Ford Frick wasn’t much of a commissioner, nor did he show any special skill as a forecaster.
Frick presided — perhaps too forceful a verb — over major-league baseball from 1951 to 1965. It was one of the most chaotic periods in the game’s history, marked by the widespread moving of franchises that had been anchored for decades. Seven clubs changed addresses on Frick’s watch.
And what did the commissioner do? He remained mute. His silence only deepened when two historic teams, the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants, decamped to the West Coast at the height of the relocation frenzy. “I am going to have very little to say from this time on,” he laughingly told reporters. “I’ll give a good imitation of a clam.”
It’s not that Frick hadn’t warned everybody. “I am not a monitor on high, ready to swing the big stick,” he had promised upon assuming office. He lived up to his word, much to the dismay of critics such as Bill Veeck, a masterful promoter who owned the St. Louis Browns and Chicago White Sox during Frick’s tenure. “Let us be fair,” Veeck once said. “Ford Frick does not try to do the wrong thing. Given the choice between doing something right or doing something wrong, Frick will usually begin by doing as little as possible.”
So why discuss this ineffectual (albeit amiable) commissioner today?
Because I recently had cause to be browsing through Frick’s somewhat disheveled memoirs (Games, Asterisks, and People) in search of a stray fact, and I discovered that the final chapter of this 1973 tome offered his predictions for a half-century in the future, specifically 2020.
Nobody should be expected to exhibit unimpeded vision that far down the road, so I certainly don’t fault Frick for any of his crystal-ball strikeouts. But it’s interesting to review the expectations of the man who had once been baseball’s supreme leader.
We might have been better off if some of them had come true.
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Ford Frick offered seven specific forecasts for our current times, though it might be more accurate to label a couple of them not as predictions, but as wishes. Let’s take them one at a time.
“By that time (circa 2020), the major leagues will have expanded from 24 to 32 clubs, operating as four separate eight-club leagues.”
A nice start. The majors expanded to 30 teams in 1998 — and then inexplicably stopped. Frick was right. There certainly should have been 32 clubs by now. Perhaps there will be by 2025 or 2030.
The four-league setup, on the other hand, is never going to happen, though it’s an interesting idea. Eight-team leagues would be more easily comprehensible than the current unwieldy groupings of 15 clubs.
“Baseball will return to the old 154-game schedule, with postseason playoffs culminating with the traditional World Series. The baseball season will be shortened, with the season opening in mid-April and all competition, including the World Series, ended by October 7.”
A pipe dream. Owners and players seem united in their unwillingness to surrender eight games of revenue.
Should the season be shortened? Of course. Would it be nice to see the World Series played in pleasant weather? Absolutely.
Will it ever happen? No way.
“Expert engineers and scientists will have come up with new construction ideas and new materials to enable municipalities and private corporations to build covered, year-round, all-sports structures, at less than the open structures of today.”
Frick wrote at a time when Houston’s Astrodome was the nation’s only covered ballpark. They indeed are more common today, though definitely not as widespread as he expected. Only eight of the 30 big-league clubs play under domes.
And as for the cost? Take a look at SoFi Stadium, which opened last year in Los Angeles. It’s a football stadium, not a baseball park, but it certainly highlights the escalation of construction expenses. It reportedly cost more than $5 billion to complete SoFi, a price that surely would have been beyond Frick’s comprehension. (And mine, too.)
“It is entirely possible that a moveable dome can be devised that could be opened or closed as weather conditions dictate.”
A home run. Seven of baseball’s eight domes are retractable. The exception is Tampa Bay’s unfortunate (and severely dated) Tropicana Field.
“Cities are growing at a phenomenal rate. Statistics predict that by the year 2000, our population will increase by a minimum of 25 to 30 percent.”
This forecast proved to be too mild, though Frick can’t be faulted. He wasn’t a demographer, after all. The actual population jump from 1970 to 2000 was 38%. (The longer rise from 1970 to 2020 was a mindboggling 63%.)
Such rapid growth meant no shortage of expansion candidates, which Frick listed as follows (though the order was clearly of no particular importance): Miami, Omaha, Denver, Salt Lake City, Phoenix, Seattle, Portland, Vancouver, Washington, Toronto, New Orleans, Mexico City, and Havana. (“Even Mr. Castro can’t live forever,” Frick wrote.)
Some of his choices were strange — Omaha and Salt Lake have never been on baseball’s radar — but most were logical. Six of the cities he named were subsequently admitted to the big-league fraternity.
Frick’s most interesting proposals — Mexico City and Havana — remain intriguing a half-century later. They also seem destined to remain outside the majors.
“I hope sports are not included in the off-track betting frenzy or harassed by any widespread legalization of betting.”
A swing and a miss. Mr. Frick, say hello to BetMGM and Caesars and DraftKings and FanDuel and William Hill and all of their colleagues.
“I see the commissioner as a judge and arbiter, respected by press and public, with full authority to protect the honesty and integrity of the game he rules.”
Rob Manfred can only dream of such universal acclaim as we descend into a long lockout winter, but Frick wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that the commissioner remains as much of a lightning rod today as he was in the 1950s and 1960s. He admitted the fanciful nature of this final prediction in his concluding sentence.
“Of course,” Frick wrote, “it’s only a dream, but a happy one — and a fit ending for what is intended to be a happy book.”