Rickey’s Folly: How the Continental League Forced Baseball Expansion

President John F. Kennedy delivered the ceremonial first pitch in Washington’s Griffith Stadium on April 10, 1961, to inaugurate baseball’s new era. The debut of the new Washington Senators against the Chicago White Sox was the first game in the 10-team American League, marking the majors’ first expansion since 1901.

The creation of the two AL expansion franchises, and the two new National League clubs that followed in 1962, came after more than a decade of hesitation, one step forward and two steps back, as American and National League owners struggled to cope with demands to bring big-league ball to growing metropolises outside the Northeast and Midwest. At last they capitulated under pressure from politicians and a baseball genius with wealthy backers.

“Probably no single program in baseball history,” Commissioner Ford Frick wrote, “created more controversy, aroused stronger fan feeling, or brought more vituperative discussion, pro and con, than the movement of clubs and the expansion of the major leagues.”1 He should know; he turned backflips for years to delay expansion on the instructions of his masters, the owners.

Major-league baseball had been putting off expansion at least since the end of World War II, when the Pacific Coast League petitioned for big-league status. The PCL’s ambition drew the predictable response: The majors stiff-armed the Westerners. But two PCL markets were too big to ignore. By the 1950 census, Los Angeles was the fourth-largest US city in population, with San Francisco 11th. The National Football League had put a franchise in Los Angeles in 1946 and absorbed the San Francisco 49ers as part of its merger with the All-America Football Conference in 1950. Some baseball executives thought a westward move was overdue.

In 1954 former owner Bill Veeck produced a bullish report on the booming LA market that could have been written by the chamber of commerce.2 The next year an American League realignment committee headed by White Sox general manager Frank Lane released a financial analysis of a 10-team league, complete with sample schedules. Lane concluded that the existing clubs could make a profit by putting new teams in Los Angeles and San Francisco, despite increased travel costs.3

But nothing happened. Many owners believed there were not enough big-league-quality players to stock new teams. No owner wanted to give up home dates with the Yankees or Dodgers in return for games against no-name expansion clubs with no-name players.

Then, in the fall of 1957, Walter O’Malley seized Los Angeles. O’Malley’s bold move of his Brooklyn Dodgers, hauling Horace Stoneham’s Giants in his ample wake, was the catalyst for expansion.

New York Mayor Robert Wagner, having lost the Dodgers and Giants and facing re-election, did what any fearful politician would do: He appointed a committee. Its chairman was William Shea, a politically connected lawyer who became the prime mover in an urgent drive to bring another big-league team to New York. “I thought it was a very easy job to be accomplished,” Shea recalled with Big Apple arrogance, “that all I had to do was get some people with money together and go out on a white charger and pick up a franchise somewhere in the hinterlands.

“Well, I soon found out that it wasn’t going to be done.”4

Commissioner Frick declared the city “open territory,” meaning the Yankees could not block another team from moving in.5 Shea targeted small-market franchises in Pittsburgh and Cincinnati, but their owners had no interest in becoming the New York Pirates or the Brooklyn Reds. Throwing more cold water, NL President Warren Giles told Shea the league had no plans to expand. Giles was reported to have said, “Who needs New York?”6

Another politician was stung by the loss of the Dodgers. Brooklyn’s congressman, Emanuel Celler, was chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and a longtime critic of baseball’s exemption from antitrust laws. In 1958 he proposed legislation to end the exemption. Furious lobbying by the majors defeated his bill. The House voted instead to exempt all professional sports leagues from antitrust restrictions, but the Senate buried the bill, at least temporarily.

Facing pressure from Washington and agitation from New York, the majors held their ground. The frustrated Bill Shea saw no clear path to his goal, but someone else did. Branch Rickey, the farsighted executive who had invented the farm system and brought racial integration to baseball, declared that a third major league was inevitable. In a May 1958 interview with The Sporting News, Rickey said forming a new league was preferable to expanding the existing majors and creating “too many also-rans.”7

Rickey was soon talking to Shea, and he found an eager audience. Within six months Shea announced that he was lining up backers for a third league. Speaking to reporters at Toots Shor’s saloon, he revealed that “a substantial baseball man” was advising him. “I’m hopeful [the majors] will give the new league cooperation,” Shea said. “But if they don’t take you in, you have to go on your own.”8

While he traveled the country rounding up partners, Shea found his most important supporter in Washington. Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver, chairman of the antitrust and monopoly subcommittee, believed in enforcing antitrust laws and didn’t believe in monopoly. It was Kefauver who had blocked the House bill granting antitrust immunity to sports leagues. In February 1959 he introduced his own legislation to put all professional leagues, including baseball, under antitrust law. In addition, the bill limited teams to controlling just 80 players. (Some teams had more than 400 in their farm systems.)9 Kefauver was attacking the economic foundation of the baseball business.

Feeling the heat, the majors adopted their first policy on expansion in May 1959. After a special owners meeting, the majors announced they would “favorably consider” recognizing a third league – with a big if: if the new circuit’s cities were larger than the smallest current big-league market (Kansas City, population around 450,000); if it had stadiums seating at least 25,000; and if the new teams reached a financial settlement with the minor leagues whose territory they invaded. If those and other criteria were met, the American and National Leagues might embrace a competitor.10

On July 27 Shea formally launched his new circuit. It now had a name, the Continental League, and commitments from backers in five markets: New York, Houston, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Denver, and Toronto. Shea listed 11 other cities that were interested. Taking the majors at their word, he said, “We are therefore proceeding on the basis of the complete and unqualified cooperation of the two existing major leagues.”11

The next day Senator Kefauver opened hearings on his antitrust bill. Commissioner Frick testified that the majors were “on the level” in pledging cooperation with the upstarts: “I feel deep in my heart that the new Continental Baseball League will become a reality.”12 Not all baseball men toed the company line. American League President Joe Cronin sniped, “Calling a league a major league doesn’t make it a major league.”13 Kefauver didn’t push his legislation, but he warned that he would be watching: “You might say baseball is under surveillance, even under a shotgun.”14

With Kefauver’s threat of a shotgun marriage, the baseball establishment agreed to talk with the Continentals. At the first meeting of the three leagues, on August 18 in New York, Shea played his ace. Branch Rickey walked into the room as the first president of the Continental League. Although he was 77 years old, Rickey was still a formidable force in the eyes of his former rivals. His league might be a mirage, but Rickey was flesh and blood and baseball genius. “It was at that moment that the owners knew we were for real and that we meant business,” said one of the Houston financiers, Craig Cullinan Jr.15

Rickey argued that it would be easier to find 200 players for eight new teams that would compete among themselves than to find 100 to stock four expansion teams capable of competing in the existing majors. He envisioned a round-robin World Series among the champions of all three leagues by 1963. “The fans will devour it,” he exclaimed.16

But the majors pointed to their criteria for recognition of a new league. The Continental had only five teams, and not all had big-league-sized stadiums. They had reached no agreements to pay off the minor-league clubs that would be displaced.

Then Washington Senators owner Calvin Griffith tossed a stink bomb into the party. Griffith, with his team losing games and money, wanted out of Washington. He was laying plans to move to Minneapolis-St. Paul. His fellow AL owners put him off, fearing a congressional backlash if they abandoned the nation’s capital. But wheels were beginning to turn. At the October league meeting, President Cronin appointed a committee to study expansion.17

Rickey now saw that his trust had been misplaced. He told the Continental owners that the majors were undermining the new league. For the first time, he said the Continental might have to “go outlaw.”18 That meant raiding the majors and minors for talent and mounting a court challenge to the reserve clause, which bound players to their teams for life. But several Continental owners were leery of going to war. While publicly committed to the new venture, they wanted to stay on the majors’ good side in case the existing leagues decided to expand.

Acquiring players was the Continental’s biggest challenge. Baseball had no pipeline of college talent as in football. The majors controlled virtually all professional players through their farm systems. Without their cooperation, Rickey confidently maintained that the player pool could be expanded by tapping Latin America and Japan, and making full use of African-American talent.

Rickey’s plan represented a radical departure from baseball history and tradition. The Continental League would operate a central scouting bureau and a farm system controlled by the league, not individual teams, with all clubs drafting players from the pool. The teams would share local television revenue.19 The goal was to level the financial playing field so there would be no Yankee dynasty and no charity case like the St. Louis Browns. Branch Rickey, conservative Republican and fervent anti-communist, wrote a constitution for socialism in baseball.

At the winter meeting in December 1959, the majors continued to insist that they had no plans to expand. Rickey put up a bold front, saying, “The Continental League is as inevitable as tomorrow morning, if not as imminent.”20 Commissioner Frick declared, “The Continental League can have our endorsement, too, as soon as they settle certain things.”21

Frick’s public expressions of support served to keep Congress at bay while pushing expansion down the road to some unspecified date in the misty future. Some saw it as a cynical ploy. New York Daily News columnist Dick Young wrote, “Did you ever have the feeling that someone is being too nice to you, and it has you worried?”22

“Expansion is coming,” Frick said, “but it will not come by fiat, by pressure or the threat of legislation.” He picked the wrong place to strike a defiant tone: at the Touchdown Club in Washington, with Senator Kefauver in the audience. Kefauver thought the commissioner had “disparaged Congress.”23

The senator struck back in February 1960 with new legislation that might have been titled the Continental League Relief Act. His bill provided that each major-league team could control no more than 40 players; the rest would be eligible to be drafted by other clubs. Shea and Rickey enthusiastically endorsed the legislation, but Commissioner Frick denounced it as “vicious” and “discriminatory.” He predicted that it would kill the minor leagues, since the majors would no longer subsidize farm clubs if they stood to lose most of the players in the draft.24

The Continental League had filled out its circuit of eight teams with the addition of Dallas-Fort Worth, Atlanta, and Buffalo, and announced that it would begin play in 1961. If the Kefauver bill failed, Shea said, the Continentals’ choice was “war or quit.”25

The Senate opened debate on June 28. For procedural reasons, the first vote came on an amendment that would extend baseball’s antitrust exemption to other sports leagues. When that was adopted by 45 to 41, it was obvious that Kefauver’s proposal to eliminate the exemption would fail, so sponsors pulled the bill from consideration. The majors had won, but the margin, with 41 votes against the antitrust exemption, was far too close for comfort.26 Frick later admitted, “Baseball was scared.”27

“Panicked” is more like it. After dawdling for 14 years since the Pacific Coast League pushed for expansion, the owners moved faster than a speeding Ty Cobb to quash the threat to their monopoly. Within days after the Senate vote, they invited the Continental principals to meet for a discussion of how “to implement expansion via Continental League or increased membership.”28

The summit meeting, in Chicago on August 2, opened with fireworks. The Dodgers’ Walter O’Malley lectured the Continentals, “Your having rocked the boat makes it hard for the major leagues to meet you halfway.” Shea angrily replied that he had no choice but to appeal to Congress, since the majors had stonewalled him.29 At one point O’Malley roared, “Goddammit,” then turned to the pious Continental president and said, “Excuse me, Mr. Rickey.”30

After both sides vented, Milwaukee owner Lou Perini offered a compromise: The majors would expand, taking in four Continental franchises immediately and the other four within a few years. The “four now, four later” proposal was the first concrete step toward a settlement.

The Continental delegation retired to caucus in another room and erupted in loud cheers. Chicago writer Jerome Holtzman commented, “The Continental League went phffft – and disappeared into the hot air from whence it came.”31

At that moment Rickey’s last shot at glory died. The jubilant Continentals ignored his warning to read the fine print. O’Malley had not said which four cities would come first or when the other four would be added.

But the old man had served his purpose. Just by being Branch Rickey, he had forced the majors to take the league seriously. Houston’s Craig Cullinan said, “It was ridiculed as a sham, but on the contrary it was an enormous success because it ran what became the biggest bluff in the history of professional sports.”32 All Continental cities except Buffalo were eventually accepted into the majors, though Denver had to wait 33 years.

Rather than savoring victory, the majors dissolved into backbiting and chaos. The pressure for expansion revealed a rift between the American and National Leagues, which were separate and highly competitive organizations. Major-league baseball had no management structure suitable for a large business, which the game had become. With the docile Frick in the commissioner’s office, the cartel lacked strong leadership. Owners O’Malley and Del Webb of the Yankees stepped into that void as the de facto leaders, two businessmen protecting their private interests rather than pursuing the greater good of the game.

O’Malley fired the opening shot in an intramural baseball war. As chairman of the NL expansion committee, he engineered a unanimous vote on October 17 to award franchises to New York and Houston. The owners were Continental League backers: heiress Joan Whitney Payson in New York and Craig Cullinan Jr., R.E. Smith, and Judge Roy Hofheinz in Houston. The new clubs would begin play in 1962, giving them a year and a half to prepare.

New York’s addition was a foregone conclusion. Houston was “considered by many the ripest plum available for plucking by big league baseball,” as Sports Illustrated’s Roy Terrell put it.33 Both leagues had coveted the nation’s seventh-largest city. Del Webb, chairman of the AL expansion committee, fumed that the Nationals “pulled a fast one on us” by taking unilateral action. He added, “This was O’Malley’s doing.”34

O’Malley had stepped on a hornet’s nest. He had his own agenda: to keep the American League out of Los Angeles, or at least delay as long as possible. But LA was now the third-largest city, and Commissioner Frick had declared it, like New York, open territory for expansion.35 The AL couldn’t pass it up. And Webb wouldn’t pass up a chance to sting O’Malley.

Meeting in New York on October 26, the AL pulled its own fast one. The owners voted to allow Calvin Griffith to take his Senators to Minneapolis-St. Paul. To mollify Congress, they awarded Washington an expansion franchise. The second expansion team would go to Los Angeles.36

The AL’s decision blew up the agreement with the Continental League. Continental owners in Minnesota were shut out, and Los Angeles had never been part of the third league. (The Continentals had avoided challenging O’Malley, even rejecting an investor group that included Frank Sinatra.)37 Bill Shea, now kibitzing from the sidelines, described the AL action as “one of the lowest blows below the belt in the history of sports.”38

But O’Malley wasn’t giving up without a fight. He leaned on the commissioner, and Frick about-faced, saying that O’Malley was entitled to compensation for the invasion of “his” territory. Hank Greenberg, the slugger turned executive who had secretly been promised the LA franchise, refused to kowtow to O’Malley and dropped his bid.39 That left the American League scrambling.

The AL, in its haste to upstage the Nationals, had voted to put expansion teams on the field in 1961. Opening Day was less than six months away. There was no turning back; the old Washington Senators were loading the truck for Minnesota and the new Washington franchise had been awarded to a syndicate led by retired Lieutenant General Pete Quesada. The league couldn’t play with nine teams. “Never has the baseball picture been more muddled, millstoned or mired in uncertainty as it is today,” the Associated Press’s Joe Reichler wrote.40

Singing cowboy Gene Autry threw his white Stetson into the ring to save the day. The AL jumped at his bid for the Los Angeles franchise. But O’Malley had the whip hand, and he used it. After three days of negotiations at an emergency meeting in St. Louis in December, Autry agreed to O’Malley’s terms. He paid the Dodgers $350,000; agreed to play one year in the city’s tiny minor-league park, Wrigley Field; and then become O’Malley’s tenant when the new Dodger Stadium was ready.41 The AL got a team in LA, and O’Malley got everything else.

At last expansion was a fact. It was a windfall for the 16 legacy teams. Each new club paid $2.1 million for the ragtag players they drafted – “crumbs from the table,” Rickey called them.42 As Rickey had predicted, the expansion teams took up residence at the bottom of the standings. Only the Angels posted a winning record in their first seven years. The “Miracle Mets” won the 1969 World Series and reached the Series again four years later, but no other expansion club made it to the championship round until 1980.

Would baseball have been better off if the Continental League had succeeded? Professional football followed that model; the American Football League was born as an outlaw in 1960 and persevered through years of heavy financial losses until it merged with the NFL to create the colossus of American sports. Baseball expanded its two leagues four more times, with stumbles at every turn, while its claim to be the national pastime became a relic of history.

 

Notes

1 Ford C. Frick, Games, Asterisks and People (New York: Crown, 1973), 119.

2 Special Research Committee for Major League Baseball in Los Angeles, “Progress Report on the Los Angeles Major League Baseball Project” (1954), commonly known as the Veeck report, in the author’s files.

3 American League Realignment Committee, “Is a Ten-Club League Practicable?” (the Frank Lane report), January 30, 1955, in American League Papers, BA MSS 125, Series III Box 20 Folder 4, at the National Baseball Hall of Fame library, Cooperstown, New York.

4 Murray Polner, Branch Rickey (New York: New American Library, 1982), 252.

5 “Frick Favors New York as Open,” Washington Post and Times Herald, December 7, 1957: A12.

6 Arthur Daley, “Sports of the Times,” New York Times, November 18, 1958: 48.

7 J.G. Taylor Spink, “‘Third Major Must Come Soon’ – Rickey,” The Sporting News, May 21, 1958: 1.

8 Dick Young, “Third Major League Gets New York Go-Ahead,” Chicago Tribune, November 14, 1958: C1.

9 United Press International, “Kefauver Offers Sport Control Bill,” Chicago Tribune, February 4, 1959: B1.

10 United Press International, “Majors to Accept Bids From 3d League,” Chicago Tribune, May 22, 1959: E1.

11 Dan Daniel, “35,000 Minimum Capacity for Continental Loop Park,” The Sporting News, August 5, 1959: 8.

12 United Press International, “Frick Talks Baseball Harmony,” New York Times, July 30, 1959: 32.

13 Dave Brady, “Majors Told to Play Ball With Third Big League,” Washington Post and Times Herald, August 1, 1959: A11.

14 Lee Lowenfish, Branch Rickey, Baseball’s Ferocious Gentleman (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 556.

15 Clark Nealon, Robert Nottebart, Stanley Siegal, and James Tinsley, “The Campaign for Major League Baseball in Houston,” Houston Review (undated reprint), 22. houstonhistorymagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/7.1-The-Campaign-for-Major-League-Baseball-in-Houston-Clark-Nealon-Robert-Nottebart-Stanley-Siegal-James-Tinsley.pdf, accessed November 1, 2017.

16 Lowenfish, Branch Rickey, 564-565.

17 Daniel, “A.L. Lays Expansion Groundwork, Will Study Twin Cities’ Request,” The Sporting News, October 28, 1959: 5.

18 Michael Shapiro, Bottom of the Ninth (New York: Henry Holt, 2009), 141.

19 Dick Gordon, “Player Pool Plan Aired By B.R. in Twin-City Visit,” The Sporting News, January 13, 1960: 9.

20 Oscar Kahan, “Mahatma Dares Majors to Attempt Expansion,” The Sporting News, December 16, 1959: 12.

21 “Third Major Standards Set; Don’t Need Mediator – Frick,” The Sporting News, January 13, 1960: 9.

22 “Dick Young Finds Love Feast ‘Too Mushy’; He’s Suspicious,” The Sporting News, September 2, 1959: 16.

23 Brady, “Blast by Frick Scorches Ears on Capitol Hill,” The Sporting News, January 27, 1960: 6.

24 Brady, “Frick Clears Sacks Testifying Against Kefauver Sport Bill,” The Sporting News, May 25, 1960: 9.

25 Shapiro, Bottom of the Ninth, 188.

26 Lowenfish, Branch Rickey, 568-569, 571-572; Robert Reed, Colt .45s: A Six-Gun Salute (Houston: Lone Star Books, 1997), 31.

27 Frick, Games, Asterisks and People, 128.

28 Shapiro, Bottom of the Ninth, 208-209.

29 Reed, Colt .45s, 34.

30 Lowenfish, Branch Rickey, 573.

31 Jerry Holtzman, “Big Timers Clearing Decks for Expansion,” The Sporting News, August 10, 1960: 3.

32 Reed, Colt .45s, 34.

33 Roy Terrell, “‘The Damnedest Mess Baseball Has Ever Seen,’” Sports Illustrated, December 19, 1960, si.com/vault/1960/12/19/585926/the-damndest-mess-baseball-has-ever-seen, accessed October 20, 2017.

34 Shirley Povich, “Griffith’s Decision Made Purely on Impulse,” Washington Post and Times Herald, October 27, 1960: D1.

35 Associated Press, “Ford Frick Believes L.A. Should Be Open Territory,” Los Angeles Times, August 15, 1960: IV-3.

36 Joe King, “A.L. Speeds Expansion – 10 Teams in ’61,” The Sporting News, November 2, 1960: 3.

37 Shapiro, Bottom of the Ninth, 124.

38 “League’s Action Scored by Shea,” New York Times, October 27, 1960: 46.

39 Al Wolf, “Several Groups to Bid for New L.A. Franchise,” Los Angeles Times, November 19, 1960: II-3.

40 Joe Reichler, “Muddled Baseball Picture May Be Cleared Up at Meetings This Week,” Associated Press-Washington Post and Times Herald, November 27, 1960: C2.

41 Frank Finch, “It’s Official! Angels to Play in 1961,” Los Angeles Times, December 8, 1960: IV-1; Andy McCue, Mover and Shaker: Walter O’Malley, the Dodgers, & Baseball’s Westward Expansion (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014), 292-293.

42 Shapiro, Bottom of the Ninth, 216.