The Promised Land: The Twin Cities’ Long Flirtation with Major League Baseball

In the 1950s, as the population of the United States shifted, the footprint of major league baseball also changed. In 1952, there were 16 major-league teams centered in just 10 cities, but within a decade, existing teams had moved to Milwaukee, Baltimore, Kansas City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and the Twin Cities area.

Following the 1960 season, the Washington Senators relocated to Bloomington, Minnesota, becoming the Minnesota Twins. They were replaced in the nation’s capital by an expansion team also called the Senators. It was the culmination of several years of speculation about the relocation of the Senators to Minneapolis, and they were the third team in that decade to seriously consider the move.

In 1903, the team now known as the Yankees played its first game in New York, and for the next half-century, stability reigned in major-league baseball, with eight teams each in the American and National Leagues. Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and St. Louis each had a team in each league. New York had two National League teams (the Giants in Manhattan and the Dodgers in Brooklyn) and an American League team, called variously the Americans and the Highlanders before becoming known as the Yankees. Cleveland, Detroit, and Washington were the other American League cities. Pittsburgh and Cincinnati were the other National League cities.

There was talk of teams relocating—St. Louis Cardinals owner Sam Breadon had discussed a move to Detroit, or possibly to Columbus, home of their Double-A team, in the 1930s, and the Browns were set to move to Los Angeles before World War II intervened— but until 1953, everyone stayed put.1 That year, the Boston Braves moved. Boston could no longer support two teams, and the Braves looked west to Milwaukee, home of their Triple-A team, the Brewers. The Braves began play in Milwaukee not in aged Borchert Field, where the Brewers played, but in Milwaukee County Stadium, a new park built ostensibly for the Brewers, but with an eye toward drawing a major-league team. Similar plans were being undertaken in Minneapolis, which had identified as priorities a more modern airport and a stadium capable of luring a big-league team to the Twin Cities.2 At the time, the Twin Cities each had a minor-league team. St. Paul was home to the Saints, who had entered into a working agreement with the Dodgers in 1943, then were bought by the latter club four years later.3 Minneapolis hosted the Millers, who had been bought by the Giants in 1946.4 The agreements with the Dodgers and Giants gave a new layer to what was already a heated rivalry between Minneapolis and St. Paul. The owners of both parent clubs were looking for new accommodations. The fourth and ultimately final stadium to be called the Polo Grounds was built at the foot of Coogan’s Bluff in 1911, and Ebbets Field was built in Brooklyn the following year. Both ballparks were starting to look a little long in the tooth, and parking limitations turned into a major issue. The team’s owners had wildly different ideas on where to land.

“Walter O’Malley was certainly looking for a new ballpark in Brooklyn,” said Major League Baseball historian John Thorn in a 2020 interview with the author.5 “Horace Stoneham was looking for a new city. Minneapolis, which was home to their Triple-A team, shared some of the same characteristics as Milwaukee, which had been a successful city for the Braves.”6 Both were growing areas, supportive of minor-league teams, and actively soliciting a major-league team. Additionally, their ownership of the Millers gave the Giants territorial rights in Minneapolis, removing one more obstacle for them to relocate there. But Milwaukee had a new stadium, and the Twin Cities didn’t. They were, however, working to change that. In the summer of 1954, the Metropolitan Sports Area Commission was formed to build a new stadium in Minneapolis. Also that year, a civic group called the Minute Men was formed. It was estimated that $4.5 million in bonds were necessary to build the stadium, and it would be the Minute Men’s job to sell them.

A 1953 letter to Stoneham from New York’s master builder, Robert Moses, suggested that perhaps the Giants could leave the Polo Grounds to clear the way for public housing to be constructed, no doubt a nudge for Stoneham to give further thought to relocation. The following January, following a well-lubricated evening at a baseball banquet, Stoneham told Millers general manager George Brophy that he planned to move the Giants to Minneapolis.7 All he needed was a new stadium.8 Following the 1953 season, the St. Louis Browns moved to Baltimore to begin play as the Orioles. And in 1954, Connie Mack sold the Philadelphia Athletics to Arnold Johnson and the team soon decamped for Kansas City. In both instances, Minneapolis was considered as a destination.9

And in both instances, the teams instead went someplace with a newly renovated stadium that could accommodate a major-league team. Ruppert Stadium in Kansas City was rebuilt from the ground up into Municipal Stadium, and Baltimore’s Municipal Stadium was transformed into Memorial Stadium.

“We had to get organized if we were going to get a baseball team,” longtime Twin Cities sportswriter Sid Hartman recalled in his memoirs.10 That offseason, 1954–55, Stoneham denied rumors that the Giants would be moving not to Minneapolis, but to San Francisco! “The Giants are not planning to vacate the Polo Grounds,” he said flatly.11

At the time, the Giants were defending champions, having swept the Cleveland Indians in the World Series. It was also a heady era for baseball in Cleveland. In a nine-year stretch beginning with a 1948 championship, the Indians hadn’t won fewer than 88 games. (Their ascendance coincided with an era of Yankees dominance, so they had just two pennants and a World Series win to show for it.) But attendance had been declining after a record year at the turnstiles in 1948, and Hank Greenberg, the team’s general manager, started to cast a longing eye elsewhere.

Greenberg’s playing career had ended following the 1947 season, when he was released (at his request) by the Pirates following his lone season in Pittsburgh. Bill Veeck, who’d just finished his first full season as Indians owner, brought him on as an assistant, and Greenberg stayed on with the next ownership group after Veeck sold the team in 1949. Greenberg bought a 20 percent interest in the club in 1956.

That was the year that Metropolitan Stadium opened in Bloomington, to rave reviews and large crowds, for its minor-league tenant, the Millers, as well as occasional major-league exhibitions.12 “There are high hopes now in Minneapolis that the bright new stadium will help the city to graduate from a Giant farm town to the Giants’ home,” Sports Illustrated wrote.13 In fact, Stoneham himself said after the fact that his plan had been to move the team to Minneapolis.

At the same time, rumors were afoot in Cleveland that the Indians, not the Giants, might soon be playing in Minneapolis. Attendance was dwindling and as the Indians slid into mediocrity, Greenberg complained that the press was too harsh. Cleveland Plain Dealer sports editor Gordon Cobbledick said they were just telling it like it is. “Hank Greenberg is sensitive to newspaper criticism and is convinced that he and his team have been unfairly dealt with by the press in Cleveland,” Cobbledick wrote in a 1956 column addressing rumors of a move to Minneapolis. “He has stated his belief that the fans are staying away not because the Indians are a dull, uninteresting team, but because the newspapers have said they were a dull, uninteresting team.”14

In his autobiography, Greenberg claimed that he was fired as general manager following the 1957 season for trying to relocate the team to Minneapolis. Meanwhile, another suitor had entered the picture for the Giants. In May 1957, it was reported that officials from San Francisco met with Stoneham and Dodgers owner O’Malley in the hopes of bringing a major-league team to the Bay Area. At that point, time was becoming a factor for the Giants, whose lease at the Polo Grounds was set to expire in 1961.15 Finally, that August, the Giants announced they would move to San Francisco.16

But the Indians still seemed to be in play. In the summer of 1957, as the Giants were moving closer to their move to the West Coast, New York Journal-American columnist Bill Corum said that the Indians would leave Cleveland for Minneapolis for the 1959 season.17 But by October 1958, board chairman Bill Daley announced that the Indians were there to stay. He said it was out of civic loyalty, but the team was bound by lease terms to Cleveland Stadium.18

By then, another team had entered the fray. The Washington Senators were looking for a new home as well, and before the Dodgers announced their relocation plans, the Senators had been linked to Los Angeles. Minnesota representatives were putting on the full-court press, and owner Calvin Griffith met with them in 1957, but only as a courtesy, he said.19 But the idea of a move to Minneapolis intrigued him enough that he sought permission to explore it in the summer of 1958. He was turned down by other owners, anxious over testimony before Congress over the sport’s antitrust exemption. Griffith testified in those hearings, saying, “We want to stay in Washington as long as humanly possible.”20

In January 1959, Boston Red Sox general manager Joe Cronin was named president of the American League. After the Giants left for San Francisco, the Millers had become a Red Sox farm team, and Cronin insisted on a stipulation in the lease at Metropolitan Stadium allowing for a major-league team to relocate to the Met. “At the time, I didn’t know why he’d want that,” recalled Peter Dorsey, a lawyer who negotiated the lease. “The Red Sox sure weren’t going anywhere.” The Red Sox might not have been, but Cronin was also Griffith’s brother-in-law.21

Also in 1959, plans were announced for a third major league. The impetus for the Continental League had come from New York, which was suddenly without National League baseball, but among the cities considered for relocation would be Minneapolis. That worried Griffith, who feared being forced to stay in DC, where public sentiment was turning against him as news got out about his considering relocation.22 In fact, the Continental League held meetings in Minneapolis in January 1960, no doubt to gin up support for a proposed team there. Suddenly, the major leagues, which had previously had no interest in expansion, were ready to do so.23 That summer, major-league owners met with Branch Rickey, who had been the main voice behind the Continental League, and a deal was struck. Expansion was promised and the proposed third major league “went phffft,” as sportswriter Jerry Holtzman put it.24

Following the 1960 season, National League owners announced plans to add teams in Houston and New York City in 1962. Not to be outdone, American League owners announced a week later their plans to expand to 10 teams in 1961. One of those teams would be in Los Angeles. The other would be in Washington, DC—to replace the Senators, who would move to Minneapolis.

The new Washington Senators would keep baseball in DC, offering photo opportunities for the president’s annual tradition of throwing out a first ball and keeping relationships smooth with Congress, which had regulatory power over interstate trade and more than a passing interest in baseball’s antitrust exemption. Griffith would get new opportunities and an almost-new stadium, and Twin Cities residents saw the culmination of a concerted, nearly decade-long effort to bring major league baseball to Minnesota.25

VINCE GUERRIERI is a journalist and author in the Cleveland area. He’s the secretary/treasurer of the Jack Graney SABR Chapter, and has contributed to the SABR BioProject, the SABR Games Project, and several SABR anthologies. He’s written about baseball history for a variety of publications, including Ohio Magazine, Cleveland Magazine, Smithsonian, and Defector. He can be reached at vaguerrieri@gmail.com, or found on Twitter @vinceguerrieri.

 

Sources

In addition to sources listed in endnotes, the author consulted Hank Greenberg, with Ira Berkow, The Story of My Life. New York: Times Books, 1989.

 

Notes

1 Vince Guerrieri, “How the Cardinals Nearly Lost the War for St. Louis,” Defector, March 29, 2023, https://defector.com/how-the-cardinals-nearly-lost-the-war-for-st-louis.

2 Jay Weiner, Stadium Games: Fifty Years of Big League Greed and Bush League Boondoggles (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 5.

3 “St. Paul is added to Dodgers Chain,” The New York Times, November 21, 1947, 38.

4 “Giants buy Minneapolis,” The New York Times, April 13, 1946, 20.

5 The interview was for Guerrieri, “The Many Megaprojects of Sunnyside Yard,” Bloomberg, March 16, 2020, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-16/instead-of-a-stadium-sunnyside-yard-to-host-homes. Sunnyside Yards in Queens was suggested as a potential relocation site for the Giants.

6 Craig Muder, “Braves’ move to Milwaukee shook baseball’s world,” National Baseball Hall of Fame, undated, https://baseballhall.org/discover/inside-pitch/braves-move-to-milwaukee-shook-baseballs-world. The Braves had drawn 281,278 fans in their final year in Boston. They drew more than 1.8 million their first year in Milwaukee.

7 Brophy recounted the interaction in an interview with Weiner for Stadium Games.

8 At the time, the plan was to build a stadium on Highway 12 in St. Louis Park. But Stoneham vacillated, and the city’s civic interests coalesced around the plan for what became Metropolitan Stadium. Further reading: Patrick Reusse, “A Twin Cities stadium mystery history,” Star Tribune, October 8, 2016, https://www.startribune.com/a-twin-cities-stadium-mystery-history/396429541/.

9 Sid Hartman said that Veeck, who was essentially forced out as Browns owner to complete the move to Baltimore, made an offer to buy the Athletics. Had his offer been accepted, he would have moved the team to Minneapolis.

10 Sid Hartman, Sid! The Sports Legends, the Inside Scoops, and the Close Personal Friends (Beverly, MA: Voyageur Press, 1997), 82.

11 Louis Effrat, “Talk of Giants Moving to Coast Idle Gossip, Stoneham Asserts,” The New York Times, November 16, 1954, 37. Ironically, one of the reasons given not to relocate was the strength of the rivalry with the nearby Dodgers.

12 Bloomington, part of the Minneapolis-St. Paul MSA, was selected as a compromise, equidistant from downtown Minneapolis and St. Paul.

13 “New Look in Minneapolis,” Sports Illustrated, August 20, 1956, 28.

14 Gordon Cobbledick, “Plain Dealing,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, August 16, 1956, 25.

15 In a strange arrangement, the Coogans “own the grounds, the Giants own the seats.” Effrat, “Talk of Giants Moving.”

16 Bill Veeck, The Hustler’s Handbook (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1965). Veeck devoted an entire chapter to the way Horace Stoneham’s amiability and fondness for scotch made him look like a mark, only for him to emerge with essentially what he wanted. “O’Malley not only got him a better territory,” Veeck wrote, “he did all the preliminary work for him in San Francisco, thereby permitting Horace to slip out of New York without even a bad press.”

17 “Indians deny Minneapolis shift,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, July 9, 1957, 25.

18 Jack Torry, Endless Summers (South Bend, IN., Diamond Communications, 1995), 75. The terms of the lease said that the Indians would play “At Cleveland Municipal Stadium and no other place.” In his autobiography, Sid Hartman said that term was inserted as Veeck tried to use League Park, a smaller stadium where the Indians had long played some of their games, to negotiate favorable lease terms for Municipal Stadium.

19 Shirley Povich, “Cal Hopes for Nat Shift—But to New Capital Stadium,” The Sporting News, October 16, 1957, 32.

20 Jack Walsh, “TV Curb Needed to Save Game—Frick,” The Sporting News, July 23, 1958, 7.

21 Weiner, Stadium Games, 30.

22 One of the plans considered following the departure of the Giants and Dodgers was for the Cincinnati Reds to move to New York. John Drebinger, “Redlegs Owner Hints of Settling Club in New York,” The New York Times, December 29, 1957, 103.

23 Gary Olson, “Minnesota Twins Team Ownership History,” Society for American Baseball Research, undated, https://sabr.org/bioproj/topic/minnesota-twins-team-ownership-history/.

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

25 Additionally, an NFL team would start play in at Metropolitan Stadium in 1961. Minneapolis had designs on a team in the new American Football League, but the NFL also agreed to expand, adding the Dallas Cowboys in 1960 and the Minnesota Vikings in 1961.