The Baseball Blues

“[We are] removing our hats to the owners, managers and players of the Northern league as the most intrepid baseball detachment in the world,” proclaimed sportswriter Gordon Gilmore of the Saint Paul Dispatch in the spring of 1942. “They started in the bottom of the depression, when baseball leagues were folding rather than organizing. Through lean years and others only slightly plump, they hewed to the base lines. They started with two strikes on them and somehow over a period of ten years have managed to avoid the third, fatal swing.” One of those Northern League teams was the Superior Blues of Superior, Wisconsin. Over the course of the Great Depression the Blues faced constant financial struggles and changed ownership three times. Despite the team’s instability, the Blues officials found ways to keep the team operating. By following national sports management trends, engaging in creative business practices, and generating community support, the Blues created a sustainable model for maintaining minor league baseball in Superior through the Depression and beyond.

The minors developed over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, forming independently of the major leagues in cities and large towns. Each minor league club was independently owned, typically by a member or group of people in the community where the team played. The minor leagues were governed by the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues, commonly known as the National Association, which established rules and classifications for all of minor league baseball. Class A and B teams typically played in larger cities and had the most talented and experienced players, while Class C and D clubs played in smaller cities and had less experienced players. All players were paid a full-time salary commensurate with the level of the club. As players honed their skills and talents they typically moved from the lower-level clubs to the higher-level teams, hoping to one day be picked up by a Major League Baseball team.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the minor league system was in transition. Most clubs and leagues were independent, meaning that if a team wanted to sign a minor player it had to negotiate a deal with the minor club. In the 1920s and 1930s, major league clubs began to purchase or pay a fee to affiliate with minor teams, giving them exclusive rights to control the players. Affiliate teams had the right to move players from team to team and league to league at their discretion.

This system of minor league baseball was devastated by the Great Depression. After 1929, attendance at minor league ballparks plummeted, causing nine of twenty-five minor circuits to go out of business by 1931. In February 1933, F. C. Lane of magazine reported that no minor league made money in 1932 and proclaimed that “minor league baseball is dying on its feet.” “Even baseball cannot prosper when all the world goes broke,” an