Sahlen Field, Buffalo (AAA #18 - a long-ago, almost, sort-of, and ought-to-be major league city)

 

A lot of cities have histories with major league baseball that are glorious or painful, or even both, but I don't think any city has a history that is more complicated than that of Buffalo.

Buffalo does not have a major league team, but I think of it as a long-ago, almost, sort-of, and ought-to-be major league city.

Buffalo has NFL football and NHL hockey - will it get MLB baseball? The metro area is only the 51st largest in the US, smaller than any current MLB city. But in 1900, Buffalo was the 8th largest city in the country, and as recently as 1960, it was in the top 20. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Buffalo drew record crowds for minor league games. Yet in all that time, things never worked out to get a sustained presence in the majors. I find the history of Buffalo's pursuit fascinating, since it covers much of the history of leagues coming and going, teams starting and moving, and even the evolution of baseball stadiums over 150 years.

I learned about Buffalo’s history while preparing for this trip, and realized that I have enough material for at least two blogs about Buffalo, but we’re only going to be going to one game there. So I’ll talk about Buffalo’s history of trying to get a franchise today, and about how the history of cities (including Buffalo) pursuing major league teams has tied in with the history of major league baseball parks tomorrow.

Long ago

Buffalo got an early start on major league baseball. Starting in the 1870s, there was one attempt per decade to form what is now considered a major baseball league.

 The National League, the oldest pro sports League in North America, started play in 1876. Of the eight teams, two are playing their 150th season this year, although the Chicago White Stockings are now the Cubs, and the Boston team moved first to Milwaukee, then to Atlanta. The Buffalo Bisons joined the NL in its fourth season. They survived only seven seasons, never finishing higher than third. The franchises that would become the San Francisco Giants and Philadelphia Phillies joined the league while Buffalo was playing.

In each of the next four decades, there was a league established that attempted to rival the NL, with varying degrees of success. Buffalo had teams that were charter members of two of those, but the city picked the wrong two leagues.

In 1882, the American Association formed. The AA included teams in "western" river cities, like St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh, as well as the city of Brooklyn. Those four franchises all ended up joining the NL, and still are playing today. Unlike the NL, the AA had Sunday games and allowed sales of alcoholic beverages, leading it to be called the "beer and whiskey League" by the NL, which didn't seem to bother either the fans or owners of the AA teams. The AA also had cheaper tickets. The AA was successful enough that there were post season playoffs between the two league champions (think World Series, though far less formally organized) throughout the 1880s. Buffalo didn't have a team in the AA, and why would they? At the start, they had a team in the NL.

in 1890, a group of high-profile players established the Players League. This was an early attempt to fight the"Reserve Clause" that tied players to a single team, or to whatever team that team traded then to, for their whole career. The Reserve Clause would survive into the 1970s, with an attempt to trade Curt Flood to Philadelphia spelling the beginning of the end. But in 1890, the Players League was a bold move, and the quality of play was at least the equal of the other major leagues, if not better. Buffalo was one of eight cities with teams, but only Buffalo and Cleveland didn't already have a major league team.  Despite the quality of play, and popularity with fans, the PL was underfunded, and folded at the end of the season.

Partly as a result of the chaos the PL caused (all three leagues lost lots of money in 1890), and partly because some of its better teams kept jumping to the more established National League, the American Association folded a year later. Some of the remaining AA teams joined the NL, and in fact, of the 12 teams in the NL in 1892, seven, including four that survive today (the forerunners of the Reds, Pirates, Cardinals and Dodgers), started in the AA. Incidentally, Rochester and Syracuse both had their only major league teams in 1890, in the AA, but each played only that one financially turbulent season.

The next attempt, in 1902, included eight teams, four in cities that didn't have NL teams, including Cleveland, Washington, Detroit, and Baltimore, but not Buffalo. That league, the American League, survives as the second major league in MLB, and all those “new” cities have teams today, even though Washington and Baltimore each have had at least one team move away.

The attempt for the 1910s was known as the Federal League. Again, there were eight teams, several in cities that didn't have teams in the NL or AL, including Buffalo. The Federal League lasted only two years, 1914 and 1915, but the two cities besides Buffalo that played both years that didn't already have a major league team, Kansas City and Baltimore, both have teams today.

To summarize, Buffalo had entries in three major leagues in professional baseball's first half century. After the birth throes of the NL and AA, every city that didn't have a major league team in an established league that got a franchise in one of the new leagues has a team today. Except Buffalo.

Almost

When the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants moved to the West Coast for the 1958 season, the nation's largest metropolitan area suddenly went from three MLB teams to one, a source of concern and wounded pride in the Big Apple. A local lawyer, William Shea, came up with the idea of a third major league. Plans for the new league, to be called the Continental League, were announced in early 1959, with play scheduled to begin in 1961. Branch Rickey, who established the minor league farm team concept with the St. Louis Cardinals, then signed Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers, was named league president.

To minimize competition with the two existing leagues, the CL announced that their eight teams would include Buffalo and six other cities that didn't have MLB teams, plus New York. There was another reason why adding new league made sense. The integration of the white major leagues meant the end of the Negro Leagues, so there were actually fewer major league playing positions available than there had been most of the time from 1920 to 1950. With a growing population, there were enough good players, and enough fans in cities without major league teams, that it seemed like the CL had a chance.

The existing leagues were not amused, and announced plans to expand to eight new cities by 1970. The National League, unwilling to cede New York, amended that to say seven new cities plus New York, and offered the NL franchise to Shea. He accepted, and the Continental League was effectively dead, and never played a game. However, of the eight cities that were to have teams in the Continental League, seven now have teams through expansion or the movement of existing teams. The exception is Buffalo.

But Buffalo was a contender for one of those expansion teams. I’ve found references on the web to a bid for a National League expansion team in 1969, with a proposed ownership group that would have included a New Yorker who had spent a lot of time in Buffalo because his family had made its money in shipping on the Great Lakes -- George Steinbrenner. However, a rather detailed baseball-oriented biography of Steinbrenner, while mentioning attempts to buy the Cleveland Indians and Detroit Tigers in that era, doesn’t mention Buffalo. In any case, a few years later, he was part of a group that bought the New York Yankees, who became the first team to spend lavishly on free agents. For fans of alternative histories, if Buffalo had beaten out Montreal or San Diego that year, would Reggie Jackson be most remembered for his time in Buffalo?

But the Washington Senators were struggling, and Buffalo sports historian John Boulet says that Buffalo was promised the team if a domed stadium then in the planning was built. But the stadium went over budget, local government backed out, and the Senators moved to the Dallas-Fort Worth area instead and became the Texas Rangers.

Finally, in the late 1980s, the owner of the minor league Bisons led an effort to build what would either be the largest stadium in the minors or the largest in the majors. That stadium, whose architecture revolutionized the look of baseball stadiums at all levels, is the one we’ll be at tomorrow night. It has the largest seating capacity in the minors (currently 16,600, as high as 21,500 in the past). In 1991, with the National League set to add two teams, the Bisons drew a minor league record attendance (not counting Mexican League teams), which has yet to be beaten, of 1,188,972 in 69 dates, an average of 17,231 per date.  By comparison, three MLB teams last year drew less than 17,231 per game.

But Miami and Denver were selected. Denver has consistently drawn well, but Miami was 29^th in the majors last year.

Buffalo still drew more than a million people for two more years (six of the seven seasons with a million customers at a minor league game are at Buffalo), but when expansion came again in the late 1990s, MLB went with Phoenix and Tampa Bay. Again, one of them has drawn decently (Phoenix, in this case), while Tampa Bay has not been above 28^th in attendance in nearly a decade.

So Buffalo hasn’t had a major league team in more than 100 years.

Except that …

Sort of

Finally, despite the fact that there hasn't been an MLB team with jerseys that say "Buffalo" on them since 1915, a major league team played all its home games in Buffalo in 2020, and about a quarter of its home games there in 2021.

When COVID -19 struck during Spring Training in 2020, baseball operations were suspended, and when they resumed, on July 23, the teams played a 60-game schedule with no spectators in the stands. But one team had a problem. Crossing international borders was very restricted, so it was not really feasible for the Toronto Blue Jays to play in Canada. Instead, they played in Buffalo, home of their AAA affiliate, the Bisons. In 2021, vaccines were available, so restrictions had loosened enough that most teams allowed limited spectators for the first couple of months of the season, then allowed full houses from about June on. But border restrictions were still tight, so the Blue Jays played their first 21 home games at their Spring Training field, in Dunedin, Florida, then their next 23 back in Buffalo.  Incidentally, the Jays drew more fans per game in Buffalo than several other teams (including the usual suspects Miami and Tampa Bay) did in their home stadiums. Also, although the Buffalo Jays made the postseason in 2020, the schedule made it such that they played in St. Petersburg in the first round, not Buffalo, and they got swept, so Sahlen Field didn’t get to host a postseason game.

That means that there have been 53 major league games played there, a record for a minor league or Spring Training stadium, a record that will be broken later this year, when both Steinbrenner Field in Tampa (Rays) and Sutter Health Field (Athletics) surpass it.

In retrospect, it’s clear that a team in Buffalo would have drawn better than those in Miami and Tampa Bay.

Ought to be

Actually, with Tampa Bay’s ongoing stadium fiasco, that team may still be available, and in a fair world, Buffalo would be the leading contender. However, the population demographics are not on Buffalo’s side, and I think that’s a shame.

The game: Columbus Clippers 6, Buffalo Bisons 1

This was probably the most one-sided game we’ve seen, far more than the score would indicate. It was 6-1, but it felt like the Bisons were lucky to have it that close.

Buffalo got only three hits for the game, and only got one baserunner as far as second base. However, that baserunner scored their only run, since two of their three hits came back-to-back in the 2^nd inning. Other than that, Columbus’ Vince Velasquez and three relief pitchers completely shut down the Bisons. Velasquez, incidentally, made his major league debut in 2015, and pitched regularly for various teams from 2016 through 2023. If he continues to pitch as well as he did last night, someone will give him another shot, even though he’s in his mid-30s.

The Bisons didn’t play crisp defense. One Columbus run scored on a wild pitch, another when an outfielder bobbled a ball bouncing toward him, and a third on a sacrifice fly to the second baseman. A sacrifice fly means that the batter hit a ball in the air, a fielder caught it, and a runner on third base tagged (you have to touch the base after a ball is caught on the fly) and raced home before the throw got there. The vast majority of sacrifice flies are on balls to the outfield. In fact, the only other one I can remember that was caught by an infielder was one where the fielder was racing away from home plate to run a ball down in the shallow outfield, and it took him several steps to slow his momentum enough to turn and throw. Last night, the second baseman was backing up, backing up, backing up, then caught, looking at the runner at third to make sure he didn’t tag, and… Wait a minute the runner did tag, and that briefly delay when he watched the runner instead of just throwing the ball to home plate was enough to let the run score. The Clippers were ahead 4-1 after three innings, and tacked another couple of runs on, so that the crowd never really had a chance to get into the game.