History Maker Baseball 1961 Continental League Montreal Royal Blues vs New York Skyliners Game 2

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The Continental League was the idea of New York City attorney William Shea, who was perturbed by the relocation of New York’s Giants and Brooklyn’s Dodgers. On July 27, 1959, Shea announced the formation of a new eight-team professional baseball league, with teams in New York, Denver, Houston, Minneapolis–St. Paul, and Toronto. Over the next year, ten cities made formal applications for the remaining three franchises. From those, Atlanta, Buffalo and Dallas–Fort Worth were selected. Former Dodgers president Branch Rickey was named league president within a month of the league’s formation. The following February, Rickey announced Opening Day for the Continental League would be April 18, 1961. It was Rickey who famously pronounced during a guest appearance on an episode of the TV show “What’s My Line” that game play in the new Continental League was as “inevitable as tomorrow morning.”

The National Football League was facing a similar problem with the upstart American Football League. After similarly stifling expansion requests for many years, the NFL didn’t take its rival seriously--at first. But when interest in the new league surged, the NFL scrambled to thwart it by doing an about-face on expansion and adding teams in two of the AFL’s key markets. Baseball took the NFL’s cue by pre-empting the new league in Houston and Minneapolis, and--the kill shot--offering an expansion New York franchise to Shea. Thus, the Continental League officially disbanded on August 2, 1960, without ever having played a single game.

But what if the Continental League had pushed forward with its plan, like the AFL did? Likely the league would have thrived and its clubs would eventually have been absorbed into the American and National leagues in some sort of merger agreement. With this new Continental League card set for HISTORY MAKER BASEBALL, you can turn back the clock and experience how a wrinkle in baseball history might have unfolded!

You may be curious how this card set was made. We originally had the idea for this set in 2015, after completing work on a similar “what if” project for SECOND SEASON Football, the 1957 Pro Season. It included a hypothetical 1957 American Football League sub set, made up of players who theoretically could have comprised the league’s rosters if the AFL had started play a couple years sooner. We used a similar process for the ‘61 Continental League, starting with a lengthy research period. We culled the baseball archives for players who could have played in an alternate league in ‘61, intentionally avoiding players who actually DID play big league ball. Our pool of players included those whose careers ended before 1961, or whose careers began in 1962 or later but who were old enough to have played in ‘61. We stopped and started on this project for a number of years, working our way from Tommie Aaron to Gus Zernial.