Minor League Ball; Major League Brawl

Two-team MLB markets have built-in rivalries. Even before inter-league play, the Yankees were, in a sense, competing against the Mets, and before 1958, against the Dodgers and the Giants, though the Yanks never played them in a regular season game. The same had been true for the Cubs and the White Sox since 1901, as well as other cities (Philadelphia, St. Louis, Boston) that fielded two teams before the franchise shifts of the 1950s.

An interesting case was the situation in Southern California. When the Dodgers arrived in Los Angeles in 1958, they had the vast metro area to themselves – but not for long. Just three years later, the American League expanded and added a Los Angeles franchise. Yet as soon as the Angels took the field in 1961, old-timers might have felt a tinge of déjà vu. Only a few years had passed since the minor league Angels had been in a heated two-team rivalry with the Hollywood Stars in the Pacific Coast League. That was the set-up from 1938 through 1957.

The Stars, the new team in town, played in the established team’s park, in this case, the PCL Angels’ Wrigley Field. Since the franchise was owned by Cubs owner Phil Wrigley, the ballpark was not only christened Wrigley Field but patterned after Wrigley Field in Chicago. It was a minor league park with a big league vibe. For that reason, it was particularly handy whenever some sort of baseball movie involving the big leagues (e.g., Pride of the Yankees, Damn Yankees and It Happens Every Spring) needed a reasonable facsimile. After its final PCL season in 1957, it showcased MLB’s biggest sluggers in the syndicated Home Run Derby TV series. Ironically, the faux big league ballpark finally became the real deal in 1961, its swan song season, when it became the home of the MLB Angels.

A previous Hollywood Stars franchise, transferring from Salt Lake City, had played at Wrigley Field from 1926 to 1935 but had never caught on with the public, even though they had some success on the playing field (PCL championships in 1929 and 1930). After finishing last in 1935, however, that iteration of the Stars ceded the LA metropolis to the Angels. They moved south to San Diego in 1936 and became the Padres, just in time for Ted Williams to join his hometown team.

Yet two years later another Hollywood Stars franchise, f/k/a the San Francisco Missions, decided to take a crack at the LA sports scene. Realizing that the identity of a team and its fan base is bound up in its home ballpark, however, this franchise played just one year in Wrigley Field before opening their own park, Gilmore Field, in 1939.

If you’ve ever been to the LA Farmers Market, shopped at The Grove, or seen an old movie at Quentin Tarantino’s New Beverly Cinema (all 35mm film – no digital allowed), you might not have realized it, but you were within walking distance of Gilmore Field, which was at the intersection of Beverly Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue. Appropriately enough, starting in 1948, the Gilmore Drive-In Theater was just beyond the right field fence. After the arrival of the Dodgers and the demolition of Gilmore Field in 1958, it remained the home of the stars, as CBS Television Studios was built on the site.

The team’s nickname was apt as Hollywood folk were regularly seen in the grandstand. More to the point, a number of them had invested in the team. Among the minority owners were Gary Cooper, William Powell, Barbara Stanwyck, Robert Taylor, George Raft, George Burns and Gracie Allen, as well as directors Lloyd Bacon, Raoul Walsh, and Cecil B. DeMille. Even character actors, such as William Frawley, later to gain fame as Fred Mertz in the I Love Lucy TV series, bought an interest in the team. Also in the mix were Gene Autry and Bing Crosby, who would one day get into MLB ownership, Autry as the owner of the big league Angels and Crosby as minority owner of the Pirates. The team promoted itself as “the Hollywood Stars baseball team, owned by the Hollywood stars.”  Shares in the team were rationed so ownership could be widely spread among the members of the movie colony.

The majority owner was Robert H. Cobb, not a household word today but well known in Hollywood at the time, as he was the owner of the Brown Derby restaurants and the alleged inventor of the Cobb Salad. His team was sometimes referred to as the “Twinks,” hardly a nickname to strike fear in the hearts of PCL opponents, but supposedly a derivation from “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”

The opening of Gilmore Field in 1939 was also apt as many film buffs and historians consider that year as the pinnacle of the Hollywood studio system. A bumper crop of hit movies (Gone with the Wind, Stagecoach, The Wizard of Oz, Wuthering Heights, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Ninotchka, Gunga Din, and Beau Geste, among others) evolved into classics and are still regularly shown today.

Curiously, 1939 was also considered a benchmark season for baseball (see Baseball’s Tipping Point by Talmadge Boston). It was also the starting point for World War II in Europe, which would have profound effects on both baseball and motion pictures. Ironically, one of the effects of the war was that it scotched the plans of the St. Louis Browns to move to Los Angeles, which would have chased minor league baseball away from La La Land in 1941. Perhaps even more significant, Eddie Gaedel would never have become part of baseball lore.

By 1950 there were roughly 4,000,000 people in Los Angeles County and half that many in Los Angeles proper. It was definitely a big-league size market for baseball and television. So it shouldn’t be surprising that in 1953, Pacific Coast League games were being televised in SoCal.  The Sunday double-header on August 2^nd between the Stars and the Angels was telecast on KTTV (Channel 11). The Stars were enjoying a good season, on their way to a league-leading record of 106-74. The Angels would finish with a respectable 93-87 record, but nowhere near their crosstown rivals.

Before we go any further, let’s introduce some of the dramatis personae. The 1953 Angels (Cubs affiliate) were skippered by former Cub stalwart Stan Hack, who had led his team to a 66-64 record to that point in the season. His counterpart on the Stars (officially unaffiliated that season, though they had ties with the Pirates in 1952 and 1954) was player-manager Bobby Bragan, whose team sported a gaudy 80-50 record.

They had ascended to first place in mid-July and never looked back. Some of the players you might have heard of were Joe Hatten, Cal McLish and Gene Baker of the Angels; and Monty Basgall, Mel Queen, Barney Schultz, Larry Shepard, and Lee Walls of the Stars. The star of the Stars was Dale Long, who was the PCL MVP that year, thanks to 35 homers and 116 RBIs.

“The Heavenly Series,” as Angels-Stars matchups were called, typically drew big crowds. This particular series (eight games) had drawn 63,017, a Gilmore Field record. On this particular day, 10,408 were on hand. The usual friction between the two teams had been greater than normal thanks to the length of the series. There had been a few spats, but they were just preliminary bouts on the fight card.

As is often the case with brawls, the August 2^nd dustup was sparked by a hit batsman who retaliated. The batsman in question was Frankie Kelleher. After a cup of coffee with the Cincinnati Reds, he had forged a long minor league career, compiling a career batting average of .283 with 358 home runs and 1098 RBI. A good deal of that offense occurred while he was with the Stars, with whom he had debuted in 1944.

When Kelleher came to the plate in the 6^th inning, he had five straight hits (including two game-winners as a pinch-hitter). Angels’ pitcher Joe Hatten, or perhaps manager Stan Hack, decided it was time to send a message. A seven-season veteran of MLB ball (he had pitched in the 1947 and 1949 World Series for the Dodgers), Hatten had returned to the minors and would stay there till he turned 43 in 1960. In 1953 he would win 17 games for the Angels and lead the PCL in strikeouts with 152.

While Kelleher was a good candidate to be plunked, he was an unlikely candidate to take umbrage. Nicknamed Mousey, he was an easygoing sort, though he stood 6’1” and weighed 200 pounds. He brushed off a couple of brushbacks in the fourth inning and tripled for his sixth consecutive hit. That should have been the ultimate rejoinder, but Hatten (or Hack) had other plans. In the sixth inning, Hatten drilled Kelleher in the back on the first pitch. This time, Kelleher did not wait to respond with his bat. He stalked to the mound and began pummeling Hatten. Angels first baseman Fred Richards joined the fray and began wailing on Kelleher. Other players joined in but order was quickly restored. Kelleher was ejected (the first time in his lengthy career) but not Hatten. That was just the end of round one, however. Ten minutes later the game resumed.

Pinch-running for Kelleher, Ted Beard took off on the next pitch and stole second. One pitch later he took off for third. Third baseman Murray Franklin reckoned Beard’s slide was a little harder than it needed to be and his spikes were a little higher than they should have been, so more fisticuffs ensued. The dugouts emptied and for the next 30 minutes it was like a multi-ring circus with players brawling all over the field. Even umpire Cece Carlucci absorbed a few punches.  According to Lupi Saldana of the Los Angeles Daily News, it was “a melee of gouging, spiking, and slugging.”

One can imagine the consternation of legendary LA police chief William Parker (who appears as a character in James Ellroy’s novels L.A. Confidential, Perfidia, This Storm, and The Enchanters), who had settled into his easy chair to enjoy the clash of his two hometown teams on TV. As he witnessed the situation spin out of control, he saw the potential for the fans to become involved, escalating the conflict into a full-blown riot, so he called in 50 police officers to restore order at Gilmore Field.

And there the police remained for the rest of the afternoon, including some in the dugouts. Beard, Franklin, Richards, and Hollywood’s Gene Handley were all ejected, but they had plenty of company in the clubhouse. Only the nine players involved in the game were allowed to remain on the field or in the dugout; the others were banished to the clubhouses unless needed.

Under threat of arrest for any more brawling, the players behaved themselves for the rest of the game, a 4-1 victory for the Stars. In fact, their comportment was impeccable in the second game, an Angels victory by a 5-3 score.

Of course, there were repercussions. PCL President, Pants Rowland (who had skippered the White Sox to a World Series title in 1917) had been in attendance that day. Afterwards, he fined Kelleher $100, a considerable sum for a minor league player at a time when the minimum MLB salary was $6,000. Kelleher’s big mistake was not going after Hatten, it was returning to the field to take part in the second brouhaha after he had been thrown out. The next day he would be dubbed Kayo Kelleher by the LA Daily News.

Beard, Franklin, Richards, and Handley were fined $50 each. Not penalized was the Stars Mel Queen, even though LA Times sportswriter Al Wolf asserted he had dealt out so much punishment he deserved “a shot at Rocky Marciano.”

While the big brawl was technically minor league stuff, it got a national boost when Life magazine did a three-page spread on the incident. It might seem odd that a minor league brawl would get so much attention, but in those days the Pacific Coast League was classified Quadruple-A or “open.”  Many observers thought some if not all of the teams were MLB quality. Salaries were decent enough that many a player turned down an opportunity to play for an MLB team and remained with his PCL club.

In 1953 LA baseball fans were likely not aware that MLB was on the radar screen for their town. At that time, Dodger President Walter O’Malley was still considering his options in Brooklyn. He hired famed architect Buckminster Fuller, inventor of the geodesic dome, to design an indoor ballpark in Brooklyn. Unfortunately, Robert Moses, New York City’s Parks Commissioner, scotched the deal.

O’Malley was a native New Yorker, lived on Long Island, and didn’t want to pull up stakes and move to the other side of the country. Some of O’Malley’s critics – and they were legion after the Dodgers left Brooklyn – thought he had planned the move to LA long before he announced it.

I don’t know if anyone can say for sure when O’Malley first started thinking of Los Angeles, but he was surely aware of the Angels-Stars dustup. I can readily imagine O’Malley puffing on a cigar, perusing the photo spread of the fracas in Life magazine, and coming to the conclusion that any town that could host a brawl of that magnitude was definitely worthy of major league baseball.

Of course, the Dodgers won the pennant in 1953, which would have made a move awkward. When they won their first World Series title in 1955, it would have been particularly tacky. But by 1957 the Milwaukee Braves went on to win the pennant while the Dodgers slipped to third place, so it was a propitious moment to make the big move.

But the seed might have been planted four years earlier, thanks to a donnybrook at a minor league ballpark 3,000 miles away.