The Postwar Yankees: Baseball's Golden Age Revisited

9. The Sixteen-Headed Hydra

The Major League Baseball cartel consisted of sixteen (and later twenty) independent, often strong-willed owners. Sometimes owners had to band together to prevent a maverick owner’s self-interest from injuring the group. On other occasions owners acted jointly to curb the injurious effects of too much competition within the group. Hence, the cartel curbed the individual owners’ self-interest in order to enhance the collective interest. Carpetbaggers and Major League Baseball’s Image The First Wave of Relocations Major League owners reserved the right to prohibit franchise relocations . There were sound reasons for this arrangement. In analyzing the territorial restraints exercised by sports leagues, law professor Jeffrey Glick cited justifications of such restraints in order to avoid creating “serious hardships for the other league members both in terms of travel schedules and costs . . . by balancing the interests of all teams in site selection, a legitimate restraint can promote on-field competition in locations acceptable to both participants, create a marketable product and thereby promote economic competition.”1 Owners believed that having a stable group of teams promoted fan loyalty, so the The Sixteen-Headed Hydra The Cartel Faces the Enmity Within 9 The Sixteen-Headed Hydra t 245 movement of six of the original sixteen franchises raised the issue of whether fans would become disenchanted. In addition, ball club owners were concerned about the adverse publicity of an owner’s seemingly too opportunistic peregrinations. To protect such loyalty, the leagues had created stringent rules against franchise movements, originally requiring unanimity within a league and near unanimity from all of the Major League teams. Moreover, the leagues occasionally helped ailing franchises with cash or players in order to keep them from going out of business or moving. Such conservatism against franchise movements broke down in the aftermath of the 1951 House subcommittee meetings, which detailed the demand for baseball by the rapidly growing cities of the West and South and growing awareness of the inability of Boston, Philadelphia, and St. Louis to support two teams. Subsequently, the requirement of unanimity was loosened to require only three-fourths approval within the league and an even lesser role for the other league. All of these moves created underlying tension. The move by the Athletics to Kansas City, for example, raised travel costs for the league as a whole. The franchise relocation caused teams to have to travel an additional twenty thousand miles, and travel costs averaged 6.4 cents per mile per person. Many teams had an entourage of forty people, so the total higher cost to the league was roughly $50,000. The Athletics, of course, bore the largest share of the increase, some $20,500. Of course, movement to the West Coast promised to escalate travel expenses by even larger amounts. A Major League study suggested that mileage would double from its 1954 level of 138,000 to 301,000 miles, and Dodgers and Giants owners O’Malley and Stoneham may have offered to reimburse their fellow National League owners for any extra transportation expense.2 By 1960 six of the original sixteen franchises had relocated or were about to. Although the moves by the Boston Braves, Philadelphia Athletics, and St. Louis Browns to Milwaukee, Kansas City, and Baltimore, respectively, seemed justified to most observers, the subsequent moves seemed less so. The Brooklyn Dodgers were a most 246 t The Sixteen-Headed Hydra profitable franchise until the very end, while the New York Giants were not in as dire straits as the first three teams to relocate. The Giants had been considering relocating for several years. As early as the mid1950s , Minneapolis public officials courted the team.3 Certainly, the Dodger’s move from Brooklyn left enduring bitterness. O’Malley’s and Stoneham’s teams played in old stadiums with inadequate parking, so both owners sought new stadiums with ample parking. Stoneham explained, “People have moved out of the city. You used to be able—at least over in Brooklyn they could—go out and get a crowd from within walking distance of the park and fill the stands. You can’t do that any more. Nowadays people have to drive in from the suburbs. We have a transportation problem, and we have a parking problem. It takes people too long to get through the traffic close to the Polo Grounds, and too long to get away.”4 To help facilitate franchise...