The Major Leagues Move West
Further information: Major League Baseball relocation of 1950s-1960sBaseball had been in the West for almost as long as the National League and the American League had been around. It evolved into the Pacific Coast League, which included the Hollywood Stars, Los Angeles Angels, Oakland Oaks, Portland Beavers, Sacramento Solons, San Francisco Seals, San Diego Padres, Seattle Rainiers.
The PCL was huge in the West. A member of the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues, it kept losing great players to the National and the American leagues for less than $8,000 a player.
The PCL was far more independent than the other "minor" leagues, and rebelled continuously against their Eastern masters. Clarence Pants Rowland, the President of the PCL, took on baseball commissioners Kenesaw Mountain Landis and Happy Chandler at first to get better equity from the major leagues, then to form a third major league. His efforts were rebuffed by both commissioners. Chandler and several of the owners, who saw the value of the markets in the West, started to plot the extermination of the PCL. They had one thing that Rowland did not: The financial power of the Eastern major league baseball establishment.
No one was going to back a PCL club building a major-league size stadium if the National or the American League was going to build one too, and potentially put the investment in the PCL ballpark into jeopardy.
Read more about this topic: History Of Baseball In The United States
Famous quotes containing the words major, leagues, move and/or west:
“When I see that the nineteenth century has crowned the idolatry of Art with the deification of Love, so that every poet is supposed to have pierced to the holy of holies when he has announced that Love is the Supreme, or the Enough, or the All, I feel that Art was safer in the hands of the most fanatical of Cromwell’s major generals than it will be if ever it gets into mine.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“Only be admonished by what you already see, not to strike leagues of friendship with cheap persons, where no friendship can be. Our impatience betrays us into rash and foolish alliances which no God attends.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“That’s just the trouble, Sam Houston—it’s always my move. And damnit, I sometimes can’t tell whether I’m making the right move or not. Now take this Vietnam mess. How in the hell can anyone know for sure what’s right and what’s wrong, Sam?”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“Look for me all around you, for with God’s grace, I shall come and bring with me countless millions of Black slaves who have died in America and the West Indies and the millions in Africa to aid you in the fight for Liberty, Freedom and Life.”
—Marcus Garvey (1887–1940)