Bob Howsam - Efforts To Bring Major League Baseball To Denver

Efforts To Bring Major League Baseball To Denver

The Broncos may have struggled in the early 1960s, but Bob Howsam would prove himself to be a highly successful baseball executive. He led the family-owned Denver Bears of the Class A Western League and Triple-A American Association from 1947 to 1962. For building one of the most successful minor league franchises of the 1950s, Howsam was twice (1951 and 1956) named Minor League Executive of the Year by The Sporting News. While the Bears achieved great success as a Triple-A farm team of the New York Yankees in the late 1950s, their earlier tie-up with the Pittsburgh Pirates (1952–1954) served to introduce Howsam to Pirates' general manager Branch Rickey, who would play an influential role later in Howsam's career.

In an attempt to bring Major League Baseball to Denver, Howsam was one of the founders of the Continental League, which in 1959 planned to become the "third Major League" following the epidemic of franchise shifts during the 1950s. MLB magnates, nervous about the possible rescinding of baseball's antitrust exemption by the U.S. Congress after the National League abandoned New York, agreed to study (and perhaps support) the formation of the new loop. Denver was one of the CL's eight founding cities, with Howsam in line to become owner and operator of his hometown franchise.

As events unfolded, the new league never got off the drawing board; it was doomed once three of its key cities gained Major League franchises in 1961–1962 (New York and Houston got expansion National League franchises, while the American League Washington Senators moved to Minneapolis-St. Paul). However, the Continental League's president was Rickey, and the Baseball Hall of Fame executive, who had revolutionized baseball in his earlier career with the St. Louis Cardinals and Brooklyn Dodgers, took notice of Howsam for a second time.

Read more about this topic:  Bob Howsam

Famous quotes containing the words efforts, bring, major, league and/or baseball:

    There are few efforts more conducive to humility than that of the translator trying to communicate an incommunicable beauty. Yet, unless we do try, something unique and never surpassed will cease to exist except in the libraries of a few inquisitive book lovers.
    Edith Hamilton (1867–1963)

    I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!
    Bible: New Testament, Luke 12:49.

    There are three major offenses against filial piety of which not producing an heir is the worst.
    —Chinese proverb.

    Mencius.

    We’re the victims of a disease called social prejudice, my child. These dear ladies of the law and order league are scouring out the dregs of the town. C’mon be a glorified wreck like me.
    Dudley Nichols (1895–1960)

    How, in one short century, has this ersatz sport so strangled the consciousness of the country in the grip of its flabby tentacles that the mention of women’s baseball gets no reaction other than blank amazement?
    Darlene Mehrer, As quoted in Women in Baseball. Ch. 6, by Gai Ingham Berlage (1994)