Parke Carroll

Who was Parke Carroll?

Parke Carroll was an American front-office executive in minor league and Major League Baseball who was perhaps best known, in baseball circles, for his two-year stint as the general manager of the Kansas City Athletics, from 1959–1960.

During those two years, he engineered trades that sent key players to the New York Yankees, such as Bob Cerv and Ralph Terry, but his most notable deal came on December 11, 1959, in which Carroll sent 25-year-old outfielder Roger Maris to the Yankees along with two other players for Don Larsen, Marv Throneberry, Hank Bauer and Norm Siebern. With the aid of the short right-field porch in Yankee Stadium, Maris set a single-season record with 61 home runs in 1961, just two years after leaving the A's. Only Siebern would pay dividends for the A's, however, as their regular first baseman from 1960–1963 and a two-time American League All-Star.

Carroll's dealings with the Yankees were controversial because the Athletics, under owner Arnold Johnson, sent many top players to New York in apparently one-sided trades during the mid-to-late-1950s. Johnson and the team's director of player personnel, George Selkirk, had previously traded quality players such as Bobby Shantz, Clete Boyer, Harry "Suitcase" Simpson and Ryne Duren to the Yanks. Johnson also had business ties with Yankee partner Del Webb and owned Yankee Stadium in the Bronx prior to purchasing the Philadelphia Athletics and moving them to Kansas City. All these factors led to charges from fans, writers and other teams that Johnson and Carroll ran the Athletics as a Yankee farm team at the Major League level.