Some Offenses Are Legal

In Venezuela last week, Pitcher Saul Rogovin wished he were back home in Brooklyn. Pitching for the Venezuelan club, he walked the first four men at bat. The fans booed, the umpire threw him out of the game, the Venezuela club owner had him jailed for "not trying."

In St. Louis last week, the purse-pinched Browns sold, for an estimated $400,000 and 13 lesser-light players, six of their first-stringers--including their homer-hitting Shortstop Vern Stephens. Nobody was jailed. It is not an offense in the U.S. to own a bad team, nor to weaken it further in any way the management chooses. But some of the other American League owners talked as if it should be. President Dan Topping of the New York Yankees demanded an official investigation of the eighth-place Browns. Said he: "We do not want to see the American League become a seven-club league."

The Yankees had a selfish reason to complain: there wasn't much profit in facing a team that, in one game last summer, played to only 315 cash customers. Most big-league owners are convinced that St. Louis cannot properly support two big-league teams. They would like to see either the Browns' or the Cardinals' franchise moved to Detroit or Baltimore.

The hottest report of the week: that the Cards would be sold for $3,500,000 to a syndicate headed by Postmaster General Robert Hannegan and the three movie-rich Skouras brothers.

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