A Third Major Baseball League?
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by Mlnsports
Think you know your major league baseball? Did you know that there were almost three major leagues? After WWII, the West was booming. The Pacific Coast League (PCL), was huge, with two clubs in Los Angeles, and clubs in most of the major cities on the west coast. The Hollywood Stars players rubbed elbows with the greats of tinsletown. The Yankees stole a guy by the name of DiMaggio from the San Francisco Seals, paying them the "development" fee which amounted to nothing near what Joltin' Joe brought in. Likewise, San Diegan Ted Williams was lifted from the PCL's Padres by Boston.
A guy named Clarence 'Pants' Rowland who was the PCL President at the time, thought that the eastern league's ability to pluck his league's prime players for a song was not only unfair, but, given how big the PCL had become after the war, was not befitting of their status.
He appealed to Kennisaw Mountain Landis, the judge-turned-commissioner who had straightened out baseball after the 1919 Chicago Black Sox scandal, and had ruled with an iron fist ever-after. When that didn't work, he told Landis that the PCL was going to form its own major league, and set out to make that happen.
Landis did not support the idea of a third league, but didn't play his hand out with Rowland.
Instead, he left that up to Ford Fricke, who replaced him... with a few suggestions. Fricke and the AL and NL owners did not want to see the PCL rise to their level. San Francisco and the Stars in LA were both talking with money people about developing major-league-sized stadiums. This could not stand. So they did the best thing that they could do to submarine the PCL's power play.
The New York market was crowded. The Yankees were the dominant club. So the Dodgers, then the Giants, were given permission to move out West.
What MLB, in its lore, likes to describe as some sort of manifest destiny was nothing more than a power grab. Once MLB announced that it would be in LA, the money behind stadiums in both LA and San Francisco dried up.
To make sure that the PCL was dead, the owners bought interests in both the Angels, and the Padres, and moved those teams into MLB to take control of the West.
Click on the link above to see more about Rowland, and other of the PCL Hall of Famers. It's interesting history.
