Pacific Coast League

Pacific Coast League
American North	American South	Pacific North	Pacific South
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Description

The Pacific Coast League (PCL) is a minor league baseball league operating in the West and Midwest of the United States. It is one of three leagues, along with the International League and the Mexican League, playing at the Triple-A level, one tier below Major League Baseball.

Short History

The Pacific Coast League (PCL) has had a long history. Originally serving California, Washington, Oregon, and Utah, the league grew up alongside the small West Coast cities, and exploded along with them as Hollywood's siren call to the Coast and the prosperity of the defense and agricultural businesses in post WWII California brought people into the state by the droves.

The league rose so close to becoming a major league that it became a threat to the MLB establishment, until it was broken and largely driven out of the state by MLB.

Today the PCL is one of the fastest-growing markets for professional baseball, with teams stretching from the coastal towns of Portland, Oregon and inland Sacramento, California, to Omaha, Nebraska in the East and Round Rock, Texas to the South.

Minor, but Proud

The PCL has been a member of the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues (NABPL or "NA") since its founding.

As much as MLB exploited players via the much-hated reserve clause, it exploited the NA leagues as well via its federal antitrust exemption that gave MLB the power to do what it would to the other professional leagues.

Before the advent of the "farm" system, where players contracts are all owned by the major league club, the system of "buying" a contract of a minor league player was stacked heavily in favor of the MLB clubs. Owners would be paid a flat amount for the development of a player. Any player could be called out by a major league team. Just pay the fee, and the player was the property of MLB. The antitrust exemption kept leagues from having any legal recourse for this type of pilfering.

The PCL produced many of the outstanding players in MLB, including Joe DiMaggio, Dominic DiMaggio, Ted Williams, Tony Lazzeri, Paul Waner, Earl Averill and Ernie Lombardi, to name just a few. Some of these players were plucked from their clubs for as little as $5,000, which, even by the standards of those days, was still a pittance for the talent being swiped.

While all leagues hated the system, none chafed at it more than the owners of the PCL.

One man, in particular, found this piracy intolerable. Clarence "Pants" Rowland, the president of the league from 1944 to 1954 went to Judge Kennisaw Mountain Landis the first Commissioner of Baseball in 1952 to demand that the fee paid to the NA clubs for players taken from them by MLB be raised from $8,000 to $10,000. The PCL became the only minor league in history to be given the "open" classification by the Commissioner's Office, a step above the AAA level. This limited the rights of major league clubs to draft players from the PCL, and was seen as a step toward the circuit becoming a third major league.

Good Climate, Good Pay

The mild climate of the West Coast, especially in California, allowed the league to play longer seasons, sometimes starting in late February and ending as late as the beginning of December. This let players earn an extra month or two worth of pay and reduced the need to find offseason work, something which even some major league players found necessary because of the low salaries, by today's standards, paid to many players. The longer playing season also provided room for additional games on the schedule, giving team owners a chance at generating more revenue. Teams sometimes played over 200 games in a single season. One consequence is that a number of the all-time minor league records for season statistical totals are held by players from the PCL.

Golden Era

Attendance in the PCL reached a peak in the mid-1950s. Frankie Kelleher of the Hollywood Stars and Joe Brovia of the San Francisco Seals may have had cups of coffee in the MLB system, but they were big stars in the league. Kelleher and other Hollywood Stars were watched nightly by some of the luminaries of show business, and they were VIPs at some of Hollywood's top watering holes. Kelleher even had a cameo in a Fred Astaire musical at MGM as himself, and was involved in the so-called "Fight of the Century" in a brutal on-field slugfest between the Stars and the hated cross-town rival Los Angeles Angels

The PCL had become so dominant that Rowland petitioned Judge Landis for the right to become a third major league.

Landis, on his way into retirement, left the threat of a third major league in the hands of his successor, Ford Frick. Frick went along with the MLB ownersm who did not want to see a third major league. They set out to thwart Rowland's designs for the PCL. Major league interests had been quietly buying into the San Diego Padres and the Los Angeles Angels.

Meanwhile PCL owners made plans with West Coast investors to build major league-sized ballparks in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

The hammer-blow came as 1958 Frick gave the Brooklyn Dodgers owner Walter O'Malley permission to move his club to Los Angeles. The news rocked both the baseball world and the Hollywood Stars. Caught off-guard, they could do nothing but shut their doors and retreat. Their ballfield on Fairfax Blvd. was sold to developers who ultimately built CBS Television City on the same lot.

MLB followed with another gut blow to the PCL for the other big stadium deal in San Francisco. Frick and the owners authorized the New York Giants to relocate to San Francisco.

The Los Angeles Angels, and the San Diego Padres, the teams that had been quietly bought into by interests including Chicago's Charles Comiskey, were later turned into MLB expansion franchises.

The PCL remained a minor league, and MLB sent a strong message out to the other smaller leagues in parts of the country that were growing rapidly, like Texas, that any designs on major league status in any of the expanding parts of the U.S. without MLB at the helm would be summarily crushed.

Of the cities represented in the PCL in its heyday, only Salt Lake City, Portland and Sacramento remain, and even these are represented by different franchises than those that had originally called these cities home.

The Oakland Oaks were moved to Canada two years before the arrival of the Giants. The Seattle Rainiers were moved to Tacoma in 1968.

For many years, until the Albuquerque Dukes were sold to an ownership group in Portland, Oregon, Sacramento was the only remaining Pacific Coast League city still on the Pacific Coast.

Recent Expansion

In the late 1990s, Branch B. Rickey III, grandson of Branch Rickey, took over the PCL after serving as president of the American Association

Rickey agreed to take teams from the disbanding American Association in 1997, the year after he arrived at the PCL. The league now stretched from the west Washington and Sacramento to the middle of the country and Nashville.

Rickey also was a pioneer in the huge boom that has turned the minor leagues into major money. He was the guiding force behind a massive modernization program that drove the PCL to build new stadiums with state of the art training for players and state of the art fun and comfort for the growing legions of fans of minor league sports.

Modern Configuration

The league is divided into two conferences, the American Conference and Pacific Conference; after a realignment for 2005 necessitated by the move of the Edmonton Trappers to Round Rock, Texas, each is divided into a Northern Division and a Southern Division. The Trappers' move also ended the league's presence in Canada; as recently as 1999 the league had teams north of the border in Vancouver, Calgary and Edmonton, but they left for Sacramento in 2000, Albuquerque in 2003 and Round Rock in 2005 respectively. In 2005, the Pacific Coast League became the first minor league ever to achieve a season attendance over 7 million.