Stumbling Around the Bases

Imagine a business composed of franchisees operating independently in designated protected territories, with a “president” serving at their sufferance. The franchisees have little sense of cohesion or common purpose. They routinely allow the underfinanced and the less-than-competent to buy in. There is no business-wide marketing strategy. Their promotional efforts largely consist of opening the doors of their establishments and expecting customers to appear on their own. The franchisees are hesitant to hire talented non-white employees due to their rampant racial prejudices. They are also slow to expand into promising new markets, often choosing weaker locations after conducting only the most perfunctory site research. The franchisees cannot even be relied upon to attend meetings in person on a consistent basis. When they do, they engage in petty and unproductive squabbling. Despite its status as a legal monopoly, their business loses the better part of 40 percent of its customer sales over a period of twenty years.This is the “business,” if it could be called that, described by Andy McCue in Stumbling Around the Bases, his administrative history of baseball's American League in what he terms the “expansion eras,” the years between the late 1950s and 1970s when the circuit grew from eight to fourteen teams. McCue's long list of the American League's miscues and miscalculations leads one to wonder if club owners recited a daily prayer of thanks for baseball's unique exemption from federal antitrust laws, the product of a controversial 1922 Supreme Court decision, because it was all that stood between them and financial ruin.Operating under a decentralized administrative system with a weak commissioner and even weaker league president, American League owners were largely free to run ingloriously amok. They allowed teams in the National League to gain a significant head start on signing and developing African American players; the New York Yankees, Detroit Tigers, and Boston Red Sox did not debut their first Black players until 1955, 1958, and 1959, respectively. By the latter year, seven future African American Hall of Fame members were playing for or had already concluded their careers with National League teams.The American League also wrong-footed expansion, allowing the National League to acquire larger markets, and moved to the West Coast late, with teams that played second fiddle to the more established Los Angeles Dodgers and San Francisco Giants. Permitting the entry of underfinanced and fractious club franchisees, most notoriously the mercurial and peripatetic Charles Finley of Kansas City and Oakland, American League owners spent much of their time reacting to crises and dealing with emergencies instead of planning proactively. Their approval of teams in Washington, DC, Kansas City, Milwaukee, and Seattle in order to forestall congressional antitrust legislation after clubs had left those cities was emblematic of their pillar-to-post management style. By the mid-1950s, the National League had passed the American League in overall attendance, not to relinquish its advantage until 1989.In 1974, the respected baseball executive Lee MacPhail took over as American League president and imposed a semblance of order and structure onto the chaos of its administrative operations, whereupon the Junior Circuit's fortunes began to turn for the better. But by the time MacPhail stepped down a decade later, the process of consolidation, which would lead to the demise of the separate-league administrative model and the formation of the centralized Major League Baseball apparatus, had already begun. By the century's end, the American and National Leagues were little more than brand names.In addition to serving up a cautionary tale of how not to operate a sports business, McCue offers another valuable historical lesson. Those seeking an explanation of why the National Football League began to surpass baseball in national popularity during the 1960s need to look no further than Stumbling Around the Bases. With a coordinated administrative, media, and marketing system presided over by a powerful and engaged commissioner—the visionary Pete Rozelle—the NFL positioned itself to take advantage of the increased mobility, urbanization, and, for better or worse, violence of American society and culture in the 1960s and start professional football on its journey to national sports preeminence. Compared to Rozelle's sleek NFL Cadillac, the American League was a wheezing jalopy.In the hands of a lesser writer, this history of back-office administrative ineptitude could have been eye-glazingly dull. But McCue's skills are such to render the off-the-field game as engaging and dramatic as anything occurring between the lines. Sometimes failure resonates more deeply than success

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