The Pacific Coast League, part 2

After I posted an article about the PCL yesterday in which I wrote that the league voted for becoming a Major League in 1946, it intrigued me a lot. My immediate thought, when I read this, was: “How did they not succeed in becoming a third Major League?” I found the answer in a 51-page case study on both the MLB bid of the PCL and the move to Milwaukee by the Boston Braves.

The MLB bid by the PCL was a direct result of a previous attempt to move an MLB team to the West Coast. Halfway the 1941 season, then St. Louis Browns owner, Donald Barnes unfolded plans to move the team to Los Angeles. Since their existence the team had never reached the playoffs (read World Series); this would only come in 1944 when the American League was weakened by the many players that joined the military.
Barnes negotiated with a group of investors from Los Angeles to sell them a part of the Browns’ shares so he could buy the PCL franchise Los Angeles Angels from the Wrigley family. If the move would be approved, he could send the Angels towards Long Beach and house the Browns in the Angels’ Wrigley Field (a mini-me clone of the original Wrigley Field in Chicago). In the meantime Barnes had to make a deal with the St. Louis Cardinals, who were tenant of the Browns owned Sportsman Park in St. Louis. The Cardinals would pay the Browns $250,000 to leave St. Louis and give them two players valued at $25,000 each. According to the proposed deal, the Cardinals would lobby within the National League to support the Browns’ move to Los Angeles. In fact the National League owners would not object; this move would make St. Louis NL only territory.
The Chamber of Commerce of Los Angeles guaranteed a minimum of 500,000 fans for the first five years. If the club would not make that number, the Chamber of Commerce would underwrite that number. With this in his mind, Barnes negotiated with Trans World Airlines and the Santa Fe Chief railroad for a travel plan. Each team would make three road trips to the West Coast, two by train, one by plane (from Chicago). Barnes was even willing to underwrite the travel costs of the American League teams (after all, the Browns would receive the box-office money for 500,000 fans).

The timing of this plan could not be worse. With the plan being far advanced, America got involved in WWII when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Due to the war effort, travel restrictions came in place and the Browns’ move to the West Coast was cancelled.

Having survived this first “attack” on their territory, the Pacific Coast League owners decided to make a bid to become a third major league. The owners voted in favour of this bid in 1945. The next season, the league should have MLB status. But things would go a little bit different.

The MLB owners were very protective. They made mutual deals that would keep players safe from being razed by other teams. Next to that, the owners wanted to keep the control over an eventual expansion to the West. So they were not waiting for a third Major League.

During the Winter Meetings of 1945, the MLB owners voted against the PCL penetrating their exclusive territory. To make things less worse, they gave the AAA status to the Pacific Coast League and stated that the area of the PCL was potentional Major League territory.
But the protectiveness of the MLB owners was not the only reason why they voted against a third Major League. The size of the PCL stadiums was clearly too small for MLB standards. Take Wrigley Field in Los Angeles for example. That stadium was really small. When the Los Angeles Angels debuted in the American League in 1961, they moved into Wrigley Field. The stadium held an MLB record for most hit homeruns in a ballpark of 248. This record stood for thirty years.

The next year the PCL would push again to become a third major league. As a result of the previous attempt where the size of the PCL ballparks was one of the points that made the MLB owners vote against a third major league, several owners started to expand their stadiums or even started to build new ones. Still the MLB owners voted against. But this time an agreement was reached.
The major leagues postponed recognizing the PCL as a major league for five years. In return, the major leagues would support the PCL’s desire for territorial protection. The PCL could also retain any player drafted, if the circuit matched the salary the drafting club offered. But the MLB owners broke the territorial promise by agreeing that an MLB club could penetrate into the PCL’s territory by compensating the involved party. It was clear that MLB didn’t want to share the post war prosperity with another league.

The third push came in 1947 when the PCL requested a three-to-five year trial of becoming a major league and that the MLB stopped the draft on PCL players, to make sure that these players could develop to top level athletes. Once again the request was shoved aside as the Major League was planning to investigate if the West Coast was a suitable place to house an MLB franchise. Later that year the Pacific Coast League softened its stance and asked for a classification above AAA. Once again the MLB owners voted against this request. Instead they accepted a resolution that kept the door open to a possible addition of PCL cities to the Major League.

With the West Coast being the area with the fastest growing population, the MLB owners could not ignore that fact and the bleak financial situation of the Boston Braves and the St. Louis Browns.
Both teams would be a good fit for a move to California.

The Pacific Coast League started to be frustrated more and more. Not only were their attempts to become a third major league sabotaged by the MLB owners, they didn’t not receive much support of the other minor leagues. Between 1948 and 1951 the PCL threatened to break away from the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues (the former name of the governing body of Minor League Baseball) and to become an outlaw league.

But in 1951 it seemed that progress was about to be made. Commissioner of Baseball, Ford Frick, announced a plan in which minor leagues with at least eight teams would be elevated to a Major League status. A new status above AAA was created for leagues with at least eight teams, a market that contained at least 10 million people, ballparks possessed by the clubs with a paid attendance of 120,000 in total that brought in $2.25 million in he previous five years. Once a league would reach this “open” status, a new set of rules had to be met before the league could become a major league. These additional rules raised the bar so high that it was nearly impossible for a AAA league to become a major league.

One of the rules that a AAA league had to meet was the number of attendance (3.5 million per year). In 1950 the PCL had no problem in reaching that number. But in the early 50s the attendance figures started to drop dramatically, so the league would never meet the set of rules that would allow them to become a major league.

The PCL’s aspirations of becoming a third major league were frustrated by Los Angeles officials who started to look around for a franchise that could move to the city of Angels.

In the late 40s and early 50s, cities on the East Coast started to lose inhabitants, who moved to the West. So the financial weak franchises like the Boston Braves, St. Louis Browns, Washington Senators and Phliladelphia Athletics lost even more potential fans.

During the 1952 Winter Meetings, both major leagues decided that a team could move when the owners of the same league would vote in favour unanimously. The other league could not block an intended move. This new rule was the spark plug for the first move of an MLB club since 1903, when the Baltimore Orioles moved to New York and became the New York Highlanders, the predecessor of the Yankees. In March 1953, Boston Braves owner Lou Perini decided to move the team to Milwaukee.

The next team that would move was the St. Louis Browns. . In 1954 the St. Louis Browns would start the season as Baltimore Orioles as the other league owners forced Browns owner Bill Veeck to sell the team in the 1953/1954 off season.

The aforementioned moves were followed closely by weak franchises like the Philadelphia Athletics, Washington Senators and the New York Giants. In the next five years all of these clubs would leave their hometown for greener pastures.

How strange it may sound, the moves to Milwaukee and Baltimore were the omen that the PCL would never be a third major league.

Even though the case study claims that the Pacific Coast League’s wish to become a third major league was a main reason for MLB’s expansion, I tend to deny this. If MLB really wanted to expand to the West, they would have done this sooner than 1958. Los Angeles City officials tried to lure the Senators to move West, but there Walter O’Malley jumped in. If O’Malley had not persuaded Horace Stoneham to move to San Francisco, the team would have moved to Minneapolis. The 1953 and 1954 moves by the Braves and the Browns/Orioles could have been halted. In my opinion the move to the West would have taken place without the attempts by the PCL to become a third major league. Cities on the West Coast were aggressively trying to get an MLB franchise. So the PCL’s push to become a third major league may have played a tiny role in this but MLB’s expansion to the West was a matter of time.