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Baseball’s third major league

The history of professional sports is full of stories that end with the big fish swallowing the little fish.

**Scott Adamson writes stuff. Follow him on Twitter @adamsonsl and Instagram @adamsons60**

The American Basketball Association couldn’t match the money of the National Basketball Association, so the result was the NBA absorbing a handful of ABA franchises.

Same thing happened when the World Hockey Association ran out of gas in its quest to skate side-by-side with the National Hockey League.

Even the American Football League – which had become the equal of the National Football League – wound up playing under the NFL banner when the circuits combined.

But pulling off a “merger” without ever fielding a club – well, that’s impressive. And that’s basically what the Continental League of Professional Baseball Clubs did 60 years ago this month.

The idea for a third major league was unveiled on July 27, 1959, courtesy of New York lawyer William Shea. When the Dodgers and Giants left the Big Apple for Los Angeles and San Francisco, respectively, Shea lobbied both the NL and AL for an expansion franchise. New York had once shown it could support two other teams aside from the Yankees, and he knew fans would welcome a second team in the nation’s largest city.

But the big leagues weren’t interested, so Shea decided to be proactive and form a brand new circuit.

“We anticipate the cooperation of organized baseball,” Shea told United Press International. “But we’re all in this to stay and we’re not going to back out no matter what. It can’t cost them a thing. It creates vast new areas of interest and income with no risk on their part. On what grounds would they object to a deal like this?”

New York would be the crown jewel of the league and play in a brand new stadium. Other cities under consideration were Buffalo, Montreal, Atlanta, New Orleans, Portland, San Diego, Miami, Indianapolis, Dallas-Fort Worth, Seattle, and San Juan.

The league would begin play in 1961 with a minimum of eight clubs, each playing a 154-game schedule. It would create jobs for roughly 200 players and Shea envisioned a unique Fall Classic.

“A round-robin World Series would be a great spectacle,” he said. “Of course, the Continental League’s champion might not win it for a while, but can you picture anyone saying it’s not big league when it does?”

Shea brought in plenty of big money men to help jumpstart the league, and all were serious about getting up and running quickly.

“I believe the major leagues are sincere in their expressed wishes to help in the expansion of their game,” said former Western League President Edwin C. Johnson, who had also previously served as Colorado’s governor and senator. “But I also know major league baseball fears two things – the courts and Congress. We don’t want to start a war, but we’re not afraid of one.”

Perhaps the greatest boost to the upstart’s credibility came when 77-year old Branch Rickey was brought on board as president. Not only had he signed Jackie Robinson to break Major League Baseball’s color barrier, he was also the pioneer of the modern farm system. In terms of front office prestige, no name was bigger than Rickey’s.

“Our league will definitely be ready to operate in 1961 and I intend to devote my remaining years to seeing it prosper,” Rickey told the Associated Press. “I’m not worried about my age. My doctor told me I’ll live just as long active as I would inactive.

“This is a great challenge to me. It’s a great challenge to the citizenship of the country. It’s a great challenge to the majors themselves. They need to do it and I think they will. Several of the club owners are ready to embrace it.”

He also made it clear that it was in MLB’s best interest to accept the Continental League.

“We want your cooperation, we need your cooperation, we demand your cooperation,” he said. “I’m convinced a third major league will do baseball, especially the National and American League, a great deal of good.”

By the summer of 1960 the new league announced eight flagship franchises in New York, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, Denver, Toronto, Atlanta and Buffalo. NL and AL owners wouldn’t listen to Shea before, but they had to listen to him now – especially since he was intent on luring players from their leagues to his.

But before any of the new teams could sign stadium deals or even get nicknames, the big league establishment offered quite a compromise. If the Continental League disbanded immediately, the two major leagues would agree to expand to four of its cities ASAP and put franchises in all of them eventually.

For Shea, whose primary concern was getting New York back in the National League, that was all he needed to hear.

“We accomplished the job I started and I believe (New York City) will be one of the first to get a team,” Shea told AP. “It’s been a lot of work, but I set out to get a team for New York three years ago and this is it.”

Major League Baseball Commissioner Ford Frick was happy to avoid a crisis.

“I always have been in favor of expansion and I’m happy the move has been made peacefully,” he said.

Thanks to the threat of a Continental League, the American League added the Minnesota Twins and Los Angeles Angels in 1961 (The Twins moved from Washington. D.C., although a new Washington Senators team replaced them that same season).

In 1962, the New York Mets and Houston Colt .45s joined the National League. Ultimately, seven of the original Continental League cities are now MLB cities, although Buffalo is still waiting.

Not a bad legacy for a league that never played a game, huh?

The weird world of sports

Life is weird right now, and I’m acutely aware there are far more important (and far more urgent) things to consider than sports.

**Scott Adamson’s sports column appears whenever he feels sporty. Follow him on Twitter @adamsonsl and Instagram @adamsons60**

But since sports have always been a big part of my life, I can’t help but marvel at how especially weird they’ve become in the era of COVID-19.

Last August no one would’ve thought the NFL would scrap its 2020 preseason and hope – hope – to play a 16-game slate.

Nor could we imagine Football Bowl Subdivision schools deciding to shorten and overhaul their schedules and some Football Championship Subdivision leagues opting to stay off the field completely in the fall because of health concerns.

I mean, everything is just so incredibly out of sync. It’s as though any competition held between now and whenever this pandemic ends is taking place in an alternate reality.

I had cooled on Major League Baseball for the past several years but decided I’d be excited about its return. That excitement waned when the decision was made to play outside a bubble, and now it’s pretty much gone.

With players testing positive for the coronavirus and placed in quarantine – and games having to be rescheduled – the whole idea of a shortened 2020 season now just seems like a mistake to me. When I wake up in the morning I no longer look for scores, I look to see if Commissioner Rob Manfred has pulled the plug yet.

The NBA and NHL are up and running again in hub environments, and as a big fan of both I’m in full watch mode this weekend. Thursday night the game between the New Orleans Pelicans and Utah Jazz had my complete attention, even though the “virtual” fans creeped me out.

And today I’m going to beat the heat by staying inside and watching the New York Rangers skate against the Carolina Hurricanes in a Stanley Cup Qualifier.

But professional basketball and hockey seasons should be long over by now. Even though neither has crowned a champion yet, restarting them as a way to wrap up unfinished 2019-20 business gives all the games more of an exhibition feel to me.

That was the vibe I got when the English Premier League and Bundesliga decided to play out the last few matches of their suspended seasons. The empty stadiums and canned crowd noise didn’t bother me so much as knowing they were closing out an old schedule at a time they should be playing friendlies and gearing up for a new one.

And don’t get me started about my beloved Canadian Football League, which should be nearing the halfway mark of the season but might not have any games at all in 2020.

Look, I understand why all the leagues are trying to salvage what they can, just as I understand why many fans are relieved they’re making the effort. Watching the NBA get back on the court and NHL teams hit the ice is like reconnecting with old friends.

Yet, I’m still unsettled by it all.

But here’s a twist I didn’t see coming. While I’ve had trouble adjusting to the Bizarro World of my favorite traditional sports, I’ve gotten hooked on other athletic events.

For example, I’ve enjoyed World Team Tennis for more than four decades, but I’ve never been as enthralled with it as I have been this summer. I found myself watching as many matches as I could, which was made easy since there were as many as four per day.

Its all-too-brief season ends tomorrow with the championship match at noon, and I’m truly going to miss it when it’s over.

After a long hiatus I was reintroduced to Australian Rules Football this summer, and I’ve enjoyed all the late night/early morning clashes on television. It’s a great hybrid sport for those of us who follow American football, soccer and rugby, and the combination of grace and brawn is quite impressive.

A new WNBA season – even though it’s scaled down from a 34-game regular season to 22 contests – has rekindled my love for women’s basketball. I’ve always said one of the best ways to learn the fundamentals of hoops is to watch an elite women’s game, and the WNBA certainly checks that box.

But there again, we’re dealing with a league playing in a bubble with all its games staged at IMG Academy in Bradenton, Florida, so it’s hardly normal. Nothing is normal these days, though, so we do the best we can however we can.

Maybe this time next year Major League Baseball will be making its post-All-Star Game push to the playoffs, the WNBA teams will be playing home games at their home arenas, and the CFL will be wrapping up Week 8.

And perhaps in August, 2021, fans of American football can look forward to how their favorite team will do in the upcoming season instead of worrying whether or not there’ll even be an upcoming season.

Until then, we have to accept the fact that sports are weird – just like life.

Aussie Rules football growing in U.S.

**The USAFL fields amateur clubs all across the country./photo courtesy of the USAFL**

Those of us who are men and women of a certain age remember ESPN before it came of age.

**Scott Adamson writes about alternative football leagues because it makes him happy. Follow him on Twitter @adamsonsl and Instagram @adamsons60**

When the fledgling network went on the air in 1979 it had no rights to major American sporting events, so there were tractor pulls and talk shows to fill up airtime. However, it was the broadcast of Victorian Football League matches that opened up a whole new world for fans like me.

Australian Rules football (now playing under the Australian Football League umbrella after abandoning the VFL brand in 1989) is a wonderful hybrid of American football, Gaelic football, rugby, soccer and bar fight. After being introduced to the game by the “Worldwide Leader In Sports” I remained interested even after ESPN shifted its attention to what United States fans considered more traditional athletic competition.

Still, I often wondered how “footy” might be received if there were clubs not just in places like Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne and Adelaide but New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta and Philadelphia.

Turns out there’s no need to wonder.

Although currently sidelined by the COVID-19 pandemic like many other sports, the United States Australian Football League has been around for 25 years. Introduced in 1996 and featuring amateur clubs from coast to coast, the USAFL helps coordinate men’s, women’s and junior programs across the country.

“2021 will be the USAFL’s 25th season, and we’ve gone from six teams in 1997 to 46 this year from Maine to Hawaii, with a couple in development hoping to join the league in the next few months,” USAFL media manager Brian Barrish said. “In the league’s early days, there were a lot of clubs in the Midwest and in California/Arizona. The upper Midwest is probably the most active, with clubs in Columbus, Cincinnati, Chicago, Indianapolis, Louisville, Madison/Milwaukee, Minnesota, and Des Moines thriving. The game has also grown in Texas (Austin, Houston, Dallas), and in the Pacific Northwest (Seattle and Portland). Recently, we’re starting to see a big push to get clubs started in the Southeast, which only had three or four clubs for the longest time.

“New teams have sprung up in Savannah, Jacksonville, Tampa, Rome (Georgia), and Richmond, to go with our established clubs in Atlanta, Raleigh, and Ft. Lauderdale.”

At first glance Aussie Rules football seems like organized chaos, but the basic rules of the pro game aren’t that difficult to follow.

The field is a huge oval (between 148 and 202 yards long and 120 to 170 yards wide).

“Finding spaces for us to play has its challenges; essentially you need to find an open space that is big enough for us to build a field that doesn’t have too many holes or baseball diamonds surrounding it,” Barrish said. “I’ve called matches and played on everything from polo grounds to public parks to the infield of a harness track (Rosemont Raceway in Maryland, to be exact). For regular season play, we just set out cones (they call them witch’s hats in Australia) for the field and the squares, and then make posts out of PVC pipes fitted over metal stakes. That last part is a bit of a complication sometimes as some parks don’t like you making holes in their field, even if they’re small and manageable. But, most teams usually have two or three places to play in case of scheduling issues and last-minute issues such as weather.”

Games are contested by teams made up of 18 players per side and a match is divided into four 20-minute quarters.

Four posts are located at each end of the field; a kick between the two taller middle posts scores a goal – worth 6 points – while one that goes between the two outer and shorter posts scores 1 point, known as a behind.

Single points are also scored if a ball goes through any of the posts without being kicked by the attacking team (say it comes off the hands of a player on either team or is kicked by a defender) or if the defense forces the ball between the posts it’s defending.

In terms of advancing the ball, teams do so by kicking or hand-passing, and players with possession of the ball and can run no more than 16 yards while holding it before bouncing it off the ground.

OK, now that I’ve written it down it does look difficult to follow, but if you familiarize yourself with the rules and watch a few matches, it all starts to make sense.

“In terms of players, we have everyone from Aussie ex-pats to Americans who saw the game on TV years ago and wanted to try their hand at it,” Barrish explained. “Recruiting looks very different from club to club, depending on everything from the number of colleges to the bar scene and everything in between. There are a lot of Australians that are over here for work, school, or family. The Americans have come through word of mouth or having seen the game in Australia, among other ways. Just under 75 percent of our players, however, are American. Roughly 25 percent are Australian. And while we haven’t grown in the total number players as much as we would like, the fact that we’ve gone from a mostly ex-pat Australian league to a mostly American program is a big win in my book. Helping this is our rule that at least 50 percent of the players on the field for a USAFL game must be American (or ‘National’ players). This requires teams to actively recruit locally and help grow the game at the grassroots level and not simply ‘import’ Aussies.”

More Americans playing, of course, means more have the chance to excel at the game.

“It’s worth mentioning that we have at least one team – the Des Moines Roosters – that is completely American,” Barrish said. “Ninety percent of our women players are American, which is fantastic for the growth and helpful for growing a pathway to play at the AFLW level, as evidenced by Dani Marshall’s signing with the Western Bulldogs this year.”

Although the formation and function of clubs varies from town to town, a sense of community is a common denominator. The roots of the game and its history help bring the teams and players together.

In addition, the AFL provides the USAFL with a yearly grant that assists in operations.

“We are also in constant communication with them about our development and about promoting the game on both sides of the Pacific,” Barrish said. “The inspiration for club culture comes from the regional Aussie Rules clubs in Australia. Many of the teams were founded by Australians who played in those clubs and wanted to establish them under similar principles to what they had back home. I got the chance to travel with the U.S. teams to Melbourne for the 2017 AFL International Cup, and we were hosted by several local clubs during the two weeks we were there. There were post-training meals, pre-game gatherings, and a real sense of family there. In the mountain town of Montrose, for example, there were people who had been a part of the club in some capacity for 50-plus years, and whose children and grandchildren had grown up playing for the team. We’re talking the equivalent of AA or AAA baseball here, but there is a lot of local pride here.

“What I will say, having been around just about every club in the league, is that each one has a different dynamic. But, it’s all positive, and it’s all about growing something sustainable. We’re not like, say, softball leagues, where we get together once a week, play a game, have a beer and go home. We celebrate Australia Day, we have ANZAC Day commemorations, and many of our clubs have social and fundraising events throughout the year. And it is really like a family, both on the club and at the national level.”

So could there come a day when Aussies Rules clubs develop a pay-for-play model?

“I don’t think it’s out of the realm of possibility,” Barrish said. “The big issue would be finding facilities that could host full-on matches. I know there is talk of someone building a bunch of cricket stadia across the country and that would be a great way to add more events to those facilities. In the absence of that, it would need to be in a smaller format. The AFL tested something called AFLX over the last two years – it was played on soccer fields with modified rules, a la Rugby 7s. Something like that would work for a league or a touring competition here. What that would look like, I don’t know; do you have players at the top of their game coming over to live and play in the States? Do you bring over retired players a la the Big 3 Basketball and mix in American players who have come up through the USAFL, or converted athletes?”

As far as Barrish is concerned, the USAFL remains the best way to showcase a sport that features highly skilled athletes playing a crowd-pleasing game.

“I’m a big believer in the growth of the grass roots effort that the USAFL has laid down over the past quarter of a century,” he said. “It would be great if that got more attention on both sides of the Pacific before anything semi-pro or professional emerged. We need more people, specifically more locals, being involved in the sport in order to be successful, and the focus should be on that first.”

For more information on the league, go to www.usafl.com.