Baseball History -- January 7

Complete entry for January 7 is at BaseballLibrary.com HERE.

First a few Hall of Fame induction classes in the highlighted entries:

1992
P Tom Seaver and Rollie Fingers are elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame. Seaver finishes with a record 98.8% of the votes cast. Pete Rose, ineligible because of his ban from baseball, receives 41 write–in votes.

1985
Lou Brock, the major leagues' all-time stolen base king, and Hoyt Wilhelm, who rewrote the record book on relief pitching, are elected to the Hall of Fame by the BBWAA. Nellie Fox is named on 295 of the 395 ballots (74.7%), but the BBWAA and the Hall of Fame committee decline to round Fox's total to the required 75%.

Now, a little entry about a league that eventually became part of the Midwest League.

1962
The 61-year-old Three-I League (B) is disbanded by the six remaining clubs.

The Baseball Hall of Fame has a section on the Three-I League HERE. Three-I stood for Iowa, Illinois, Indiana. Look at it on a map. It just makes sense.

Appleton was the home of a Three-I League team from 1958 - 1961. There was also a Green Bay franchise from 1958-1960. Here are the final two paragraphs of the story from the Baseball Hall of Fame website that tells of the latter days of the Three-I League:

In the late 1950s, the Three-I League lost important markets that either left professional baseball, or joined another league. The most common move was from the Three-I League to the Class D Midwest League which was formerly known as the Mississippi-Ohio Valley League. Teams in the Midwest League generally incurred fewer expenses than those in the Three-I. Waterloo and Davenport left the Three-I League in 1956 and 1958 respectively. Both took a one year absence and then joined the Class D Midwest League. Teams that dropped out were being replaced by teams that extended the geographic boundaries of the league. In 1958, Green Bay and Appleton, two cities in northeast Wisconsin, returned to professional baseball with Three-I League teams. In 1959, the league added four teams from the Class A Western League, that folded after the 1958 season. The new teams were Lincoln, Nebraska, Topeka, Kansas, and Sioux City and Des Moines, Iowa, pushing the league's boundaries further west and north. Though the league gained strong baseball communities, the distance between cities became a great financial burden for the teams. For the 1959 season, a special mileage pool was established to ease the cost of travel for the two teams in Wisconsin. As a condition of their league applications, Lincoln, Sioux City and Topeka "agreed to reimburse the Fox Cities and Green Bay Clubs, on equal payments, for added costs of travel caused by the addition of those cities to the League. (annual report, 1959)" Even with the mileage pools, the cost of operations increased as attendance and operating income decreased.

After the 1961 season, the six teams of the Three-I League decided to suspend operations, putting an end to the National Association's oldest Class B League. Ken Blackburn of the Cedar Rapids club was elected president after the 1961 season. His tenure was short lived. The League held a special meeting on January 7, 1962 at the Fort Des Moines Hotel in Des Moines, Iowa to discuss the request of the Burlington Baseball Club to leave the Three-I for the Midwest League. Through the course of the discussion, the directors approved Burlington's move by suspending operations of the entire League for the 1962 season. A total of three cities, Burlington, Cedar Rapids, and Appleton, moved to the Midwest League, replacing a weak franchise in Kokomo, Indiana and expanding the league to ten teams. The three other teams, Topeka, Lincoln and Des Moines remained out of professional baseball for a number of years. At the January 7, 1962 meeting when the league folded, officials felt that the Midwest League, especially its president, C. C. Dutch Hoffman, sought to tamper with the Three-I League, taking their best franchises. The directors proposed reorganizing in 1963, but never were able to pull the league together. The location of the Three-I Leagues' top Iowa teams (Waterloo, Davenport, Burlington, Cedar Rapids) in the Midwest League was a serious problem that could not be overcome.