No Minor Accomplishment: The Revival of New Jersey Professional Baseball

Chapter 2: The Decline and Reinvention of the Minor Leagues, Post-1950

U nlike the declining state of professional baseball in New Jersey by 1949, it took a year or two before other ball clubs throughout the United States felt the same financial strains. In 1949, more than 39.8 million fans attended games fifty-nine minor leagues operating 448 teams, an attendance record not broken until 2003. It was easy to see how television had hurt the New Jersey clubs, especially Newark and Jersey City. First, there were an unusually high number of major-league teams in the region, with three in New York City alone. These clubs televised their games into northern New Jersey. In addition, the New York metropolitan area had a higher percentage of households with television sets than did most of the nation. But in the rest of the country, especially 25 2 The Decline and Reinvention of the Minor Leagues, Post-1950 Dunn Tire Field in Buffalo, New York, originally Pilot Field. Photograph courtesy of the Buffalo Bisons baseball club, 2007. the rural areas that were supporting minor-league baseball, most homes were not within the airwave range of a major-league club. By 1950, only 23 percent of the homes in America had television sets at all. Clearly television was a factor in the decline of minor-league baseball after 1950—a decline that would level off but not reverse until the late 1980s—but it was not the only factor. In 1950, attendance at minor-league games fell by five million fans, followed in 1951 by another drop of eight million fans. The national minor-league scene was not immune to the same pressures first faced by the Garden State teams. In fact, the New Jersey situation foreshadowed the decline of minor-league baseball everywhere during the 1950s.1 A major factor in the rapid decline of the minor leagues immediately after 1950 was the overexpansion of the minor leagues after the Second World War. Players who served in the armed forces returned to baseball in 1946 in large numbers, and the nation was not in the mood to tell its war heroes that there was no place for them in the national game. New leagues and teams were created to handle the surplus of players. The country still hadn’t quite taken to the road in their automobiles as of yet, which created a situation that made for some prosperous years for minorleague teams in towns big and small. Local entertainment options still dominated a population that had not realized the potential of its mobility . This tremendous postwar expansion in minor-league baseball had inherent dangers, however; as business executives acknowledge that a boom in an industry that is caused by overly exuberant expansion will most certainly be followed by a painful bust. In minor-league baseball, that bust took place quickly after the peak season of 1949. For better or for worse, America began to change and the minor leagues would have difficulty adapting to those changes. Increased mobility was the basis of the new American society. The postwar period saw the building of better highways, culminated by President Eisenhower’s Interstate Highway System of the early 1960s. The automobile became king. A Sunday drive began taking the place of a day at the ballpark. Families were on the move, not only on weekends but also on a permanent basis. Members of the new middle class, spurred on by a prosperous postwar economy and the shifting of the industrial base, moved out of the cities and into the suburbs. They also moved into areas previously thought to be unreachable—the West Coast and the Sun Belt. The population of America underwent a dramatic migration, away from the traditional northern and eastern manufacturing centers and into more temperate areas that promised a more comfortable lifestyle. 26 No Minor Accomplishment Previously successful minor-league cities like Atlanta, Denver, Houston , Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and San Francisco grew in population. The minor-league clubs in those cities were quickly replaced by majorleague expansion teams or by relocated major-league franchises. In their haste to bring their product to as many growing markets as possible, major-league owners destroyed the minor leagues by moving into these successful minor-league cities without an adequate plan to keep the rest of the minor leagues viable. But it would be inaccurate to lay the blame for the decline of the minor leagues in the 1950s...