with late 1950 baseball card images from check out my cards. www.checkoutmycards.com from: www.baseball-almanac.com ....However, by the mid-1950s the other teams appeared to be catching up to the Yankees. Some teams, most notably the Dodgers, moved quickly to sign the excellent African-American players made available by the ending of the color line in 1947. Some good young players decided to sign elsewhere, not wanting to get stuck in the large Yankee farm system. Other teams became more active on the trade front, and built their own minor-league systems, following the model created by Branch Rickey in St. Louis and, later, Brooklyn and Pittsburgh. The Yankees won a record five World Series in a row ending in 1953, but they lost the pennant in 1954 to Cleveland. Their dominance of baseball was threatened. Of course, the Yankees were the richest and most resourceful club in baseball, then as now, and they found a way to ensure a continuous supply of good players. They managed to turn one of their American League rivals, the Kansas City Athletics, into a virtual farm team. How did this happen? Connie Mack's family sold the Philadelphia Athletics in 1954, and Yankee principal owner Dan Topping arranged for one of his business friends, Arnold Johnson, to buy the A's and move the team to Kansas City. It's still unclear how much influence the Yankee ownership held over the A's, but the two teams then embarked on a six-year series of trades. These trades, as we shall see, almost ...
Tags: kansas, city, 1959, knickerbockervillage
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