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All-American Girls Professional Baseball League
The AAGPBL was a World War II-era alternative to major league baseball.
With most young men, including the best ballplayers, fighting the war,
Cubs owner/chewing-gum king Philip K. Wrigley worried that fans may not
want to see minor league 4-Fs in major league uniforms. He recruited former
ballplayers to act as managers, among them Jimmie Foxx, and invited women
from all over the country to try out for the new league.
It began play in 1943 with just four teams, and to most fans, it was just
a novelty. The teams had flowery-sounding nicknames like the Daisies,
Chicks, and Belles, and the players wore short dresses instead of baseball
pants. "In the beginning," says star shortstop/catcher Lavone
"Pepper" Davis, "a lot of people came out to laugh and
the guys to look at the legs." But the league gained an enthusiastic
following, and it gradually increased to 10 teams. Salaries also increased
from $50-$75 per week to as much as $600 per month, which was close to
what some major leaguers of the time made.
Unlike their male counterparts, however, the women had to follow strict
rules of conduct. Makeup was to be worn at all times. No drinking or smoking
was allowed in public. A chaperone joined them at any public engagement.
And they had to attend charm school. On the other hand, they acted like
major leaguers in a key way: says Davis, "I had a boyfriend in every
town." By 1954, interest had waned and the league folded.
Women's professional baseball remained all but forgotten until the release
of the box-office smash "A League of Their Own" in 1992 and
the 1994 formation of the Colorado Silver Bullets, a women's team that
will play men's minor league and semipro teams throughout the country.
When
Women Played Hardball
by Susan E. Johnson
A
Whole New Ball Game : The Story of the All-American Girls Professional
Baseball League
by Sue Macy
Women
at Play : The Story of Women in Baseball
by Barbara Gregorich
The story of the minor leagues is like the story of what happens to a
small town when Big Business moves in. Since the founding of professional
baseball, minor leagues have existed and flourished throughout the country,
usually in small cities like Pocatello, Idaho, and Durham, North Carolina,
but sometimes also in places as big as Detroit and Miami. At one time,
thousands of players in dozens of minor leagues performed for fans who
otherwise had no contact with professional baseball. In order to survive,
minor league teams would sign young players right out of high school or
a small college, usually local kids, and if they got good enough that
major league scouts were interested, they'd sell the players to big league
clubs. Attendance and player sales -- that's how minor league owners made
their money.
But when major league owners began to realize that professional baseball
could be a big money-maker-and some owners realized it sooner than others--they
started manipulating minor league teams to their advantage. Around the
1920s, the major leagues began to set limits on how much they would have
to pay for minor league players. Then they set a hierarchy of leagues,
depending mostly on sizes of the cities, like we see today; back then,
however, there were class A, B, C, and D leagues, as well as AA and AAA.
A player would work up the minor league ladder, all the way to the majors.
Meanwhile, savvy owners and general managers were following Branch Rickey's
lead: they began setting up "farm systems" of minor league teams
owned by major league clubs. The big club would sign agreements that would
give them the pick of the litter from their minor league affiliates. At
this point, minor league owners found themselves in trouble. Profits were
sagging because they couldn't sell their best players on the open market
to the highest bidders. And fans stopped coming to games because they
had no bonds with the local players; once a player became good and popular,
he'd get called up by a major league club.
Of course, this wasn't the case everywhere. In leagues with little major
league affiliation, like the Pacific Coast League in the '30s, for example,
a lot of players became local heroes and attendance flourished; Buzz Arlett,
for example, smashed over 400 minor league home runs, more than half with
the PCL's Oakland Oaks.
But for the majority of teams, it was all they could do to survive financially.
So major league clubs took the inevitable step: they started to buy out
minor league teams. That's the system we have today for almost every minor
league team. The big club pays all the player salaries and a stipend to
the small club for operating expenses. The minor league team's profits
depend on attendance, which is tough because meaningful pennant races
usually don't exist at the minor league level. If a guy is hitting .350
with a bunch of home runs and his team is in first with two weeks to go,
none of that matters to a big league club if it wants a player to come
off the bench every six days to pinch hit.
Like the countless small towns that used to have a dozen corner stores
before the Wal-Mart moved in, the minor leagues were ruined by corporate
greed. The minors have a great history in the United States, and it's
a real shame that major league owners nearly destroyed them.
Update in 2004:
Today I am happy to report that minor league baseball is roaring back. Thanks to an influx of independent leagues and possibly a general backlash against the greed of major league baseball, minor league attendance is approaching an all-time high. Let's hope this trend continues!
Baseball's
Hometown Teams : The Story of the Minor Leagues
by Bruce Chadwick
Minor
Players, Major Dreams
by Brett H. Mandel
Small-Town
Heroes : Images of Minor League Baseball
by Hank Davis
A triple-A level minor league located throughout the western United States. Until the 1950s, when the Dodgers and Giants moved west, the PCL was the closest westerners got to big league baseball. The players were as celebrated locally as major leaguers were in their home cities. The PCL produced many baseball greats: Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, Billy Martin,, Ernie Lombardi, and others. One of the PCLıs greatest players, however, only a brief major league careerOaklandıs Buzz Arlett, who blasted a PCL-record 251 lifetime homers. (Actually, Arlett smashed 184 homers in other minor leagues, making him the all-time minor league home run champion.)
During the golden age of the PCL (1920-1957), some of the leagueıs teams included the San Francisco Seals, Oakland Oaks, San Diego Padres, Portland Beavers, Los Angeles Angels, Seattle Raniers, Hollywood Stars, and Sacramento Solons. Today, with major league baseball ubiquitous on the West Coast, the PCL is a misnomer. With teams in Albuquerque, Calgary, Colorado Springs, Edmonton, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, Tacoma, and Tucson, most of the states represented donıt touch the Pacific Ocean.
American League team, 1900-1960; now the Minnesota Twins
"First in war, first in peace, and last in the American League"
went the saying about the Senators. But for all the talk about how bad
the Senators were, they in fact finished last only 10 times in their 60-year
history, a better ratio than the Athletics, Browns, or Phillies. One of
the charter members of the Ban Johnson's American League, the Senators
did start out poorly. In their first 11 seasons, they never finished higher
than sixth. Walter Johnson, arguably the greatest pitcher of all time,
came aboard in 1907, but it wasn't until the 1920s that they were able
to seriously compete for the pennant.
In 1924, with 27-year-old boy wonder Bucky Harris playing and managing,
the Senators captured their only World Series victory, a thrilling seven-game
affair in which four games were decided by one run. Game Seven was legendary:
with the score tied 3-3, the 36-year-old Johnson entered in the ninth
against the Giants and shut them down until the Senators could score in
the 12th. Johnson wouldn't be so lucky the following year, when his Game
Seven performance cost the Senators another World Series. They made it
to the Series again in 1933, this time losing to the Giants in five games.
Over their last 27 years in the nation's capital, the club challenged
for only a pennant just once and finished last six times. It was after
World War II that the previously quoted expression came into popular use.
In the late '50s, owner Calvin Griffith believed a change of venue would
help the struggling franchise. After the 1960 season, he got his wish:
the team moved to Minnesota, where it would win a number of pennants,
division titles, and two World Series.
Check out the new blog that features interesting tidbits of baseball lore, literature, personalities, statistics, terminology, and more. I'm sharing a lot of research I've done over the years on fascinating topics. If you're a fan of the history of the game, this blog is for you.
