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Sunday, December 13, 2015

Is George Sisler the Only St. Louis Brown with a Kellogg's Card?

Watching the Bing Crosby classic "Going My Way" from 1944 last night inspired today's post.  In the movie Father O'Malley (Crosby) is a big fan of the American League St. Louis Browns.  He mentions practicing with the team and that the team gave him a jacket and hat when he leaves town for a new position.

I found out that only two Hall of Famers spent the majority of their career with the Browns who had a long history of losing.  Those two were Bobby Wallace and George Sisler.

Sorry, I'm having problems getting photos uploaded so I'm copying stuff from the internet lately.


Father O'Malley mentions that before hie became a priest that he was a member of a singing group called O'Malley's Orioles.  That's quite an interesting choice of names for his group.  Ten years later the St. Louis Browns moved and became the Baltimore Orioles.

Bill Veeck, known well by those of us from Chicago, became the owner of the Browns in 1951.   Attendance doubled and the team was on the rise in 1952.  According to baseball-reference.com Veeck knew that St. Louis could only support one team so he hoped to run the Cardinals out of town.
When the Busch family purchased the team in 1953, Veeck certainly lost any financial advantage over the Cardinals.  

Before the 1953 season Veeck planned to move the team to Milwaukee, where he had previously owned a minor league team, but the league moved the Braves there from Boston which ruined Veeck's plan.  He then targeted Baltimore and Los Angeles but both possibilities failed to materialize. 

Fans knew of Veeck's plans so attendance dropped.  The team suffered on the field too since Veeck was out of money and the team had to unload players.  After the season the AL once again denied Veeck's plan to move the team to Baltimore.  Once Veeck sold the team to a Balitmore lawyer, Clarence Miles, the AL allowed the move.  Veeck seemed to correctly understand that the AL rejections to his moves were personal - the other owners wanted him out.

Father O'Malley would certainly have been hurt by the move of his beloved Browns, but what would his take be on the nickname of Orioles?

In the 1944 movie what would Father O'Malley have thought of the Los Angeles Browns?  Two days after Pearl Harbor, after initially approving the move, the AL denied the move of the Browns to L.A. since the USA was entering World War II and travel restrictions would be quite an issue for all of the teams.  








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