Gameday Thread, #150: 9/14 @ Twins

After Clark Griffith’s death in 1955, his nephew and adopted son Calvin took over the team presidency. Calvin sold Griffith Stadium to the city of Washington and leased it back. This led to speculation that the team was planning to move, as the Boston Braves, St. Louis Browns, and Philadelphia Athletics had done in recent years. By 1957, after an early flirtation with San Francisco (where the New York Giants would move after the season), Griffith began courting Minneapolis–St. Paul, a prolonged process that resulted in his rejecting the Twin Cities’ first offer before agreeing to move.

The American League opposed the move at first, but in 1960 a deal was reached. Major League Baseball agreed to let Griffith move his team to the Minneapolis-St. Paul region and allowed a new Senators team to be formed in Washington for the 1961 season. [Jim: Well, this next section is extraordinarily unfortunate. Copied verbatim from Wikipedia] Asked nearly two decades later why he moved the team, Griffith replied, “I’ll tell you why we came to Minnesota, it was when I found out you only had 15,000 blacks here. Black people don’t go to ball games, but they’ll fill up a rassling ring and put up such a chant it’ll scare you to death. It’s unbelievable. We came here because you’ve got good, hard-working, white people here.”

And, moving rapidly on…

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