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Old 06-21-2019, 01:15 AM
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Charles
Cha.rles
 
Join Date: Oct 2015
Location: New Jersey (But born & raised in Brooklyn, NY)
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Here's a brief synopsis of the Contenental Leage taken from a Mets blog (link provided below) after the passing of New York attorney Bill Shea (whom Shea Stadium was named for).


• Shea was a protégé of George McLaughlin, the banker whose Brooklyn Trust Company long ran the Brooklyn Dodgers. McLaughlin had installed Walter O’Malley to oversee business operations in 1933 and, Dodger fan that he was, ultimately felt personally betrayed by O’Malley moving the club to Los Angeles after the 1957 season.

• Shea was a friend and informal adviser to politicians from both parties, including New York City Mayor Robert Wagner. Wagner tasked Shea with leading a committee that would find a replacement for the Dodgers and Giants. After putting out unsuccessful relocation feelers to existing National League teams, Shea turned his energies to expansion.

• When rebuffed by baseball — “We don’t need New York,” huffed N.L. president Warren Giles — Shea concocted the Continental League, a third major league that would conceivably compete with the National and American for players and profits. It would play in New York as well as markets left out of big-time baseball to date.

• McLaughlin, who remained an upper-echelon power broker in New York, brought Shea together with Branch Rickey (another of his old Dodger hires) to give the Continental League scheme some oomph among baseball men. It was the threat of this new league and all its implications for baseball’s antitrust exemption that shoved the sport’s recalcitrant establishment to agree to expand.

• Shea’s trump card was attracting serious investors in markets like Houston and Dallas/Fort Worth for the Continental. Houston and Dallas/Fort Worth are in Texas, home to Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson and House Speaker Samuel Rayburn. They absolutely ran Congress and would not look kindly on a sport/business that arbitrarily blocked Texas from making the majors.

• It was an intricate plan, but it worked essentially as Shea wanted it to. Baseball caved.




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