The History of the Athletics: Every Era, from the First Season to Today

By 4Baseball Staff · November 5, 2026 · 12 min read

A franchise history of the Athletics in six eras, from Connie Mack's Philadelphia pennants through Kansas City, the Oakland dynasty of 1972 to 1974, the Bash Brothers and Moneyball, to the 2025 move.

The Athletics have won nine World Series, five of them in Philadelphia between 1910 and 1930 and four in Oakland between 1972 and 1989. They are also a club with a very odd shape. In 125 seasons of the historical record, through 2025, they have a record of 9,405 wins and 9,945 losses, a .486 winning percentage, which is what you get when you combine some of the best teams ever assembled with some of the worst, and almost nothing in the middle for long stretches.

The story has a natural set of chapters. There is the Connie Mack era in Philadelphia, which alone covers 50 years and two separate dynasties. There is a dreary Kansas City interlude in which the club never won more than 74 games in a season. There is the Oakland of Charlie Finley, the three straight championships of the early 1970s, and the long run of division titles around them. There are the late-1980s teams that went to three straight World Series, the Billy Beane years that gave baseball a new vocabulary, and the final seasons at the Coliseum before the club left for West Sacramento.

This article walks through those eras in order, with the records and rosters from the database behind each one. Where the numbers cannot tell you something, such as why an owner made a decision or what a clubhouse felt like, we say so rather than guess. For the numbers on individual players, the companion piece on the best players in Athletics history goes position by position.

The names and the homes in one table

Few clubs have carried as many labels as this one. The franchise began as the Philadelphia Athletics in 1901, became the Kansas City Athletics in 1955, the Oakland Athletics in 1968, and in 2025 simply the Athletics, with no city attached while the club played in a minor-league park in West Sacramento.

The Coliseum carried several sponsor names over the years, and the current park is covered in the Sutter Health Park guide.

Mack's first dynasty: 1901 to 1914

The Athletics were a charter member of the American League, and the American League's first decade was the club's best early run. They finished first in 1902 and 1905, then won again in 1910, 1911, 1913 and 1914. The win totals tell the story of a team that was consistently good rather than occasionally great: 83 wins in 1902, 92 in 1905, and then 102, 101, 96 and 99 in the four pennant years of the 1910s.

Connie Mack ran the club from the dugout for the entire stretch, and for half a century after it. In the database his record with the club is 3,582 wins and 3,814 losses in 7,466 games from 1901 to 1950, a winning-percentage figure that reflects how long he stayed after the winning stopped. He managed in street clothes, a suit and a high collar, and he waved a scorecard to position his fielders, which is widely documented and a good picture of how different the job looked in 1910.

The pitching staff did the heavy lifting. Eddie Plank is the club's career leader in wins (284), strikeouts (1,985) and shutouts (59), all for the years 1901 to 1914. Charles Bender won 193 games and Rube Waddell, who pitched for the club from 1902 to 1907, holds the club's best career ERA among pitchers with 1,000 innings, at 1.97. In the lineup, Eddie Collins, Home Run Baker, Danny Murphy and Harry Davis formed the core; Collins won the 1914 American League Most Valuable Player award, the first MVP in the franchise's list.

The postseason record of those years is mixed. The Athletics lost the 1905 World Series to the New York club of the National League, then won in 1910 (over the Cubs, four games to one), 1911 (over the Giants, four to two) and 1913 (the Giants again, four to one). Then came 1914: a 99-53 team, the pennant winner, swept four games to none by the Boston Braves. It was the last World Series the club would appear in for fifteen years.

The sell-off and the cellar: 1915 to 1928

What happened next is one of the best-documented collapses in baseball. In the winters after the 1914 season, Mack broke up his own team. The reasons are usually given as money, a pay dispute with stars at a time when the Federal League was bidding for players, and Mack's own sense that the sweep by the Braves had shown the team was past its best. Eddie Collins was sold to the White Sox, and within about two years most of the core of the pennant winners had been sold, traded or had left the club.

The results in the standings were extraordinary. The Athletics finished eighth and last in the American League every year from 1915 through 1921, seven in a row. The record of 1916 was 36 wins and 117 losses, the worst winning percentage in the database for any season of 100 or more games by this franchise, and 1919 was 36-104, 1915 was 43-109, 1920 was 48-106. The club did not finish above fifth until 1925.

Mack kept building, and the recovery was slow and then sudden. The club was second in 1925, third in 1926, second again in 1927 and 1928 with 91 and 98 wins. In the 1927 season, which is remembered for the Yankees, the Athletics' 91-63 record placed them second, 19 games behind the New York club's 110-44. That is the setting in which the next great team arrived.

The 1929 to 1931 team

The three-year run that followed is one of the most dominant in the history of the American League. The Athletics won the pennant in 1929 with a record of 104-46, in 1930 at 102-52 and in 1931 at 107-45. The 1931 team has the best winning percentage of any Athletics team of 100 or more games.

It was a Hall of Fame team. Mickey Cochrane, the catcher, was the 1928 MVP. Lefty Grove, the left-handed starter, won the 1931 MVP award. Jimmie Foxx won it in both 1932 and 1933, and while those two seasons fall just after the pennant years, Foxx's 302 home runs for the club still rank second behind Mark McGwire. Al Simmons holds the franchise's career marks for RBI (1,178) and batting average among hitters with 3,000 at-bats (.356). The lineup also included Max Bishop, whose 1,043 walks for the club between 1924 and 1933 are second in franchise history only to Rickey Henderson.

The World Series results: the club beat the Cubs in 1929, four games to one, in a series famous for a ten-run seventh inning in Game 4 that overturned an 8-0 deficit. It beat the Cardinals four games to two in 1930. And in 1931, with a 107-win team, it lost the rematch with St. Louis in seven games, three to four.

Philadelphia's second collapse and the move: 1932 to 1954

This time the break-up came for economic reasons that no one disputes: the Depression, shrinking attendance, and a club that sold stars for cash. Foxx, Simmons and Cochrane were all gone by the mid-1930s, and the standings went with them. The Athletics were 94-60 and second in 1932, 79-72 in 1933, and then slid. From 1935 to 1946, the club finished eighth in nine of twelve seasons, and the 1943, 1946 and 1950 teams lost 105, 105 and 102 games respectively. The 36 wins of 1916 did not recur, but 1935 (58-91), 1936 (53-100), 1938 (53-99) and 1940 (54-100) were all bad enough.

There were bright spots. Elmer Valo, a steady outfielder, reached 820 walks for the club, fifth on its list. Eddie Joost, a shortstop who walked 768 times for the club between 1947 and 1954, played on the best team of the period: 84-70 and fourth in 1948. And Bobby Shantz won the 1952 American League MVP, a rare award for a pitcher.

Mack finally retired as manager after 1950, in his late eighties, and his former infielder Jimmy Dykes took over for 1951 to 1953. After the 1954 season, in which the club finished 51-103 and eighth, the Mack family sold control of the franchise and the club moved to Kansas City. In their last two years in Philadelphia, 1953 and 1954, they played in a park named for the old manager, Connie Mack Stadium; it had been Shibe Park for most of the club's life there.

Kansas City, 1955 to 1967

The thirteen Kansas City seasons are the least successful stretch in the club's history. The Athletics never finished above sixth place, which they did in their first year (63-91), and the high-water mark for wins was 74, in 1966. They finished tenth in a ten-team league in 1964, 1965 and 1967, and lost 100 or more games in 1956 (102 losses), 1961 (100), 1964 (105) and 1965 (103).

The place is best remembered for what it did to its players. Kansas City's relationship with the New York Yankees, in particular, became a standing joke and a source of grievance, because a number of its better players moved to New York in trades. Roger Maris is the clearest case in the data: he played 1958 with Cleveland and Kansas City and the full 1959 season with Kansas City, then appeared for the Yankees in 1960 and hit 61 home runs in 1961. The Athletics' own 1961 record was 61-100. The owner who is the key figure in the era is Charlie Finley, who bought control of the club in 1960 and who spent the next several years scheming to move it somewhere with a larger market.

Attendance in the Municipal Stadium years peaked at 1,393,054, a total that the club in Oakland passed in 1982, when 1,735,489 came through the gates.

Finley's Oakland and the 1972 to 1974 champions

Finley got his move, to Oakland, for the 1968 season. The club was 82-80 in its first year there, then won 88, 89, and in 1971 a division title with 101 wins and 60 losses. That 1971 team had a pair of young stars: Vida Blue won both the Cy Young Award and the MVP that year, and his 124 career wins for the club rank eighth. The team was swept by Baltimore in the 1971 ALCS, 0-3.

The next three years are the heart of the franchise's Oakland history. The Athletics won the ALCS and the World Series in 1972 (over Detroit three games to two, then over Cincinnati four to three), in 1973 (over Baltimore three to two, then the Mets four to three), and in 1974 (over Baltimore three to one, then the Dodgers four to one). Dick Williams managed the first two, and Al Dark the third. Reggie Jackson, the 1973 MVP, was the star hitter; Catfish Hunter won the 1974 Cy Young Award; Rollie Fingers was the closer, with 136 saves for the club; Sal Bando and Bert Campaneris were the veteran infield. Campaneris's 1,882 hits are still the most in Athletics history.

The team was colourful, and the colour was Finley's. The green and gold uniforms, with white shoes, were part of his marketing; so was his push for a designated hitter, which the American League adopted for 1973. What the database does show is that the Athletics won the American League West every year from 1971 to 1975, five straight, and that in 1975 they were swept by Boston in the ALCS, 0-3.

Then free agency came to baseball. Hunter left after the 1974 season and Jackson after 1975, and by the end of the decade the dynasty was gone. The Haas family bought the club in 1980, a year that ended with an 83-79 record and second place. The 1981 strike-split season produced a division title, a 3-0 sweep of Kansas City in the division series and then a 0-3 loss to the Yankees in the ALCS.

The Bash Brothers and the 1988 to 1992 teams

The next peak arrived under Tony La Russa, who managed the club from 1986 to 1995 and compiled a record of 798-673 in 1,471 games, a tenure second in length only to Bob Melvin's among Oakland-era managers. Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire were the young sluggers: Canseco was the 1986 Rookie of the Year and McGwire the 1987 winner after hitting 49 home runs; Canseco's 1988 season (42 home runs and 124 RBI) made him the 1988 MVP. McGwire holds the club's career home run record of 363. Dave Stewart anchored the rotation, Dennis Eckersley converted to relief, and Rickey Henderson returned from New York and won the 1990 MVP, hitting .325 in 136 games.

The results: 104-58 in 1988, 99-63 in 1989, 103-59 in 1990, and a division title in each of the three seasons, plus another at 96-66 in 1992. The postseason ledger is lopsided in a way that is hard to forget. The Athletics swept Boston in the 1988 ALCS and lost the World Series to the Dodgers, one game to four. They beat Toronto in the 1989 ALCS, four to one, and swept the Giants in the World Series, four to none, in the series that was interrupted by the October 1989 earthquake in the Bay Area. They swept Boston again in the 1990 ALCS and were swept themselves in the World Series by Cincinnati, zero to four. In 1992, with Eckersley winning both the Cy Young Award and the MVP, they lost the ALCS to Toronto, two games to four.

The attendance at the Coliseum followed. The highest total in franchise history is 2,900,217 in 1990, and the three years from 1988 to 1990 all topped 2.2 million. Rickey Henderson's figures with the club (867 stolen bases, 1,270 runs, 1,227 walks) lead the franchise list, and his full career is covered in our profile of Rickey Henderson.

The Beane years and a new vocabulary: 1999 to 2014

After a lean mid-1990s, with 1993 (68-94) and 1997 (65-97) the low points, the club rebuilt under general manager Billy Beane. The Athletics won 87 games in 1999, then 91 in 2000 for a division title, and 102 in 2001, 103 in 2002 and 96 in 2003. They made the playoffs from 2000 to 2003, and the ending was the same each time: five-game divisional series that went the other way. In 2000 they lost to the Yankees, 2-3; in 2001 to the Yankees again, 2-3; in 2002 to Minnesota, 2-3; in 2003 to Boston, 2-3. Four straight years of losing the deciding game of a division series is a streak that gets quoted a lot.

The 2002 season is the one that became a book and a film. The club won 103 games, and that figure, not any individual star, is what is usually cited as evidence of the method: Jason Giambi was the 2000 MVP, Miguel Tejada the 2002 MVP and Barry Zito the 2002 Cy Young winner. The approach usually credited for the run, buying on-base skill that other clubs undervalued, is described in the book that gave the era its name and is easy to over-simplify. It was one edge among several, and it faded as other clubs copied it; our stats and analytics topic page collects more reading.

The later playoff years: a 93-69 division title in 2006 with an ALDS sweep of Minnesota and a 0-4 ALCS loss to Detroit; 94-68 and 96-66 division titles in 2012 and 2013, each ending in a five-game division series loss to Detroit; and wild-card losses in 2014, 2018 and 2019, in each case a single game, 0-1. The 2018 and 2019 teams each won 97 games. The 2020 club, 36-24 in a short season, won a wild-card series over the White Sox, two games to one, and then lost the division series to Houston, one to three.

The decline and the departure: 2021 to 2025

The final Oakland years are a different kind of story. The club won 86 games in 2021, then 60 in 2022, 50 in 2023 and 69 in 2024. The 2023 team's record of 50-112 is the fourth-worst winning percentage in franchise history, behind only the 1916, 1919 and 1915 teams, and in that season the Coliseum drew 832,352 fans over the year. The manager for those seasons, Mark Kotsay, went 255-393 with the club, a figure that says more about the roster than the man.

The club left Oakland after the 2024 season. For 2025 it played in West Sacramento at Sutter Health Park, a Triple-A ballpark with a listed capacity of about 14,000, while a new stadium in Las Vegas is planned. The 2025 team finished 76-86 and fourth in the American League West, and drew 768,464 in total. Nick Kurtz was the American League Rookie of the Year. Because plans for the Las Vegas ballpark can change, check the club and the league for the current position rather than relying on any article, including this one.

The franchise by the numbers

These are the leaders the database credits to the franchise across all of its homes:

Hall of Famers with four or more seasons for the club include Plank, Henderson, Collins, Simmons, Bender, Foxx, Jackson, Hunter, Grove, Fingers, Eckersley, Cochrane, Baker and Waddell. The club has 13 MVP winners, five Cy Young winners and nine Rookie of the Year winners in the database, 15 pennants and 17 division titles.

Where to go next

For the stars behind each era, read the best players in Athletics history and the best seasons and every October run. To see how the club's neighbors have fared, compare the Houston Astros, the Los Angeles Angels and the Seattle Mariners. For the live record and the next game, see the Athletics team page, and for the format of the October series described above, see the history of the World Series.