Angels and the Hotfoot

In 1901 when a Cincinnati buggy-maker named Bob Hedges bought into the St. Louis Browns baseball club, he got a bargain for his $35,000. In 1916 he sold out for $525,000. Since then nobody has been able to get rich owning the Browns, a chronic second-division club.

Phil Ball, a big cold-storage man, dropped $500,000 in five years. Donald Barnes, shrewd finance-man, gave it a whirl, got out while the getting was good. In 1945 Coal-&-Iceman Dick Muckerman stepped in. Save for the wartime year 1944, when the Browns surprised everybody by winning their first pennant since the American League was organized in 1901, the threadbare Browns went from bad to worse. About a year ago, the Browns sold a batch of their best players in order to stay solvent. The chief trouble, it seemed, was that St. Louis was a one-team town and the flashy St. Louis Cardinals were that team. The Browns were caricatured on sport pages as a bearded hillbilly leading a forlorn hound dog. Except for special occasions, the attendance followed the pattern of the pre-World War I days, which a mournful St. Louis sportwriter once characterized by saying solemnly that "the fans were staying away in large numbers."

Last week, despite this record, buyers were waiting in line when the Browns once again went on the block. One of them was William DeWitt, 46, who got his start in baseball selling peanuts and soda pop, and worked up in 1936 to general manager of the club. Along with his big brother Charlie, 48, traveling secretary of the Browns for the past twelve years, Bill DeWitt scraped up some money and plunged in where other treading angels had gotten a hotfoot. The DeWitt brothers bought control (58%) of the Browns for about $1,000,000.

That set more tongues wagging than the sale six days before of the prosperous St. Louis Cardinals (TIME, Feb. 7). Why would anybody want to buy the Browns?

Bill DeWitt had his reasons. Chief among them: the Browns own St. Louis' $1,200,000 Sportsman's Park (which they rent to the Cardinals for $35,000 a season) and a new $721,000 ballpark in San Antonio. Before anybody got impudent enough to ask whose money he used to buy the Browns, Bill firmly announced: "There are no associates in this thing with us. It's all Charlie and myself."

If worst came to worst, Bill DeWitt could always sell some ballplayers or a ballpark--or he could pack up the Browns (and their league franchise) and move them to another city. Since ball clubs began to travel by air, sportwriters have talked about the possibility of moving the franchise to the Pacific coast. Many of them feel sure that St. Louis would not support that much baseball, even if the Browns were a first-division club.

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