By Default

[b]Max Granillo[/b]: A meeting had already been called for the owners on February 3rd. It was to discuss wartime restrictions but it had been expanded to see how this new problem could be handled.

This was a dead skunk in the middle of the room. Landis knew that baseball had to put up a women's league that met minimum standards, whatever they were. He wanted to pull something together out of baseball's general fund. However, the owners were against it - they wanted control of their own money. Poor clubs like Connie Mack's club tried to stop it, but to no avail. If there were going to be any women's teams, they woudl be run by each of the individual clubs. That predicated a 16-team organization.

Each team would have a "ladies auxilary" team, so to speak. It was informally agreed that baseball would run the league until either Landis was dead, or Roosevelt was out as president, or the war was over. Landis would be dead soon but there was no foretelling how long it would take for those other two conditions to be met.

[b]Elnora Sunderman[/b]: They decided one thing - unanimously - that getting a league up in three months was too soon. This time, Landis wrote a letter, signed by all of the league owners, which begged the President for more time.

Roosevelt agreed that a league in 1943 was acceptable. Then, of course, once the league had gotten their "green light" from the President, they forgot all about it.

[b]Max Granillo[/b]: There were only two owners who gave a rat's ass about a women's baseball league. One of them was Branch Rickey. He wasn't really an owner, but he was with the Cardinals org and might as well have been an owner.

[b]Tameka Hadjupp[/b]: Rickey was a peculiar specimen. Men tended to either denigrate women in the 1940s or put them "up on a pedestal, and out of the reach of power" as my old thesis supervisor put it. Rickey was probably the most moralistic of baseball's minds with a streak of contrarian idealism. He liked baseball. He didn't like baseball players all that much.

So he idealized women as baseball players. He thought he would have sweet, docile girls - he was a traditional man - who could hit home runs and run the bases like Ty Cobb. He wanted players who hit like men and thought like women.

[b]Max Granillo[/b]: The other person who liked the idea was Philip Wrigley. Wrigley was very pessimistic about the war. He once told a friend that it would be a major leap when the United States military could get to the level of "not running away". He figured the war could run at least 10 years. He was as patriotic as any man, but he figured that it would take the US military a longer time to get to speed.

So he didn't know what the future would bring, and he thought it was a dumb idea to put all of your eggs in one basket. Players could get drafted, but they would never draft women into the military. Furthermore, any idea that he could try out in this new league would be tried. The new league would be a testing ground for all of his theories about baseball.

[b]Elnora Sunderman[/b]: Wrigley hated the reserve clause. He hated it with a burning passion. You have to remember that the Cubs weren't very good and I think in 1942 they finished in the cellar. He didn't think it was fair that the Yanks could have a DiMaggio in perpetuity. So he pushed hard for an abandonment of the reserve clause in the new Women's Baseball League.

[b]Max Granillo[/b]: There was no grand league name. It was just the Women's Baseball League, because that was how the owners talked about it. "What are we going to do about this women's baseball league?" After a while, some owners and secretaries began to capitalize the name - "Women's Baseball League" and the name was accepted by default.

[b]Elnora Sunderman[/b]: A lot of things were accepted by default. No one really cared in any of the club offices. Any meme that caught on had a chance of becoming part and parcel of the WBL.