Fragile existence
Here’s another piece of content that probably will be included in my next book, about how Billings got a professional baseball team in 1948 and the key role played by Bob Cobb, the owner of the famed Brown Derby restaurants in Los Angeles and a onetime Billings boy who never forgot his hometown.
The Mustangs faced a fragile existence during their first two decades as a member of the Pioneer League. The root cause of the fragility was the lack of a working agreement with a higher-level team, preferably a major-league team, as a new season approached. Minor league teams needed working agreements to supply them with players signed by teams above them in baseball’s pecking order.
I can imagine Mustangs officials, members of the team’s board of directors, fretting over coffee or a drink in downtown Billings. And saying, in essence, if we don’t get a working agreement soon, we won’t be able to play next year. If we lose the fans for a season, we might lose them for good. And there goes the team.
One of those years of trial was 1959. “We’re still waiting,” Maury Enright, the Mustangs business manager, said in early December 1959 in an account reported by the Gazette’s Roy Anderson on December 3.
Enright repeated those three words about twenty times an hour. That was because the Mustangs had received no word on how the Pioneer League’s search for working agreements, which was underway in the winter baseball meetings in St. Petersburg, Florida.
The work mostly went on behind doors, so, “It’s hard to tell just when we will find out. It could be tomorrow or in two weeks,” Enright said.
On November 21, 1959, Anderson wrote that too much talk by Pioneer League team executives could jeopardize the circuit’s prospects for playing a 1960 season.
The palaver began in Great Falls, which was in the Los Angeles Dodgers farm system. Electric City people sounded off, dissatisfied with the quality of the team that the parent Dodgers had furnished. LA responded by pulling out of the Pioneer League.
Anderson said fans and team officials had the right to issue “a blood-curling yell when their team isn’t representing them the way they would like.” It would have been wise, however, for the Electrics to have done “a little spadework and line up another working agreement before cutting loose with both barrels.”
Billings had followed that strategy. The Mustangs had been a Pittsburgh Pirates farm team, but Billings fans grew tired of seeing the squad relegated to an always-a-bridesmaid finish. So, Billings and the Pirates worked out a baseball divorce, and the Mustangs switched to affiliation with the St. Louis Cardinals.
The new ties paid off; the Mustangs won their first Pioneer League pennant in 1957.
Now, though, it was touch and go at the winter meetings. Billings officials stayed diplomatic and, with Great Falls’ fate in mind, said, “We are ready to operate. The Cardinals haven’t cancelled our working agreement.”
Still, phone calls, goodwill, and newspaper columns would make little difference to the fate of Pioneer League teams. Anderson told his readers that major league farm directors would decide their lot, and it would take about five minutes.
Claude Engberg, Pioneer League president, would lead the “buttonholing” and work at St. Petersburg. “Then the boys who write the checks that grease the player talent assembly line to the major leagues will sit down and say - who’s in for the Pioneer?
“If six clubs decide they can send players, we’ll operate,” Anderson wrote.
He warned of the consequences of the big leagues dumping the Pioneer League. That would, in effect, mean tossing one million dollars of worth into the street — the value of six franchises, equipment and other assets.
The Mustangs stayed alive in 1960. On December 10, 1959, according to a report a day later in Butte’s Montana Standard, they signed a working agreement with the Rochester, Minnesota, Redwings of the International League, another higher-level team in the Cardinals system.