Thursday, July 17, 2003 | 10:12 a.m.
If the Pacific Coast League's second 100 years are as intriguing and colorful as the first 100, the next three generations of West Coast baseball fans had better stock up on peanuts and Cracker Jack.
It was on March 5, 1903 that James Moran, the first PCL president, took himself out to the first ballgame in PCL history. He threw out the first pitch in San Francisco as the host Stars defeated the Portland Browns 3-1 at Recreation Park.
In other games that day, the Los Angeles Angels beat the Seattle Siwashes 2-1 at Chutes Park in Los Angeles and the Sacramento Senators downed the Oakland Recruits 7-4 at Oak Park in Oakland. The average time of those the games was 1 hour, 30 minutes.
But the old PCL was known for so much more than its snappy pace of play.
"A lot of people are familiar with the players that played in the league," said Steve Hurlbert, the PCL's assistant director of operations. "Joe DiMaggio comes to mind and the success of Ted Williams is tied to the San Diego Padres of the 1940s. Then you had the Hollywood Stars of the 1940s and '50s, when you had movie stars around the ballpark."
There were also great teams, such as those Los Angeles Angels, who won 14 pennants during their Coast League years. The 1934 Angels won 134 games and are generally recognized as the best team in minor-league baseball history, although the 1981 Albuquerque team deserves at least an honorable mention.
Those Dukes certainly put them up. They had four players (Mike Marshall, Jack Perconte, Rudy Law and Candy Maldonardo) hit better than .335, won 94 games with a winning percentage of .712 and finished 25 games ahead of their closest pursuer. And veteran PCL fans also may recall the 1960 Tacoma Giants, which featured Juan Marichal, Gaylord Perry and Willie McCovey.
As Hurlbert alluded, there were dozens of great players, beginning with DiMaggio, Williams, Paul Waner and Bobby Doerr, who started their careers in the PCL. Mickey Cochrane, Earl Averill, Lefty Gomez, Harry Heilmann, Lloyd Waner, Ernie Lombardi, Bill Mazeroski and Tony Lazzeri all played in the league. So did Ferguson Jenkins, Phil Niekro, Jim Bunning, Mike Schmidt and Brooks Robinson, Hall of Famers, one and all.
And then there were the managers. Casey Stengel, the skipper of the Oakland Oaks from 1946-48, parlayed PCL success into fame with the New York Yankees. Rogers Hornsby (Seattle, 1951) Tommy Lasorda (Spokane 1969-71 and Albuquerque, 1972), Duke Snider (Spokane 1965), Warren Spahn (Tulsa 1967-68) and Bob Lemon, who managed four different PCL clubs in the 1960s and '70s, are among the others who cut their managerial teeth in the Coast League.
And let's not forget the men who didn't go to become major-league stars, but were marquee players in their own right. Guys such as Steve Bilko, a slugging first baseman who hit .360 hit 55 home runs and 160 RBIs in 1956 and was so popular in Los Angeles that a hit TV series -- "Sgt. Bilko and His Gang" -- was named after him.
Tradition and longevity are two of the biggest reasons the PCL became synonymous with minor-league baseball at its highest level. In fact, during the 1940s and '50s, the talent and quality of play was so good that the PCL was often called the "third major league."
Shortly thereafter, Major League Baseball expanded to the West Coast, signaling the end of the PCL's halcyon days. But the love affair between West Coast baseball fans and PCL teams continues to this day. In fact, attendance in the PCL reached an all-time high in 2002, when a record 6.79 million paying customers filed through the turnstiles.
Of course, it also should be noted that the PCL has doubled in size in the half-century since it first truly captured the imagination of West Coast baseball fans, and now stretches as far East as the Mississippi River.
But 50 years ago, the PCL was more than content to "play ball" within earshot of the pounding surf. There was no reason to stray inland.
"To a large extent, I believe that geography is just as responsible for leading to the Coast League's notoriety," said baseball historian Dick Beverage, president of the Pacific Coast League Historical Society, which provided much of the background and anecdotes for this story.
"For many, many years, transportation out here wasn't as advanced as it could be. There was a vast distance isolating the West Coast and that's when you had a lot of people migrating to the West. A lot of them liked baseball.
"So here was the Coast League, with a lot of great cities and a lot of great players, well-known names. That gave the Coast League a cache that was quite a bit different from any other minor league."
Beverage, who makes his home in Southern California, saw his first PCL game in the 1940s when his father moved his family from Nebraska to the Bay Area. He became a regular at Oakland Oaks' games at old Emeryville Park, and when he was old enough, began traveling around the league.
The post-World War II Pacific Coast league essentially was based in eight cities -- Seattle, Portland, Sacramento, Oakland, San Francisco, Hollywood, Los Angeles and San Diego. Beverage witnessed games in six of the "traditional" eight.
"It became a different league after the Giants and Dodgers came out in 1958," he recalled. "But I just kept going to the Coast League games. They were a lot cheaper, I liked a lot of the players and there was a sense of continuity."
The dedication of fans such as Beverage notwithstanding, the relocation of the Giants and Dodgers marked the end of an era in the PCL.
Beginning in the late 1940s, the PCL had started campaigning for major league status. Although it never received it, the Coast League was able to lure some pretty good players away from the National and American Leagues, and many historians and old ballplayers feel the level of play was comparable.
As Gus Zernial, who parlayed a couple of outstanding seasons with the Hollywood in the late 1940s into an 11-year major league career recalled, the weather in PCL was pretty darn good. But the salaries were even better.
"In 1947, there were a lot of teams in the Coast League that made more money than teams in the big leagues," Zernial said in an interview that was published on the PCL's 100-year anniversary website earlier this year.
For starters, there were the Stars, who purchased by Bob Cobb, owner of the Famous Brown Derby restaurant, and movie mogul Cecil B. DeMille. The team played its games at state-of-the-art Gilmore Field and would become the first professional ballclub to televise its games.
"We had a lot of guys playing in the Coast League that were making $14,000-15,000 when the minimum was only $5,000 in the big leagues," Zernial said. "In fact, when Frank Lane offered me a contract to play with the White Sox, he offered me less money than I made in the Coast League. I said 'I'm not going to go back there (Chicago) and play for the minimum' when I was making $8,000 in the Coast League.
"That was the Coast League. We traveled by train and stayed in some pretty nice hotels."
In those days, PCL teams traveled on Monday and spent a week in the same city, playing single games Tuesday-Saturday and doubleheaders on Sunday. Because the weather was so suitable to baseball, PCL teams began their seasons earlier and finished them later. It was not uncommon for PCL teams to play 200 games in a season.
But when the Giants and Dodgers moved from New York to California, the PCL went into a tailspin.
"It was different," Beverage said. "The caliber of play wasn't that different; in fact, it was probably even better. But it didn't have that stability. It became strictly a farm league and the players would change teams from year to year.
"It was pretty much the start of a down period for the PCL and minor league baseball in general. It took six or seven years for them to figure out what their market was."
During the 1960s, the PCL and the other minor leagues couldn't depend on the quality of baseball to attract fans any longer, not with major league teams now playing in their backyard. To stay in business, they began offering "family entertainment" at a reasonable price, with baseball simply serving as a backdrop.
"The customer base changed," Beverage said. "It went from being baseball fans to families that wanted to be entertained. It just so happened the game was baseball.
"That (marketing strategy) makes it quite different. It used to be the big thing was who won or lost the game. I don't think it's like that now."
The PCL, like every other minor league, had to reinvent itself, extending its tentacles to new cities and even new countries. The Coast League added its first Canadian franchise in 1956, when Vancouver was admitted, and opened the 2003 season with 16 teams, having absorbed six franchises from the American Association, which disbanded in 1998.
The PCL thus finds itself with teams in Oklahoma, New Orleans, Nashville, Memphis, Omaha, Des Moines and Colorado Springs, which seem far removed from the palm trees and swimming pools around which the original league was formed.
"What really makes those of us who can be called purists, I guess, swell up with pride is that we used to keep scorecards and programs from every game we ever attended," Beverage said. "These days, the only guy keeping score in the stands is me.
"One day not too long ago I was keeping score in Colorado Springs and people thought I was doing some sort of secret work, or that I was a scout or something like that."
So you can hardly blame Beverage for longing for the old days and questioning, in a subtle way, whether bigger necessarily means a better PCL in the future.
"That probably remains to be seen," he said. "Spread out the way they are, it's not something that can easily be resolved. But they seem to have their act together. They have good, strong leadership. Branch Rickey Jr. is a very forward-looking man, and they've opened a bunch of new ballparks in many new places."
That said, if you're one of the few like Beverage scoring the new PCL at home, perhaps you should wait another 100 years before calling it an official game.
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