"The fans raised such a rumpus over the incident," Frick wrote, "that my curiosity was aroused. After the game I went to the umpires' dressing room and asked Rowland what the Babe had threatened to do to him.
"Rowland laughed. ' The fans had it all wrong,' he said. 'The Babe wasn't sore at me. That strike curved over the plate at the last moment as pretty as anything, and that's what made him mad. What he said was, 'Clarence, where'd that bird get a hook like that? He never showed me one like that before.''"
He returned to the minors, this time in the front office.
Rowland was the president of Los Angeles Angels in 1944. Pants earned The Sporting News' title of No. 1 minor-league executive.
He visualized the growth of the market in a post-WWII boom, and the advent of scheduled commercial air flight, along with the development of major league talent in the West as the formula for either a third league, or at least for PCL clubs to join the major leagues.
He took on the presidency of the PCL in 1944, signing a ten year contract for $12.500 a year, which he fulfilled to the day.
Pants may have had the funny moniker, but he was dead serious about taking on the majors and Judge Landis.
"He dresses like a tailor's ad, drinks champagne cocktails and has been called 'the most lovable guy in the whole damn game,'" said Time Magazine of him in January of 1944.
By 1947, the battle cry for liberation by the PCL was well known to the major leagues. Judge Landis was gone, and in his wake came Commissioner Albert "Happy" Chandler.
Chandler decided not take the same tack as Landis: The Pacific Coast League was unique in minor league baseball because it was 87.5% independent. The Cubs owners, the Wrigleys, also owned the Los Angeles Angels, but the league could largely do as it pleased, and, with the boom in population in the West, there was the real possibility of another major league, with or without the sanctioned blessing of the National and American Leagues. The PCL owners were bristling at the hated draft law, which forced clubs to sell star players. If the club didn't, the majors could draft them anyway, buying their contracts from the PCL clubs for a pittance of $10,000.
Recalling the drag from the league wars at the turn of the century, Chandler wanted to avoid another Civil War in baseball, and take on some of these potentially lucrative markets. The St. Louis Browns had done some poking around Los Angeles, but found small crowds, as few as under 500. Of course, they were a rotten team, and fans in the LA area had two teams, the Stars and the Angels, who drew much better and to whom area residents were loyal.
The Commissioner himself led a fact-finding mission, accompanied by Presidents Will Harridge and Ford Frick of the American and National Leagues to Los Angeles in September of that year. Rowland lobbied hard for promotion to major status.
The week before the visit, the major league powers that be dispatched Babe Ruth to throw cold water on the third major league. "There aren't even enough top baseball players for two major leagues," Ruth told reporters.
The other real problem that the PCL had to contend with was one of the new assets to professional sports: Air travel. The league feared the NL or AL moving one of their clubs into a PCL market, using the air service to keep the team in schedule with the other 15 in the majors.
Time Magazine called the fact finding trip a draw: "At Hollywood's Brown Derby the Chandler mission was wined, dined and propagandized by glib Proprietor Bob Cobb, head man of the Hollywood Stars and an eloquent antidraft orator. Before heading up the Coast, Happy Chandler did some talking of his own. 'You haven't had major-league baseball out here," he drawled in parting. "Don't be impatient if it takes a few more years.'"
At a meeting in September of 1951 in San Francisco, Rowland lead the charge of the club owners, who voted to serve an ultimatum on the majors. If they did not get exemption from the player draft, the PCL would become an 'outlaw' major league.
The goal was to slow down the player bleed to the East. The majors were still balking at the cost of moving around athletes by air. Even though Los Angeles and San Francisco clearly had the populations to be major league towns, the American and National leagues did not see the justification of the expense. They also knew that the PCL would be hard-pressed to call itself a major league unless players from the other clubs who were the top talent of the day came out and graced the ballparks with their aura.
There was also the problem of the parks themselves. The Seals Stadium could handle a major league club (It served as the Giants' park until Candlestick was built.). The facilities in L.A. and other markets would need to be built to move up to major league status. That required money. Backing for an expanded major league could find security and dollars. Backing for a renegade league was a risky proposition in a 1950s where post-war conformity was the social rule of the day.
"We're all living or dying together in this deal, and if the majors won't go along, to hell with 'em," said C. L. "Brick" Laws, owner of the Oakland team in a Time Magazine story on the PCL
In the end, Rowland was unable to fulfill the dream of ownership in the majors. The Angels went major, the Dodgers assassinated the Hollywood Stars, and Major League Baseball asserted its power in the West with unyielding certainty.
The PCL would never be a major league. It limped into a more humbled West, found new cities, and began rebuilding into the premiere AAA league that it has become today.
