Arnold M. Johnson (Jan. 11, 1906 in Chicago, Illinois – March 3, 1960 in West Palm Beach, Florida) was an American industrialist, businessman and sportsman, who purchased the Philadelphia Athletics baseball club and moved it to Kansas City, Missouri in the autumn of 1954. He had a son, Jeffery and a daughter, Wendy.
A native of Chicago and graduate of the University of Chicago, Johnson enjoyed a highly successful business career. He was a stockbroker and banker, served on the board of directors of a number of corporations, and invested in the Chicago Black Hawks of the National Hockey League.
Buying, and moving, the Philadelphia Athletics
In December 1953, Johnson entered baseball through a real estate transaction by purchasing the top two playing venues of the perennial champion New York Yankees — Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, and Blues Stadium in Kansas City, home of the Yanks' top farm club, the Kansas City Blues. Concurrently, struggling major league baseball teams—especially "second" teams in two-team cities—were abandoning their old homes. Spurred by Kansas City officials, Johnson decided to bring a major league team to town, and found a target in the Philadelphia Athletics.
The Athletics of Connie Mack had once been one of the pillars of the American League, with nine pennants and five World Series wins to their credit; however, the team's chronic failures on the field since the early 1930s and its lack of resources undermined it. Most seriously, Mack either could not or would not spend money on building a farm system. In the 1940s, two fatal blows were struck.
First, in , the Phillies of the National League were bought by lumber baron William D. Cox. The Phillies had long been the definition of baseball futility (they had only one winning season from 1918 to 1948), in part because their owners either did not or could not spend the money it took to build a winner. They had played at Shibe Park as tenants of the A's since . When Cox bought the Phillies, in the midst of World War II, he began to spend money on signing young players; like the A's, the Phillies had not had a competitive farm system for most of their history. Cox was forced out after one year for betting on his own team, but his successor as owner, DuPont heir Bob Carpenter, began building out a farm system, hired Herb Pennock as general manager, and spent lavishly on young prospects. Many of these young players helped the once-moribund Phillies win their second-ever National League pennant in . For most of the first half of the 20th century, Philadelphia had been an "A's town", even though the Athletics had fielded teams as bad or worse than the Phillies for a decade. However, in 1946 the Phillies began outdrawing the A's, and in 1949 permanently surpassed them as Philadelphia's favorite team. This culminated in 1950, when the A's crumbled to the worst record in baseball while the Phillies' "Whiz Kids" won the pennant.
Second, the franchise was enveloped in a power struggle between two branches of the Mack family—essentially, Roy and Earle, Mack's two sons from his first marriage, were ranged against Connie's second wife and their son from that union, Connie Jr. Roy and Earle were unwilling to depart from their family's bargain-basement approach to running the team, and dismissed their half-brother's proposed innovations almost out of hand. Connie Jr. then made an alliance with the heirs of franchise co-founder Benjamin Shibe, and began taking steps to upgrade the team and the park. One of the few things on which the two factions agreed was that it was time for Connie Sr. to step down as manager; the three brothers persuaded their father to retire at the end of the season though he nominally remained team president. Matters came to a head when Connie Jr. and the Shibes decided to sell the team. However, Roy and Earle ended the struggle by buying out their half-brother and the Shibes in July. However, to do so, they mortgaged the team to Connecticut General Life Insurance Company (now part of CIGNA) and pledged Shibe Park as collateral. As the A's languished at the bottom of the standings, attendance dwindled, depriving the team of badly needed revenue that could have serviced the debt. By 1954, the once-proud team was close to bankruptcy. The Macks were all but forced to put the team up for sale.