Swoonin' A's: A's outdrew Royals in the beginning

By Phil Ellenbecker
   From the start, the Royals had it all over the A's in Kansas City in terms of performance on the field. Each team finished third-from-last in their initial season in the American League. The A's were sixth in the eight-team AL in their first year in K.C. after moving from Philadelphia. The Royals took fourth in the six-team AL West in their first year as an expansion club in the AL West.
  But the Royals topped the A's in winning percentage, .426 to .409, as they would in every year in comparison through the time the A's left Kansas City for Oakland in 1968. And the comparison isn't even close. The Royals were a .500 team by their third year. The A's never finished above .474.
  Yet perhaps ironically and surprisingly, the A's actually drew better than the Royals in the two teams' first few years at Municipal Stadium.
  The A's topped 1 million fans in each of their first two years, while the Royals didn't draw a million until their fifth year. The A's brought in more fans than the Royals in three of the first four years the teams were in K.C. And it wasn't close – the margin was 490,640 the first year and was 322,107 the second and 217,435 the fourth. Only in the third year — 1957 vs. 1971  — did the Royals outdraw the Athletics, and the margin was only 9,717.

In a year-by-year comparison, despite performance that didn't match up on the field, the Kansas City A's outdrew the Kansas City Royals for the two teams' first four years in existence. While the A's topped a million fans in their first year, it took the Royals five years to do so.

 The A's drew more than 900,000 in each of their first five years, while the Royals slid to 693,047 in their second year and 707,656 in their fourth.
 It wasn't until their fifth year, 1973, when the Royals moved into their brand-spanking-new stadium, that they topped the A's and topped the million mark for the first time.
  And that's the way it stayed. The Royals were above a million the next year and have been ever since. The A's never brought in more than the 774,944 they drew in 1960, bottoming out at 528,344 in 1965 (an average of 6,500 a game)
   So why were the A's more popular than the Royals at the start? You got me. Perhaps Kansas City baseball fans were still miffed over the way the A's left town in 1967 when the Royals arrived two years alter.  Or perhaps living up to Missouri's Show Me State motto, they were waiting for a winner. Yet three years in the Royals were winning more than they lost and their attendance backslid from 910,784 to 707,656 one year later.
  Perhaps the stadium condition had something to do with it. While Municipal had been spruced up for its major league arrival in 1955, it was on list last legs by 1969. Certainly the new stadium made a difference in 1973.
  Yet these explanations don't entirely suffice to me. I would have thought the Royals would have generated more enthusiasm than they did. I'd like to see a study of this some day by somebody more learned and ambitious than me. At any rate, those are the facts.