1979
The Astros sign reentry free agent Nolan Ryan, formerly of the Angels, to a 4-year, $4.5 million contract, making him the highest-paid player in the ML.
Nolan Ryan, the first million dollar man in baseball.
1939
The National Professional Indoor Baseball League, headed by league president Tris Speaker, begins play. The league has 10 clubs, one in each then major-league city except Washington. Alas, it disappears within a month.
Indoor baseball? TIME thought the startup was worthy of a writeup in 1939.
Last week softball (minus its rover) was brought back indoors, stripped of its aliases and launched as a big-time winter sport. Patterned after major-league baseball's setup, the National Professional Indoor Baseball League sold franchises to New York, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, Boston, Cleveland, Chicago, Cincinnati, St. Louis. Each club, locally financed, is to play a 102-game schedule from mid-November to mid-March, with a World Series at season's end between Eastern and Western champions.
Though big names are notably absent from the roster of players (most of whom are drawn from the 10,000,000 sandlot baseballers and softballers in the U. S.), many a onetime star has turned promoter of indoor baseball. President of the league (at $7,500 a year) is 51-year-old Tris Speaker, Cleveland's baseball Immortal who has spent the past nine years as a radio sportcaster, Hollywood actor, minor-league club owner, wholesale liquor dealer and steel salesman. Managing the Cleveland club is another onetime Indian, baldpate Bill Wambsganss, only baseballer ever to make an unassisted triple play in a World Series (against the Dodgers in 1920).
It doesn't say in what arenas these teams played. Hey, it was Indoor Baseball in 1939. Those things were just known back then and didn't need to be put into a news sotry.
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