Sports outlook
Anyone who has spent any time reading this column over the past 31 years knows how much interest I have in both baseball and history and when I can combine the two, I'm in my element.
So here we are toay and that's exactly what I'm going to hit you with along with one of my favorite teams, the St. Louis Browns. Yeah, the Brownies. I'm probably the only person in Nevada who has three styles of Browns caps.
If you like underdogs, here was the real deal. Here was a team that lured fewer than 90,000 fans to Sportsman's Park in a full season no fewer than three times. That's a mean feat folks. The only other teams to manage such an incredible feat were the Washington Senators and Boston Braves. Yet the Senators and Braves did it only once.
St. Louis used to be the western limit of the major leagues and since the city was the fifth largest in the country, like the top four, it had two franchises.
In their 51 seasons in St. Louis, the Browns finished in the second division 40 times, nearly won the pennant in 1922 and finally won their only pennant in 1944.
But it is that pennant that might not have been had it not been for another event that kept the Browns in St. Louis another 12 years when they were once headed for Los Angeles. How how different the history of the game would have been had that occurred.
Before we delve into that, a brief history of the Browns would be in order.
The Browns were the traditional St. Louis team, dating back to the 1800s. When the National League was reorganized in 1900, the Cardinals joined.
The Browns moved to St. Louis from Milwaukee in 1903. Oddly enough, in the end it was Cardinals who almost moved. But we'll also get to that later.
From the beginning, the Browns were saddled with the same problem. Ownership refused to spend any money on improving the club. In fact, when Robison Field began to fall apart, the Cardinals didn't have to spend money on a new facility. Instead, they rented Sportsman's Park from the Browns. Can you imagine what that field must have been like with a 154-game schedule? They never had time to work on it what with a game every day. The field was a mess.
With the Cardinals usually winning and the Browns usually losing, the Cardinals gradually became the favorites what with their semi-frequent championships.
After owning the Browns for five years, owner Don Barnes determined that he could no longer fight the Cardinals for attendance and he decided to move the team to Los Angeles for the 1942 season. Cardinal owner Sam Breadon would pay Barnes a substantial amount at that time, $350,000, to leave town, and the Browns would move their schedule to Wrigley Field in Los Angeles where the Angels eventually played in 1961. Barnes was scheuled to meet with Phil Wrigley, owner of the Chicago Cubs and Wrigley Field in Los Angeles and purchase Wrigley Field for $1 million. The American League schedule had already been amended with all teams scheduled to make two trips to Los Angeles, always leaving Chicago on the Super Chief.
They were scheduled to meet on Dec. 8 in order to announce the whole thing, but when the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor came on Dec. 7, the meeting and move to Los Angeles were called off and never again mentioned. Imagine what would have happened to baseball had the Browns made it to Los Angeles in 1942.
That the Browns were more popular than the Cardinals in the early days is indisputable.
Neither club was too good and it wasn't until 1926 when the Cardinals won their first pennant that became the city's more popular draw. In the last 28 years the teams battled for attendance dollars, the Cardinals finished higher in the standings than the Browns 25 times. In the other two years they tied.
The Brownies were doomed.
But Bill Veeck, the man who batted the midget for the Browns, tried to run Fred Saigh and the Cardinals out of town when he realized that someone had to go because he firmly believed that New York and Chicago were the only cities large enough to support two franchises.
What I find ineresting is that the better of the two teams always outdrew the other in attendance. Never did either of the teams finish lower in the standings and outdraw the other for the season. And in 1944, when both teams won, the Browns outdrew the Cardinals, the best team in the majors at the time. The city supported the better team from beginning to end.
While the Cardinals were outdrawing the Browns, the Cardinals were dropping in attendance and the Browns were rising. Saigh went to Houston and tried to work out a deal to move the Cardinals if they could get their stadium up to big league specs.
There was also a deal in the works with Milwaukee. But before anything could be done, Saigh got into income-tax trouble and was forced to sell. When August A. Busch bought the Cardinals, Veeck knew the fight was over and he'd lost.
There was no way he could compete with the big eagle.
How different things might have been but for historic quirks.
Imagine the Houston or Milwaukee Cardinals and the Browns still in the American League. I wonder if Baltimore would have ever made it to the majors.