1959 Winter Meetings: Winds of Change

As the 1959 Winter Meetings approached, both the nation and baseball were on a roll.

For America, the postwar economy was firing on all cylinders. The Space Race against the Soviet Union was on, and a burly, proud nation was confident of ultimate victory. Television ratings toppers like Father Knows Best reflected a culture that honored idyllic family life and wholesome middle-class values.

Major-league baseball was on a roll, too, burnishing its reputation as the national pastime. Steadily recovering from a decade-long attendance lag, it attracted 19,199,419 million fans in 1959.1

But while the nation’s love affair with major-league baseball was once again heating up, the owners of the major- and minor-league franchises converging on South Florida for their annual gatherings knew they had a range of problematic issues ahead of them. The majors were trying to figure out how to expand and control costs. The minors were trying to figure out how to simply survive. And both were attempting to manage their futures within a swirl of shifting demographic, sociological, political, lifestyle, and economic factors.

One new reality was television. Simply put, television was changing how the public watched baseball, and as such was a cause both for the implosion of minor-league attendance and the growing popularity of major-league baseball.

When the All-Star Game in Chicago’s Comiskey Park was televised for the first time on July 11, 1950, there were 9.7 million television sets in America.2 By 1959, the same year an early version of instant replay was introduced, the number of television sets in use had swelled to over 67 million.3 Regional broadcasts had expanded quickly into weekend national broadcasts, so if you could find a television, you could see major-league baseball. A total of 13 of the 16 teams televised 669 games.4 By the end of the decade, there were more TV sets in America than combined sales of baseball tickets. And for the first time in the history of professional baseball, more people were watching major-league rather than minor-league baseball.

In the 1949 season, 448 teams in 59 minor leagues, both all-time highs, attracted 39,782,717 fans, a record that stood for 54 years. By 1959 only 21 leagues and 148 teams remained, and attendance had dropped to 12,171,848, a decrease of 69 percent! Not only did attendance dry up, but radio revenue did as well, as local fans could now see on televised major-league games the players they had watched in the minors.5

At various points along the way, major-league owners had rejected pleas from the minor-league owners to protect minor-league provinces from escalating air-wave intrusion by the majors. Instead, the big-league owners “proved quite willing to sacrifice their minor league dependencies on the twin altars of cost control and television profits.”6

A nation on the move was also changing and challenging Organized Baseball.

National League franchise expansion into California, along with television viewer habits, had already degraded the minor leagues there. But the majors were feeling the pinch as well. The nation’s population had more than doubled, from 76 million to 179 million, since 1901, but the majors still had 16 teams, and most were in cities east of the Mississippi River. The migration of fans from the cities to the suburbs had resulted in attendance issues at some urban ballparks. But the migration of people from the aging industrialized urban centers in the East to points south and west, thanks in part to the relativity new phenomenon of home air-conditioning, was eliminating fans altogether and creating new untapped markets.

Those factors would help explain why, deep into a stretch of peace and national prosperity, and with television already making up almost 20 percent of ballclub revenues, major-league owners were casting their expansionist eyes toward booming cities like Houston, Fort Worth, Dallas, and Atlanta.7 The Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area was also on the radar.

Meanwhile, New York City Mayor Robert Wagner was aggressively mounting attempts to replace one of the two franchises the city had lost when the Giants moved to San Francisco and the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles after the 1957 season. New York attorney and power broker William Shea, tapped by Wagner to make it happen, had failed in his attempts to relocate franchises from Cincinnati, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh. In what was an open secret, Shea and his compatriots then began planning the creation of a Continental League that would eventually compete for talent with the American and National Leagues.8

On May 21, 1958, Commissioner Ford Frick and the baseball owners met in Columbus, Ohio, and agreed on conditions that must be met for a rival league to gain their endorsement as a legitimate major league.9

On July 27 the new league was formally announced, with teams in Denver, Houston, Minneapolis-St. Paul, New York City, and Toronto. Legendary executive Branch Rickey resigned as president of the Pittsburgh Pirates and was named president of the league on August 18.10 “By trial and error it developed that the only way to provide major-league baseball for an increasing number communities on this continent was to form a new major league. There was no other way,” Shea said at the announcement.11

Adding to its assault on baseball’s established order, Rickey proposed that the clubs would pool and share their television revenue so that no one club could have an unfair advantage, as the New York Yankees had at the time.12

Owners in each city had agreed to pay $50,000 to the league and committed to a capital investment of $2.5 million, not including stadium costs. A minimum seating capacity of 35,000 was established by the league for the venues in which its teams would play.13

While it was likely that the American and National Leagues did not want to share expansion with a third league, major-league owners also understood that they ran the risk of congressional involvement that could jeopardize their exemption from the Sherman Antitrust Act. But court precedents did not discourage Rickey and his allies.

A bill that targeted baseball’s organizational structure was introduced in February 1959 by Senator Estes Kefauver (D-Tennessee). The bill specifically denied the Sherman exemption to any baseball team that controlled more than 40 players at one time, and it was motivated by the belief that the large number of players under contract to major-league teams prevented the creation of new independent major leagues.14

Rickey and Shea did not necessarily want the exemption overturned, but as the owners pushed back against the Continental League, “[T]hey began contemplating the possibility of establishing the league without baseball’s blessing and support.”15 

In a July 1959 hearing before the Senate Antitrust and Monopoly Subcommittee, Commissioner Frick assured members that he would be as helpful as possible to the new league’s backers, while Sen. Kefauver warned the major-league owners that Congress was closely monitoring the “attitudes of Organized Baseball” toward the Continental League in an effort to prevent any antitrust issues.16 Ultimately, none of Kefauver’s proposals passed either house of Congress.

This was the testy atmosphere as the Winter Meetings began.

The meetings were actually a series of two meetings and conventions at two locations. First came the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues (NAPBL), the umbrella organization for the minor leagues. Their 58th annual convention took place from November 30 to December 3 at the Vinoy Park Hotel in St. Petersburg, Florida. While its attendees primarily represented minor-league teams, the major-league owners and general managers were also there as members. The convention was, in fact, called to order by Commissioner Frick.

The major-league winter meetings followed, on December 7 to 10 at the Fontainebleau hotel in Miami Beach. Joe Cronin, the American League president, and Warren Giles, the National League president, were collectively more powerful than the commissioner and drove the agenda. The commissioner served as the spokesman.

Leading up to the major-league meetings, Frick had essentially ordered the National and American Leagues to make known their own plans for expansion, and the National League announced on the first day that it really had no plans to expand. “There is not sufficient sentiment at the present time to consider the expansion of the National League,” said Giles.17

The American League, which had announced some exploration of expansion, deliberated on the same day and came up with no conclusions. Some American League representatives reportedly pressed for an expansion program but could not muster enough votes.18

That afternoon Rickey arrived and warned that without expansion, “baseball may die in the 1960s.” First, he said, owners had continued to alienate fans by not updating ballparks and refusing to have better parking. But he also opined that “baseball was no longer national,” though that could be remedied; at least 32 cities, he said, “can and should play” in an expanded league.19

The next day, December 8, Rickey brought to center stage at a press conference some of the proposed Continental League’s big-gun owners. Representing New York was Dwight Davis Jr., whose father had funded tennis’s Davis Cup. Representing Houston was Texaco heir Craig Cullinan. Representing Denver was Bob Howsam, owner of the minor-league Denver Bears and loaded with powerful political connections through his father-in-law, former Colorado Governor and US Senator Edwin C. Johnson. (Johnson had also been president of the Western League.) Representing Toronto was media mogul Jack Kent Cooke. From Minneapolis, there was businessman Wheelock Whitney Jr. Attorney William Shea was also in attendance.

The Continental League is “as inevitable as tomorrow, but not as imminent,” Rickey said.20  Inevitable, he explained, because five cities had already signed on to begin the season in 1961. And then he announced that Atlanta had signed on as the sixth city, and that Dallas, Montreal, and Buffalo were considering it. Still, he said, potential entrants were holding back to see what American League President Cronin’s expansion plans were, in hopes they might be added there instead. In fact, Cronin’s “purposeful indecisiveness” had already caused one group to waver. Before ending the press conference, Rickey took a swipe at the major-league establishment, calling major-league baseball “a monopoly that calls itself a national pastime.”21

When Cronin finally spoke, he said the National League’s decision not to expand also killed the AL’s plan to add a ninth team. “We kicked around the idea of going to nine without the National League, but it would be impossible unless we had an inter-league schedule. One of the nine clubs would be idle every day,” Cronin said.22

A frustrated Rickey quickly responded.

“We have just begun to fight. If we go down, they will write an epitaph that they did their best and died trying,” he told Washington Post sports columnist Shirley Povich after the meetings.23 But Povich added his own interpretation of events, writing in his Sporting News column of December 16, 1959,  “Informed baseball men, not those attempting to organize the Continental League as a third major, are now convinced that the fledging circuit will never get off the ground, or even muster eight teams for a takeoff attempt. The Continental League people came away from the winter meetings at Miami Beach with even more problems than they took to that convention. They got a green light of a sort from the entrenched leagues, but it was tinged with so much red that the Continental is newly aware of the peril of proceeding.”24

On December 22 Rickey went to Dallas, where he announced that city would be the seventh team in the Continental League, and that an eighth team would be named shortly.25

While the issue of expansion was a major one at the meetings, it had plenty of company.

High on the agenda were continued attempts by the owners to save themselves from paying large bonuses to amateur prospects.

After World War II, as interest in the game increased and the number of minor-league teams grew, intense competition for players forced teams to offer signing bonuses to top players. For the next 20 years, major-league officials worked to mitigate the problem.26

The majors were investing so much money into a few “bonus babies” that it consumed their budgets for development that would have gone into underwriting the lower-level minor-league teams they would have otherwise supported.

In 1947 the major-league owners implemented bonus rules, which were restrictions aimed at reducing player salaries, as well as keeping wealthier teams from monopolizing the player market.27 The rules were repealed in 1950, reinstated in 1953, and repealed again in 1957.

In short order, spending on bonuses picked up again. Examples of supersized bonuses in 1957 included catcher-outfielder Bob “Hawk” Taylor ($112,000), outfielder John DeMerit ($100,000), right-handed pitcher Jay Hook ($65,000), and right-handed pitcher Von McDaniel ($50,000).28

At the 1958 winter meetings, the owners had amended Rule 5 with the addition of the first-year player draft. The new wrinkle, seen as a measure to control costs, added to the existing major- and minor-league Rule 5 drafts. For $15,000, a major-league team, drafting in reverse order of the past season’s finish, could draft any first year pro player not protected on a team’s 40-man major-league roster. If the drafted player was due a bonus, the original team still was on the hook for those dollars. Owners hoped this would minimize teams paying bonuses to players they might not only lose but would continue to have to pay. But they added the caveat that the drafting team had to keep the player in the majors for the entire season or give him back to his original team for $7,500.

Only one player was taken in this draft, left-handed pitcher Mike Lee of the San Francisco Giants. The Cleveland Indians scooped him up but wound up only pitching him for a total of nine innings. Teams just did not want to burn a precious roster spot on an unproven player.

While the first-year player draft was a flop at the major-league level, 13 other players were picked under the regular selection rule for $25,000 apiece. Of the 13, seven had been in the majors before, among them right-hander Don Lee, catcher Darrell Johnson, infielder Joe Amalfitano, and first baseman Steve Bilko.29

At the 1959 Winter Meetings, some executives proposed a formal draft of amateur talent, but the idea was five years head of its time and was defeated.30

Over the opposition of Commissioner Frick, the major-league owners had, during their summer meeting, approved interleague trading from November 21 to December 15, which overlapped the winter meetings. For the first time, players could move from one league to the other without having to first clear waivers in their own league.

Speaking during the winter meetings, National League President Giles expressed disappointment that the trades were allowed, calling it “bad business, and that goes especially for the clubs of the National League. We have spent years building up the prestige of our individual leagues, both American and National. But it’s especially stupid of us in the National League to sabotage our own prestige at this time, because we happen to be the stronger league in recent years.”31

In the first interleague trade, on November 21, the NL Chicago Cubs sent first baseman Jim Marshall and right-handed pitcher Dave Hillman to the AL Boston Red Sox in exchange for first baseman Dick Gernert.

On November 30 the San Francisco Giants took advantage of the trading window to bolster their pitching staff by sending Gold Glove-winning outfielder Jackie Brandt, along with right-handed pitcher Gordon Jones and catcher Roger McCardell, to Baltimore in exchange for workhorse right-handed pitcher Billy Loes, who once claimed to lose a grounder in the sun during a World Series game, and southpaw Billy O’Dell, a two-time All-Star.

On December 9, the Pittsburgh Pirates were also active in the interleague market, sending right-handed pitcher Dick Hall and minor-league shortstop Ken Hamlin to Kansas City for catcher-third baseman Hal Smith, whom they planned to platoon with catcher Smoky Burgess.

But the blockbuster trade of the season occurred on December 11, when the New York Yankees traded a quartet of productive veterans — All-Star outfielder Hank Bauer, right-hander Don Larsen, first baseman-outfielder Norm Siebern, and first baseman Marv Throneberry — to the Kansas City Athletics for infielder Joe DeMaestri, first baseman Kent Hadley, and outfielder Roger Maris, who would be named the American League MVP the next two seasons, as well as hit a record 61 home runs in 1961.  “I thought Roger Maris was the one guy we needed. He was a complete player who could field, throw and run,” Whitey Ford later said.32

At its 58th annual convention, the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues, led by its president, George Trautman, since 1947, once again faced challenging headwinds.

Growing concern related to attracting new talent and protecting investments in players already under contract was reflected in proposals offered for consideration at the convention. “The source of talent is in the minors and with the National Association dwindling from 59 leagues in 1949 to 21 in 1959, it’s no secret that the field is getting pretty thin,” said veteran Detroit scout Joe Mathis.33

Of the 28 items on the docket, 19 were directly or indirectly related to talent issues, centered on a plan to set up a free-agent draft and an unrestricted draft among all minor leagues, attempts to amend the present first-year draft or replace it with another bonus rule, and efforts to establish a minimum salary in the minors.34

For their part, the major-league owners knew full well that many minor-league franchises were on life support, in part because they knew that the majors’ desire to televise more and more of its games meant minor-league markets and profits were certain to be further squeezed. The major-league owners also knew that the more they were forced to spend on player salaries and amateur prospects, the less money was available to prop up a sagging player-development system. Once vibrant and self-sustaining, the minor leagues by 1959 were dependent on major-league subsidies for survival. At the same time, the major-league owners also knew their dreams of expansion into cities like Denver, Minneapolis, Atlanta, Toronto, and Houston could further impact the viability of the sport’s feeder system.

Under the headline “Minors Defeat Free-Agent Draft Motion, Vote for Modified Version of First-Year Player Selections,” Clifford Kachline described in The Sporting News some of the National Association’s actions. “Organized Ball isn’t ready for a free-agent draft or unrestricted selection of minor league players, but when major and minor loop officials came out of the legislative sessions of the 58th annual National Association convention … there remained considerable doubt as what the majority actually wanted to do in the way of legislation to curb the bonus rule. Defeating a proposal to restore a bonus rule, the minors voted to continue a first-year player draft on a modified basis.”35

On other issues, in addition to rejecting a bonus rule, a draft of free-agent talent, and unrestricted selection, they also voted against setting up a college-player rule, but agreed to make a professional career more enticing by setting up minimum salary limits for each classification in the minors.36 Set at $500 a month for Triple A, $400 for Double A, $350 for A, $300 for B, $275 for C, and $250 for D, it was praised by National League President Giles. 

“The biggest problem in baseball today is not television, but getting more boys to play baseball professionally,” The Sporting News opined. “This is one of the most constructive proposals presented in the National Association in years.” Since the new salary scale applied only to the minors, no vote was necessary by the major leagues.37

A week later, the major-league owners adopted all but two of nine measures approved by the National Association convention, including an amended first-year draft under which clubs selecting such players would be permitted to option them out the same as any other player. Under the amended first-year draft as adopted by the majors and minors, a uniform price of $12,000 replaced a sliding scale, which had started at $15,000 for the majors, $7,500 for Triple A, and down to $3,000 for B and C clubs.38

Voted down by the National League and approved by the American League was a proposal to give clubs in Triple A, Double A, and A the same privileges as lower-class teams to sign six players each after July 1 for service the following year without counting in the under-control limit. With two leagues divided, Commissioner Frick cast a deciding n” vote. Also defeated were proposals involving allotment of World Series tickets.39

But the major-league owners also came through for the minors in a big way.

Understanding that their own future was linked to the ability of the minor leagues to stock their parent clubs with talent, and that they needed to quell any minor-league rumblings concerning antitrust issues, the owners voted unanimously on December 7 to approve the second-year continuation of the Player Development Fund for 1960.

A total of $847,000 was donated, including $65,000 for promotional purposes, with the rest to be distributed by formula to each minor-league franchise that would agree not to sue Major League Baseball for “alleged invasion of territory by television and monopoly of player talent.”40

The allocation was to be as follows: Triple-A teams, $22,500; Southern Association teams, $12,500; Texas League, $9,000; Mexican League, $5,000. In the lower leagues the amounts were: Class A, $7,500 for teams with limited tie-ups with major-league teams and $5,000 with a general working agreement; Class B, $4,000 for all teams; Class C, $3,500; and Class D, $3,000.41

Responding to the vote, Commissioner Frick said: “This program proved a great boon to the minor-league people the past year and I am most happy that the owners saw fit to renew it. There is no doubt but that the player development fund has helped many leagues and clubs to survive.”42

It’s always a bit surprising when 16 strong-willed owners can do anything unanimously, and the vote reinforced the belief in some quarters that the purpose was simply to mollify the minors while they executed their own expansion. Nonetheless, National Association President Trautman called the vote to renew the fund by the major-league owners a “very generous act” and “concrete evidence of their interest in the minors,” and predicted that because of it, for the “first time in 10 years, the National Association probably will not lose a single league.”43

Previously, at the National Association meetings, major-league owners also stepped up in a concrete way to aid their struggling farm-team system by rescuing several of its tottering franchises. After the 1959 season, the Cardinals, Tigers, and Cubs had dropped their teams from the American Association, and with the additional loss of Omaha and Fort Worth, it left the Triple-A league with only seven franchises. League President Ed Doherty came to the meeting looking for help, and got it when the Washington Senators, Kansas City A’s, and Philadelphia Phillies agreed to work with Charleston (West Virginia), Dallas, and Indianapolis, respectively. In the Southern League, where there were two dropouts after the season, the Dodgers stepped in to keep the Atlanta franchise alive and the Senators took on Chattanooga. Further, the Braves and Cardinals offered the prospect of future help by attempting to line up additional working agreements for the struggling Pioneer League.44 (The White Sox, Reds, Dodgers, and Giants would all come into the league in 1960.)

 “We’ve been through some rough times, but maybe we’re just getting squared away,” said Trautman.45

Indeed, with talk of expansion and new television revenues in the air, there was a feeling in some quarters that an era of “harmony” between owners and players was at hand.

“Trade and legislative action notwithstanding, the most important product of the winter meetings at the Hotel Fontainebleau may be the new era of harmony ushered in by the player representatives and major league officials,” The Sporting News wrote.46 “Relations between the owners and players have never been better in the history of baseball,” echoed Charles Segar, secretary-treasurer of the major leagues.47

That sense was a far cry from a year earlier, when Commissioner Frick had rejected the players’ request for a salary scale based on 20 percent of team revenue. “Since then, a more realistic attitude has developed in the player ranks,” The Sporting News said.48

More good feelings were in evidence at the player-management meeting December 6 at Indian Creek Country Club. The player representatives, led by the NL’s Robin Roberts and the AL’s Harvey Kuenn, asked for improved clubhouses in Philadelphia and Chicago in the National League and stadium improvements at Chicago’s Comiskey Park and Washington. They also asked that the leagues standardize the height of the bullpen pitching mounds, and the owners promised to address that issue. The players also won approval on three other proposals regarding night games on getaway days, and guidelines to reschedule postponed games. Also, meal money for players on the road was standardized at $10 a day, where previously it was as little at $7.49 The representatives also introduced to the major-league chieftains their new legal adviser, Circuit Court Judge Robert C. Cannon, the son of Wisconsin Congressman Raymond J. Cannon, who was the lawyer for some of the Chicago Black Sox and had attempted to unionize the players during the 1920 season.50

Of course, it wasn’t all sweetness and light. Smack in the midst of the winter meetings, the owners were greeted with a page-one banner headline in the December 9 issue of The Sporting News that certainly had to have drawn their attention. “Fading Stars Face ’60 Salary Slashes,” it read, with the subheadline “Stan, Splinter Big Names on ’59 Skid List.”51

Indeed, the major-league owners were so focused on controlling current player salaries and costs that even future Hall of Famers still in their prime received salary cuts going into the 1960 season after their 1959 performance slid. The Giants were set to move into Candlestick Park and vastly increase revenue, yet Willie Mays’s salary was cut as were those of Mickey Mantle and Richie Ashburn. 54

In 1959 the average National League salary was $16,997, up 23 percent from $13,772 in 1954. In both leagues, the 18 lowest paid players earned $7,000. The middle 117 made from $10,000 to $24,999, and two made $75,000 or more.52

“Where is the player payroll rise going to stop? How much higher can we go?” said Yankees general manager George Weiss? He said the club owners were not opposed to increased salaries as long as they were justified by revenues.53

At the same time, the reality in 1959 was that any player who complained or made a big salary was the potential subject of trade talk. And multiyear contracts and no-trade clauses were beyond imagination. “Players at all levels of Organized Baseball could do little about owner miserliness since the industry refused to implement any formal system of pay mediation or arbitration,” wrote baseball scholar Robert Burk.54 In the absence of outside arbitration processes, “team general managers exercised unilateral economic power over their charges,” Burk wrote. “For most of the 1950s and early 1960s, baseball players remained largely nameless, replaceable links in their industry’s chain.”55

To be sure, one of the small links in that chain weakened in 1959. That was the year Chicago White Sox owner Bill Veeck broke with tradition and placed the surnames of his players on the backs of their jerseys.

The year 1959 also saw the falling of the last official color barrier in the major leagues. Under pressure from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination, the Red Sox recalled Elijah “Pumpsie” Green from their Minneapolis farm team, and on July 21, 1959, he became the first black player in team history as the Red Sox became the last team to integrate.

 

Notes

1 ballparksofbaseball.com/1950-59attendance.htm.

2 ethw.org/Technological_Innovations_in_Sports_Broadcasting.

3 pix11.com/2012/11/17/the-history-of-wpix/.

4 Jonathan Fraser Light, The Cultural Encyclopedia of Baseball (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co., 2005), 928.

5 Leonard Koppett, Koppett’s Concise History of Major League Baseball (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998), 263.

6 Robert Burk, Much More Than a Game (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 109.

7 Light, 928.

8 Sullivan, 141.

9 Ibid.

10 Ibid.

11 Sullivan, 142.

12 Michael Shapiro, “Memorabilia From the What If Drawer,” New York Times, January 22, 2009. nytimes.com/2009/07/23/sports/baseball/23league.html? R=0.

13 Fran Zimniuch, Baseball’s New Frontier (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013), 32-33.

14 J. Gordon Hylton, “Why Baseball’s Antitrust Exemption Still Survives,” Marquette Sports Law Review, Volume 9, Issue 2, Spring 1999, Article 11, 401, 402.

15 Shapiro. 

16 “Third Major League Under Senate’s Eye/Continental League Founder to Testify In Congressional Quiz,” Palm Springs (California) Desert Sun, July 31, 1959: 1. See also baseball-almanac.com/yearly/yr1959a.shtml.

17 The Sporting News, December 16, 1959: 5.

18 Bill Morales, Farewell to the Last Golden Age of Baseball (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co., 2011), 4.

19 Morales, 7.

20 Ibid.

21 Morales, 8.

22 The Sporting News, December 16, 1959: 5.

23 Shirley Povich, The Sporting News, December 16, 1959: 10.

24 Ibid.

25 Morales, 10.

26 Allan Simpson, baseballamerica.com/today/2005draft/050604bonus.html, June 4, 2005.

27 Paul D. Staudohar, Franklin Lowenthal, and Anthony K. Lima, “The Evolution of Baseball’s Amateur Draft,” NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture, 15.1, 2006: 27.

28  baseball-almanac.com/players/baseball_signing_bonus.shtml.

29 The Sporting News, December 9, 1959, 11.

30 Cliff Blau, “The Real First-Year Player Draft,” Baseball Research Journal, Summer 2010: sabr.org/research/real-first-year-player-draft.

31 The Sporting News, December 2, 1959: 2.

32 Tom Clavin and Danny Peary, Roger Maris: Baseball’s Reluctant Hero (New York: Touchstone, 2011), quoted in thescore.com/mlb/news/906624.

33 The Sporting News, December 2, 1959: 1.

34 The Sporting News, December 2, 1959: 2.

35 The Sporting News, December 9, 1959: 5.

36 Ibid.

37 The Sporting News, December 9, 1959: 6.

38 The Sporting News, December 16, 1959: 6.

39 Ibid.

40 The Sporting News, December 16, 1959: 1.

41 Ibid.

42 Ibid.

43 Ibid.

44 The Sporting News, December 9, 1959: 7.

45 Ibid.

46 The Sporting News, December 16, 1959: 2.

47 Ibid.

48 Ibid.

49 The Sporting News, December 16, 1959: 6.

50 baseball-almanac.com/yearly/yr1959a.shtml.

51 The Sporting News, December 9, 1959: 1.

52 roadsidephotos.sabr.org/baseball/1957-63sals.htm\1/14.

53 The Sporting News, January 14, 1959: 2.

54 Burk, 114, 115.

55 Burk, 115.