Free Tigers

The baseball farm system, by which big-league teams own or control whole minor-league teams or some of their players, was considered a form of slavery in the early days of baseball. Nowadays it is considered quite legal. The World's Champion Yankees, for example, control 13 minor-league teams. The main rules are: 1) no team may own or control two teams in the same league; and 2) all deals, transfers, etc. must be properly recorded with High Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis.

Snowy old Judge Landis hates the farm system. His office mail is packed with squawks about it from players. Two years ago he freed 100 players from the St. Louis Cardinals' farms. Last year he got wind of irregularities in the Detroit Tigers' farm lands. Last week the roughshod way Judge Landis rode over Detroit's farm system was the talk of baseball.

He freed 91 players, four of them brought up from the farms to Detroit's own roster, the rest secretly kept in "cold storage" on bush-league teams from Shreveport to Seattle. Detroit had prized this buried talent at something like $500,000. Beyond this paper loss, it had to shell out some $50,000 in adjustments. One team with which Detroit had a secret deal, Hot Springs in the Cotton States League, found itself with only one player after the great emancipation.

Because he had issued no warnings at the time of the St. Louis affair, Judge Landis exacted no further penalties against Detroit, although fines of from $500 to $1,000 for each offense were in order, and banishment of Detroit's General Manager Jack Zeller possible. Instead, Baseball's Landis laid down the laws of farming, for every manager in the land, and he issued fair warning. For farm violations hereafter: no mercy.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.