a deal to buy for $10,000 a young, pre-legendary pitcher from the minor league Baltimore Orioles named Babe Ruth.

Like the snuffing of the archduke, this event may very well have set the proverbial wheels in motion that led to a century of bitter conflict. A rumble in which the two teams are still embroiled today, here on the eve of the 2006 season opener in Oakland.

One can only speculate on the look of a different scenario in which Connie Mack had the deep pockets of a George Steinbrenner, and the Babe had first dressed in the Green and Gold.

Instead, in spite of having won the AL pennant in 1914, and the World Series in 1911 and 1913, the nearly impovershed Mack, foreshadowing Charley O’Finley’s fire sale of the mid-70’s, began selling off his ace hurlers, including Bob Shawkey and Herb Pennock and his “$100,000 infield,” including the great Eddie Collins and Frank Baker.

The Yankees, of the bankers’ pinstripes, couldn’t have been happier. Each time Mack went looking for cash, as he would again following the brilliant run of the great ’29-’30-’31 A’s clubs, the more affluent teams, and especially the Yankees, would be waiting with open checkbooks for the mother lode of stars the A’s were discarding.

Thus, out of the bad fortune of the Athletics, begun baseball’s version of the Ming Dynasty. The Yankees hadn’t yet won anything before 1921. It was the earlier arrival of Frank “Home Run” Baker, the ranking slugger of the dead ball era, which helped them win their first AL pennant in 1921, and pitchers Shawkey, Pennock, and Joe Bush hurled the Bronx nine to their initial World Series victory in 1923.

But revenge wasn’t long in coming for the Athletics. In one of American history’s most overlooked and startling turnarounds, the “invincible” 1927-28 World Champion New York Yankees of Ruth and Gehrig, often referred to as “the greatest club in history,” finished the 1929 season 18 games behind the A’s. This Athletics club of Al Simmons, Jimmy Foxx, Mickey Cochrane, and Lefty Grove, Hall of Famers all, went on to win two consecutive World Series and three straight pennants.

This wasn’t the only time that the A’s have escaped the long shadow of the Yankees.

Everyone knows that the Bronx Bombers have collected a nearly unimaginable twenty-six World Series titles, a record that is unable to ever be surpassed, at least in this solar system.

Here is your two-minute-drill question: Which organization holds second-highest total of crowns in all of baseball? The Dodgers? The Giants? Cincinnatti? Detroit? No, it’s the Athletics, together with the Cardinals, in a tie with nine world titles apiece.

The 1998 book Baseball Dynasties lists fifteen teams since 1900 that the authors consider to have been so superior that they rate the designation “dynasty.” Of the fifteen, five were various Yankee clubs, the teams of 1927, 1939, 1953, 1961, and 1998.

Only one other organization, the Athletics, was named more than once. The three A’s dynasties cited were in 1911, 1929, and 1974. And if it wasn’t for that unforgettable Robert Redford imitation by Kirk Gibson in the 1988 Series, the authors would have probably given them a fourth.

In a similar vein, only five franchises have gone to the World Series for three or more consecutive seasons. The Yankees have had seven such streaks; 1926-28 (three in a row), 1936-39 (four), 1941-43 (three), 1949-53 (five), 1955-58 (four), 1960-64 (five), and 1998-2001 (four). Wow!

The A’s have had three; 1929-31 (three), 1972-74 (three), and 1988-1990 (three). Of the three other clubs in all of MLB in this elite group, including the Giants in 1921-24 (four), the Cubs in 1906-08 (three), and the Cardinals in 1942-45 (four), none has had more than one such streak.

Yet, it would be easy think that the Red Sox have been the ones locked in mortal combat with the Yankees, constantly challenging the preeminient Bombers, since virtually the dawn of organized baseball.

Before Boston’s 2004 World Series victory, there was an unbearably inflated myth circulating throughout baseball that the Red Sox and their fans had suffered greater disappointment than all others since their last Series victory in 1918.

To this I ask: What is more painful, to have been a fair-to-middling franchise whose greatest achievements during that eighty-eight year interlude were occasionally competing with the Yankees for the AL pennant, having won their last flag in 1986 prior to 2004?

Or, as has befallen the truly cursed Athletics, to have been flirting with immortality nearly constantly since the inception of the American League? All the while continuing to virtually anonymously challenge the Yankees for baseball supremacy.

Then, more recently, and this is real frustration, only winning one more Series title, despite regular post-season appearances, since that dastardly one-legged home run in 1988, and nearly being robbed of even the 1989 triumph by the goddess Loma Prieta.

By comparison, how can Red Sox fans kvetch about anything but Bill Buckner – especially since 1986? While the Bosox won nothing, the A’s were capturing eight divisional titles in this period and, woe is me, went to the final game in four consecutive ALDS from 2000-2003. Who really suffered, the also-rans from Beantown, or the not-quite-great-enoughs of Oaktown?.

Back to the Yankees and A’s. Most recently, the Yankees harvested Jason Giambi from the A’s in 2002. This seemed to dull the A’s recent ascendancy momentarily, yet it didn’t lift the Yankees back onto their throne. To the surprise of many, and the delight of A’s fans, the Athletics successfully thwarted the Yankees attempted mid-summer’s raid on centerfield last season and signed the popular Mark Kotsay to a multi-year deal

Now there is talk that Barry Zito, in his free agency year and with a market value that could potentially bankrupt the A’s and even force them out of the Coliseum sooner than later, should they end up retaining him, may ultimately be headed to the Bronx by July 31.

So, the war continues. Even as a new crop of future Yankees man the front for the A’s.