Stumbling around the Bases: The American League’s Mismanagement in the Expansion Era by Andy McCue

Abstract

Reviewed by: Stumbling around the Bases: The American League’s Mismanagement in the Expansion Era by Andy McCue David M. Pegram Andy McCue. Stumbling around the Bases: The American League’s Mismanagement in the Expansion Era. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2022. 296 pp. Cloth, $29.95. Andy McCue knows the business of baseball—the economics, the politics, and all the back- door wheeling and dealing. He showed as much in his previous book, Mover and Shaker: Walter O’Malley, the Dodgers, & Baseball’s Westward Expansion, which won SABR’s Seymour Medal in 2015. McCue’s latest, Stumbling around the Bases: The American League’s Mismanagement in the Expansion Era, focuses on some of the themes and issues that came up in that previous outing— namely, baseball’s westward expansion and relocation. But here, McCue’s attention turns to the various American League owners and their collective failure in leadership, resulting in their league’s twenty- year period of dysfunction, from 1961 to 1981. McCue doesn’t hesitate to remind his readers of what this dysfunction looked like, at its peak, in 1971. By then, McCue notes, “a quarter of the league’s teams had relocated” (xi). Indeed, the Athletics had moved from Kansas City to Oakland, the Seattle Pilots expansion team picked up for Milwaukee after just one season, and now the “new” Washington Senators were heading to Dallas (as the Texas Rangers). Was all this just indicative of the American League’s changing economics and demographics? After all, a decade earlier, Calvin Griffith moved the original Washington Senators to Minneapolis to increase his franchise’s value. Alas, no. McCue argues that there was much more at work with the American League’s expansion and relocation woes. League president Joe Cronin, along with a mix of owners who came and went during the ’60s, mishandled the league’s expansion—not once but twice. They didn’t properly vet new ownership groups, nor did they properly research the viability of new markets. Put simply, the results were a mess. McCue lays out this mess in a tight, well-crafted retrospective of the American League’s missteps. Specifically, he chronicles the rushed expansion in 1961, which led to a bungled draft for the Angels and Senators, the Angels’ initial season in a stadium (Wrigley Field) that was not ready for Major League Baseball, a failed attempt by new owners to promote the game during the mid- ’60s, Charles Finley’s disastrous dealings with Kansas City and his relocation to Oakland and a bay area market that struggled to support two teams, and an approved sale of the Senators to Bob Short, who lacked proper financial backing and soon relocated the team to the Dallas metro area. But it’s in his description of the Seattle Pilots “debacle” (97) that McCue is at his best. McCue notes that American League owners had relied on a [End Page 135] ten- year-old study by the Stanford Research Institute that gave Seattle a thumbs- up as a viable major league city. As it turned out, Seattle didn’t have any of the three criteria necessary: a stadium that could seat at least twenty- five thousand, support of the local community, and a strong financial backing. McCue lays out a pathetic situation in Seattle, in which the Pilots played in run-down Sicks Stadium, for an ownership group that filed for bankruptcy less than a year later. Just days before the 1970 season was set to begin the team suddenly (and embarrassingly) uprooted to Milwaukee, under the new ownership of Edmund Fitzgerald and Bud Selig. The book describes little of the play on the field: it is not about the players or the game’s spectacular moments that contributed to its cultural importance. Instead, McCue looks at deliberations, meetings, and business decisions. And he infuses the narrative with well- researched backgrounds on each of the owners, most of whom came to the fore during and between the league’s expansions in 1961 and 1969, including Gene Autry, William Daley, Arthur Allyn (the more prominent of the Allyn brothers who owned the White Sox), Jerold Hoffberger, Vernon Stauffer, John Fetzer, Ewing Kauffman, and of course...