Here Come the Colts

In 1958, three years before a major-league expansion team took the field for the first time, Milwaukee Braves owner Lou Perini, one of the lone voices in baseball’s hierarchy pushing for extending into other regions of the country, complained, “Baseball men have always been averse to changes. … They simply can’t continue to sit back and do nothing.”1 In fact, Perini, who had owned the Braves since 1945, when they were the Boston Braves, misjudged the glacial pace of decision-making among his fellow owners. In 1939, six years before Perini purchased his club, Warren Giles, the Cincinnati Reds’ general manager, first raised the possibility of realigning and potentially expanding major-league baseball.2

Presumably shelved with the onset of the Second World War, the subject gained traction during the 1946 winter meetings after Organized Baseball mushroomed from 12 leagues to 43 within a 12-month span. Despite this enormous growth, major-league owners remained steadfast in their opposition to expansion. “They are content to rake in their profits and defy any other cities to crash into their select group,” said Perini ally and former baseball executive Larry MacPhail.3

Beginning in the late 1940s, Houston and several other cities and regions around the country were often used as a pawn in the owners’ decades-long strategy of placating the US Congress when the House Monopoly Subcommittee, while reviewing baseball’s antitrust exemptions, began to push for expansion. In the mid-1950s, with the advent of the Douglas DC-7 airliner, which revolutionized domestic air travel, the owners turned an earnest eye toward expanding into the lucrative West Coast. But the subject of expansion reverted to mere lip service after the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants moved to Los Angeles and San Francisco, respectively, after the 1957 season. It wasn’t until two years later, when the owners were threatened by the formation of a third major league – and it won backing from key members of Congress – that the owners moved positively toward expansion.

Immediately after World War II, baseball experienced a renaissance unlike anything before or since. Besides the frenzied growth of the minor leagues in 1945-46, amateur leagues nationwide also grew at an alarming rate. This unexpected surge caught many by surprise. In March 1947, after a 10-day strike by its employees, the Hillerich & Bradsby Company, maker of the Louisville Slugger bat, asked Organized Baseball to “specify … orders [of] reasonable quantities” [emphasis added] to allow the firm to meet the demands of its other customers.4 That year the pockets of the major-league owners were lined handsomely when attendance more than doubled from prewar years. In July, in a seemingly halfhearted response to this surge, the National League established a committee to explore the likelihood of expansion along the West Coast. Five months later, as Perini was floating the possibility of two 12-club circuits that, in various iterations, included Milwaukee, Montreal, Toronto, and four California sites (Texas received only lukewarm consideration), the senior circuit took a nonbinding vote during the winter meetings in favor of a 10-club league.

The proposal proved short-lived when the American League, citing increased travel costs and other factors, voted 5 to 2 against the proposal. (Cleveland Indians owner Bill Veeck, an expansion proponent, inexplicably abstained from voting.) In August 1948, while attempting to ease the disappointment of prospective major-league owners during an official visit to Houston, Baseball Commissioner A.B. “Happy” Chandler said, “We definitely are not opposed to other cities moving into major league baseball. … But when and if the occasion arrives … it should be done gradually.”5 This sentiment was still being echoed 10 years later when retiring AL President Will Harridge remarked that “[e]xpansion is going to come, but we should let it develop naturally.”6

One of the many prospective owners not placated by Chandler’s soothing words was Texas millionaire oilman Richard Wesley Burnett. A moderately successful businessman from the small East Texas town of Gladewater, Burnett became fabulously wealthy in 1944 after discovering an oil and gas field in southwest Arkansas. An ardent baseball fan, Burnett had acquired several low-level minor-league clubs before setting his sights toward greater goals.7 In 1948, after purchasing the Dallas Rebels of the Double-A Texas League for $550,000, Burnett, in concert with league President J. Alvin Gardner, began negotiations with club owners in the Pacific Coast League to form a third (and possibly fourth) major league. Though nothing came of this, neither Burnett’s nor Gardner’s goal of attaining big-league status ever diminished. “Maybe … I will not live to see it, but the time is not too far distant when this country will see four major leagues in existence,” declared the visionary Gardner in 1949. “Houston promise[s] to become one of the largest metropolitan centers in the United States and [I envision] the time when Houston, along with Dallas, would be in the majors.”8

 

 

The idea of three or four major leagues was certainly not unique to Burnett and Gardner, and it continued to gain traction over the next dozen years. In 1952, Philip K. Wrigley, the Chicago Cubs owner, not only came out in favor of four circuits, but took the additional step of divesting himself from ownership of the PCL’s Los Angeles Angels to clear the city’s path from conflict in its quest for a major-league club. After initially coming out in favor of expanding the existing leagues, Lou Perini, who for years was the subject’s most consistent advocate, eventually endorsed a three-league arrangement. “[T]he so-called ‘world championship’ [is] confined to practically one-quarter of the country’s area,” he sniffed. “[I]t’s not very national in scope.”9 Continuing to turn a blind eye to Texas, Perini looked even farther south by suggesting the placement of teams in Mexico City and Havana. When Ford Frick replaced Chandler as commissioner in 1951, he maintained the gradualist position of his predecessor before eventually championing a three-league arrangement. When doing so, he became one of the fiercest advocates for placing a club in Houston.

But this growing chorus of expansion advocates continued to face stiff opposition. In 1953, when the National League announced that it would begin independent pursuits toward expansion apart from the American League, AL President Will Harridge complained that this would be in violation of the circuits’ National Agreement. The divide between the pro- and anti-expansion camps was not limited to an NL-AL conflict alone. Though Bill Veeck, now owner of the St. Louis Browns, found support for expansion among a few of his fellow AL owners, Harridge’s position often aligned with that of Bob Carpenter and Horace Stoneham, owners of the NL Philadelphia Phillies and New York Giants, respectively. The anti-expansion camp cited a multitude of reasons for their opposition: there weren’t enough quality players to go around; there would be increased costs in salaries, operating expenses, travel and training expenses; and there would be a need to address the territorial rights (investment and property rights) of the minor-league owners whose cities were targeted. Moreover, at a time when major-league owners could not or would not conceive of a schedule increase from 154 games to 162 games, the greatest concern was lost revenue. With reference to two 10-club leagues, Branch Rickey, an expansion advocate, explained, “[T]his would mean a different sharing of the gate receipts. Instead of one-eighth, it would mean a one-tenth split. And there are some clubs having trouble with the financial problems playing 77 games.”10

A break in the opposition camp came before the 1953 winter meetings when, after the Browns announced their move to Baltimore, the AL appointed a three-man committee to conduct a study on expansion and realignment. (A fourth person would be added to the committee a year later.) In 1954, outspoken Chicago White Sox general manager Frank Lane, who was selected to chair the committee, was not shy about expressing his disdain toward members of the anti-expansion camp, “brand[ing] them as reactionaries still hobbled by horse-and-buggy thinking.”11 Moreover, Lane was a strong proponent of placing a major-league club in Texas. His support, like that of Gardner’s before him, was well warranted. While the United States had witnessed a brisk 61 percent increase in population increase from 1910 to 1950, during the same period Texas’s population had nearly doubled, from 3.9 million to 7.7 million. If Gardner and Lane had had the ability to gaze into the future, they would have known that, over the next 40 years, the state would realize a more than twofold increase to 16.9 million people. In 1948, the National Association had issued a statement saying, “[V]arious sections of the country have developed greatly and increasing population … should eventually result in expansion of major league baseball to such territories.”12 By the 1950s the Lone Star State, with its burgeoning population, was certainly making its case for consideration.

From 1953 through June 1958, discussions surrounding expansion, if they happened at all, took a variety of forms. Interleague play, an idea strongly advocated by Indians GM Hank Greenberg, was introduced alongside expansion. During the 1954 winter meetings, factions within the NL presented a proposal for immediate expansion that included reducing rosters from 25 players to 23, but it was defeated. Three years later, the AL also considered immediate expansion to 10 clubs during a five-year interim phase with the option of reverting to eight clubs if necessary. The proposal never went beyond talk. The only concrete action taken during this period came in May 1955 when the commissioner’s office hired a public-relations firm to study expansion among other items. The task generated even more studies, a process that prompted sportswriter Dan Daniel to sarcastically opine that “[t]he reports advise expansion, but do not counsel haste.”13 In May 1958, Bill Furlong, a Chicago-based sports scribe, piled on by writing that “all the talk about expanding the majors seems as far from reality as a trip to the moon.”14 [This was four years before President John F. Kennedy announced a goal of reaching the moon.] Conspicuously absent from these four-plus years of discussions and proposals was the matter of multiple circuits. On October 22, 1953, Warren Giles, now the NL president, who in 1939 had first raised the potential of major league expansion, in a speech in Milwaukee, roundly dismissed the three- or four-circuit concept. It proved to be the first nail in the multiple circuits’ coffin. Except for the short-lived Continental League, the idea never gained much attention again.

The inaction of the major-league owners created a vacuum that was eventually filled by a variety of competing factions. In October 1957, New York City Mayor Robert F. Wagner announced plans for the appointment of a citizens committee to seek an NL team to replace the departed Giants and Dodgers. Within a year, the origins of the Continental League were established when the committee threatened to set up a third major league. Meanwhile, 1,600 miles to the southwest, Houston, which had grown to become the largest city in the nation without a big-league club, was making its own presence felt. On June 19, 1958, George Kirksey, a former United Press sportswriter who now was the executive secretary of the newly established Houston Sports Association, made formal application with the NL for placement of an expansion team in the Texas city. Thirteen days later he made the same filing with the AL. “[W]e believe we’re ready for the big leagues,” Kirksey said. “We’d like serious consideration for membership.”15

Former Houston Mayor Roy Hofheinz and oilmen K.S. “Bud” Adams Jr., future owner of the Houston Oilers of the NFL, and Craig F. Cullinan Jr. were among Kirksey’s many powerful allies. Over the preceding years the Houston Sports Association had approached the owners of the Indians and three other clubs in failed attempts to purchase those teams and relocate them to Houston.16 Two weeks after the AL filing, the citizens of Harris County, Texas, by voted overwhelmingly in favor of a $20 million bond to build a new multipurpose stadium in Houston. The Houston Sports Association was the driving force that had brought the bond issue to the fore, a task made all the easier by the influence of a member of the county’s Board of Park Commissioners, former major-league player and manager Eddie Dyer. In November, in a move similar to what Philip Wrigley did for Los Angeles six years earlier, the Cardinals ended their nearly 40-year affiliation with the Houston Buffaloes by selling the minor-league club to Milton Fischmann and a business associate, former Cardinals All-Star shortstop Marty Marion. New York and Houston were hardly alone in their pursuit of a major-league club. Within two years of Houston’s $20 million bond approval, Seattle floated a similar bond for the same purpose, while Denver, New Orleans, and Buffalo, among other cities, also competed for recognition. On December 3, 1958, in response to these developments, the NL approved a resolution appointing an independent research organization to conduct a survey on expansion. A day later, in a similarly bold move, the AL approved an identical motion.

Years of surveys, studies, and overall foot-dragging were rapidly ending. Congress, which in 1951 had made a pitch for expansion before being placated with pledges of imminent action, by the late 1950s was no longer swallowing empty promises. “The owners’ failure to expand has had Congress looking down their throats for several years now, and understandably,” MacPhail said. “There are congressmen and senators eager to make political capital out of baseball and the game could lose the favored status it gained from the Supreme Court decisions. If Congress puts baseball under some of the antitrust laws, well, the owners asked for it. So far the owners have gotten away with their vague promises of expansion, but there has been no sign they have been acting in good faith.”17 But in May 1959, the NL, seemingly disregarding the number of times Commissioner Frick was hauled before Congress to testify about antitrust exemptions, expansion, and other matters, vetoed a proposal for expansion to 10 clubs. (The AL didn’t even bother to bring the issue up.)

“Expansion is coming,” Frick said. “[B]ut it will not come by fiat, by pressure or by the threat of legislation.” New York’s mayor had already appointed attorney William A. Shea to chair the city’s baseball committee. Within days of his appointment, Shea announced the formation of the Continental League on July 27, 1959. New York, Toronto, Denver, Minneapolis-St. Paul, and Houston formed the nucleus of the proposed league, with the Houston Sports Association and the Marion-Fischmann group each having bid separately for Houston’s entry. “The question is no longer whether Houston will be in the major leagues but when and in what league,” Shea declared.18 Further pressure was put on the major-league owners after he projected a 1961 opening for the new circuit.

But the Continental League’s path to major-league status was hardly a smooth one. In August 1959, with Houston among half of the Triple-A American Association’s 10 cities targeted for either major-league expansion or inclusion in the new circuit, the Association’s executives claimed an expected $5 million loss in territorial rights. Without declaring a specific amount, the Triple-A International League also weighed in with anticipated losses in the millions of dollars. “[N]ot want[ing and likely lacking the ability] to pay for territorial damages,” Shea started engaging in merger talks with the major-league owners.19 These negotiations came to fruition in Chicago on August 1, 1960, when the Continental League agreed to fold after securing a firm commitment from the major-league owners to expand to two 10-club circuits by 1962. The parties reached a general agreement that the AL would expand into Toronto and Minneapolis-St. Paul (plans that were torn to shreds by the Washington Senators’ move to Minnesota, plus the owners’ desire for a California presence); the National League would expand into New York and Houston. Two months later, the Houston Sports Association made its second application for entry into the National League.

Notably absent from this process were the Buffaloes, owners of Houston’s territorial rights. In August 1959, shortly after the Marion-Fischmann contingent applied for entry into the Continental League, a Houston group unaffiliated with the Houston Sports Association purchased the majority interest in the club. Shortly thereafter, the owners expressed their goal of entry into the major leagues via expansion. But by February 1960, this new entity was instead engaged in merger talks with the Houston Sports Association. Talks quickly turned bitter as both sides took a hard-line negotiating stance and discussions collapsed in July. Negotiations eventually resumed, with the parties about $240,000 apart, before another impasse was reached. Finally, in October, with considerable political weight behind it, the Houston Sports Association presented a take-or-leave-it offer to the Buffaloes in the amount of $362,000. (A final settlement was reached at slightly under $400,000.) The offer appears to have been taken in part because the Buffaloes owners’ focus had since shifted to Missouri, where they were busy placing a bid for ownership of the Kansas City Athletics. Within days of the settlement the NL rewarded the Houston Sports Association by selecting Houston among its two expansion entries. “[Houston] has made the most progress of all the cities seeking major league franchises,” Giles said. “It has definite plans to build a ball park … and has started its organization.”20

One of the first steps taken by the quartet of Robert E. “Bob” Smith (considered the world’s largest independent oil operator), Hofheinz, Cullinan, and Bud Adams, who collectively owned 51 percent of the new franchise’s stock, was to hire a general manager. Wasting no time, on October 25 the team lured Reds GM Gabe Paul from Cincinnati with a three-year contract. Paul brought Reds executive Tal Smith with him to oversee the farm system and the scouting system, and immediately hired former major-league infielder and manager Bobby Bragan as the personnel director. “First and foremost in our format … will be a master scouting system second to none,” Paul declared.21 Next the organization announced a February 1961 construction start date for a domed stadium to be ready by Opening Day 1962. Though this projected schedule was found to be overly optimistic, it proved to be one of the few missteps in Houston’s relentless pursuit of a major-league franchise.

From an early age DAVID E. SKELTON developed a lifelong love of baseball when the lights from Philadelphia’s Connie Mack Stadium shone through his bedroom window. Long removed from Philly, he resides with his family in central Texas where he is employed in the oil & gas industry. An avid collector, he joined SABR in 2012.

 

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author consulted Baseball-Reference.com. The author wishes to thank Mickey Herskowitz and Tal Smith for their invaluable assistance.

Notes

1 Bob Wolf, “Perini Predicts Two Ten-Team Majors by ’63,” The Sporting News, March 26, 1958: 30.

2 Jack Walsh, “So What? Fans Ask After Celler Hearing,” The Sporting News, October 31, 1951: 8.

3 Shirley Povich, “ ‘Expand or Regret,’ MacPhail Warns,” The Sporting News, July 29, 1959: 2.

4 John Hillerich, “To ALL Clubs in Organized Baseball,” The Sporting News, March 19, 1947: 24.

5 “Chandler Favors Gradual Expansion,” The Sporting News, September 1, 1948: 2.

6 Edgar Munzel, “Harridge Retirement Marks End of Era,” The Sporting News, December 10, 1958: 4.

7 “Burnett, Richard Wesley,” “Handbook of Texas Online,” Texas State Historical Association, June 12, 2010. Accessed July 30, 2017 (,bit.ly/2hdiOgZ ).

8 “Gardner Predicts Four Major Loops for U.S.A.,” The Sporting News, January 19, 1949: 15.

9 “Big Leagues Too Limited in Area, Contends Perini,” The Sporting News, August 18, 1948: 6.

10 “No Immediate Expansion to West Coast Seen by B.R.,” The Sporting News, December 8, 1954: 2.

11 J.G. Taylor Spink, “Lane Calls Ten-Club Foes Reactionary,” The Sporting News, December 22, 1954: 1.

12 Edgar G. Brands, “Coast’s Major Aspirations Dealt New Setback,” The Sporting News, December 22, 1948: 2.

13 Dan Daniel, “Daredevil Dan Foresees Yank-Brave Repeat,” The Sporting News, December 31, 1958: 16.

14 “Quotes,” The Sporting News, May 28, 1958: 18.

15 Jack Gallagher, “Houston Ready to Join N.Y. in Bid to N.L.,” The Sporting News, November 26, 1958: 3.

16 One of the parties the H.S.A. approached appears to have been Calvin Griffith. In July 1958, the Washington Senators owner petitioned the AL for approval to relocate his club to either Houston, Dallas, Toronto, or Minneapolis. The request was denied.

17 Shirley Povich, “ ‘Expand or Regret,’ MacPhail Warns,” The Sporting News, July 29, 1959: 1, 2.

18 Clark Nealon, “Two Houston Groups to Bid for Third Major Franchise,” The Sporting News, June 3, 1959: 17.

19 Jerry (Jerome) Holtzman, “Big Timers Clearing Decks for Expansion,” The Sporting News, August 10, 1960: 4.

20 “Giles Explains Why Houston Should Land N.L. Franchise,” The Sporting News, October 19, 1960: 4.

21 Ray Gillespie, “500 Scouts to Hunt Houston Talent,” The Sporting News, November 9, 1960: 1.