In Memoriam: The California League, 1879–2020

In MemoriamThe California League, 1879–2020 Steven Treder (bio) The COVID-19 pandemic triggered North America's greatest upheaval in the structure of professional baseball in more than a century. The disruption was even greater than that of World War II. In that instance, zero major league championship games were cancelled, and though most minor leagues suspended play, the few strongest endured the war and with them, the minor league framework survived. It was not so through this most recent calamity. Following the complete cancellation of the 2020 minor league season, for 2021 the minor league organizational architecture itself, in place continuously since 1903, was blithely scrapped. Replacing it were blandly named, colorless, vassal leagues, stripped of any identity beyond subservience to the majors. Many of the grandest old names and richly storied institutions were unceremoniously swept away, including the International League, the Pacific Coast League, the Texas League, the Eastern League, the Southern League, and the California League. The reconstituted minor leagues are purposefully, conceptually, and most importantly, legally severed from any connection to the past. Beginning in 2022, with MLB now able to use traditional Minor League brand names without paying trademark compensation (it's always about the money), several of the newly arranged minor leagues were rechristened with old names. Among these is a wholly owned MLB subsidiary called the California League, stocked with eight wholly owned MLB subsidiary teams. Whatever this entity may prove to be, it isn't what the California League was before 2020. The California League before 2020 took various forms. Its most significant was the enterprise that operated for every season from 1946 through 2019, a period that presented turbulent changes to the state of California and to the midlevel minor baseball league that proudly bore its name. The enduring role that the California League played within the greater state economy and its cultural way of life was complicated and fascinating. [End Page 86] That California League is gone. It deserves a fair and hearty remembrance. baby pictures In 1879, the sport of professional baseball was just toddling about as a brand-new business concept. There was a grand total of five baseball leagues presenting a season of play that summer; among them was the now-familiar National League, struggling to make it through its fourth year. It was within this primordial setting that the California League first appeared. It was one of two professional leagues in the Golden State making a go of it in 1879; the other called itself the Pacific League. Both had chosen names to make them seem more expansive than they were. Of nine teams comprising both leagues, eight were located in San Francisco, and the ninth was all the way across the bay in Oakland. That's how tightly concentrated California's economic activity was. The population of the state of California in 1880 was 864,000, of which more than one-quarter were living in San Francisco, and more than one-third were in the San Francisco Bay Area and Sacramento, the state capital, ninety miles northeast of San Francisco. There were no other cities yet established.1 Other than Sacramento, the largest settlement in the state's vast Central Valley was the San Joaquin River town of Stockton with about 10,000 residents. That was the same size as the quaint old-Spanish pueblo of Los Angeles, which was far to the south, beyond the rugged Tehachapi, San Emigdio, and San Gabriel mountains. Distant, arid, and sleepy, Los Angeles was just becoming accessible via railroad.2 The Pacific League of 1879 quickly folded, but the California League survived for a while. In 1886 it welcomed a team from Sacramento—its first member from outside San Francisco or Oakland—and later included a team representing Stockton and one from the farm town of San Jose, at the south end of the San Francisco Bay. But that California League disbanded in 1891, and the ensuing decade brought a chaotic tumble of unstable team and league formations in California. The first professional club in Los Angeles appeared in 1892 but stuck it out for only one season. In various and fleeting combinations, entries from San Francisco...