Municipal Stadium in Kansas City

Kansas City’s Municipal Stadium has an interesting past.
Built in 1923 it was originally a single deck park, home of the AA Kansas City Blues. The Negro League Monarchs played here as well. Imagine seeing the great Satchel Paige or Jackie Robinson play there against other Negro League greats!!

The Mack family (of Connie Mack fame) couldn’t make up its mind whether to sell the Philadelphia Athletics and have the team move to Kansas City or not. When they finally made up their mind the new owners were put into a severe time crunch to get a second deck put on the stadium.

Original construction supposedly allowed for a second deck, but once construction began, it became apparent the footers couldn’t support one. The decision was made to raze the stands and completely replace them. Remarkably the whole park was built in 90 days and by opening day April 12, 1955 it was ready for play. From 1955 to 1967 it was the home of the A’s and from 1969 to 1972 the current World Champion Kansas City Royals played here. One more tidbit – the scoreboard from Braves Field in Boston was transplanted here (a good scoreboard is a terrible thing to waste).

If you scroll down this page there’s an earlier post featuring Charlie Finley’s obsession of tinkering with the dimensions of and adding entertainment to the right field area of the park.

As always I’m indebted to baseball-fever.com and its contributors for many (all?) of these photos.

With the hasty construction that was required, the field on opening day (shown here) was in terrible shape. The field was replaced the following year.

Here’s the same scoreboard with later additions built onto it (including the Fan O Gram, which was also a part of Cleveland Stadium’s scoreboard). I’m not sure how many Fan O Grams were built in ballparks across the country. More research is needed!