In the spring of 1958, minor league baseball in the Bay Area began dying in plain sight, and everyone knew exactly what was killing it. The major leagues had come to California: the Giants were playing their first season in San Francisco, the Dodgers their first in Los Angeles, and the Class C California League's northern outposts suddenly could not make the math work. In San Jose, the JoSox had drawn a respectable 40,000 fans in 1957 and still lost $11,000. A Reno columnist reported the club's people in a state of shell shock ever since the Giants' westward move landed on their doorstep. In Salinas, the Packers were drawing crowds as small as 171, against the 600 a game the club said it needed to break even, and one press box wit noted the 171 must have included the ballplayers. A Santa Cruz sports column had run a headline in April boasting "Majors Apparently Don't Affect California League Attendance." By June, the same columnist was writing the teams' obituaries.
Las Vegas watched all of it like a poker player eyeing their opponent's short stack. The city had been applying for a California League franchise for years and kept finding the door shut, and by January 1958 the Nevada papers could see the opening forming. League president Eddie Mulligan had handed San Jose a deadline to prove it could fund a season, and the Nevada State Journal's sports columnist, a man named, wonderfully, Ty Cobb, wrote that Las Vegas was "chafing at the bit to move into a California League vacancy." San Jose scrambled, got a ten-day extension, and promised that support was virtually assured. In March the league shut the door on Las Vegas once more, and the city's baseball men briefly weighed returning to the Arizona-Mexico League they had played in the year before; one former Las Vegas Wranglers boss was even reportedly maneuvering to bring the Washington Senators to town. Then, on April 1, club president A.J. Brimacombe made the coldest move available: he turned the Arizona-Mexico League down flat, leaving Las Vegas with no team at all, and announced, "We are ready to take over the operation of [the San Jose] franchise at any time." They would rather sit out than play in the wrong league. It camped on San Jose's deathbed and waited.
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The wait was short. In late May the JoSox, by then playing as the San Jose Pirates, missed a payroll, and the league itself took over running the club. At 5 p.m. on May 26, San Jose's directors failed to come up with a needed $20,000, with front-office confusion and the recent death of the club's chief stockholder compounding the Giants problem, and the franchise was forfeited on the spot. The league awarded it to Brimacombe's group of Las Vegas businessmen, who never had to buy the team at all; they paid $3,000 to the league, put up a $2,000 deposit, and inherited a ballclub, a Pittsburgh Pirates working agreement, and a 14-18 record. Las Vegas got its team the way the town wins everything; by waiting for the other guy to go bust.
The new Wranglers were the third Las Vegas team in eleven years to wear the name. The name dates back to 1947, when a charter franchise in the Class C Sunset League became the city's first professional team in any sport, a Boston Braves affiliate playing at a park at Las Vegas Boulevard and Bonanza. The original Cashman Field, until then a venue for football and rodeos, hosted its first Wranglers game on May 21, 1948, a 10-7 win over Reno in front of 1,515 fans, and in 1949 those Wranglers ran away with the Sunset League title at 88-39. But the club died with its league after 1952, a second Wranglers team folded out of the Arizona-Mexico League after 1957, and now a third was setting up at Cashman Field in the summer the Strip was adding palaces by the month; the Stardust, briefly the largest hotel in the world, opened that very July. If any city in the country could sell a night at the ballpark, surely it was the one built entirely on selling people a night out.
Opening night said yes. On June 3, professional baseball returned to Las Vegas against the perfect opponent, the Reno Silver Sox, the old rival from the Sunset League days, and Nevada fans at both ends of the state celebrated a rivalry reborn; the Reno paper noted the two cities had always drawn well against each other. Brimacombe predicted a crowd of 2,000. League president Mulligan came down for the game and declared that organized baseball would go over big in Las Vegas, telling the town, "if enthusiasm means anything, you are a winner." The Wranglers beat Reno 12-4 behind a seven-run fourth inning. It was the high point of the franchise's existence.
The roster, at least, was strangely well-stocked for a seventh-place club. In June, Pittsburgh signed a 6-foot-6 left-handed pitcher out of St. Benedict's College in Kansas named Bob Veale, a Birmingham fastballer who had turned down Detroit because, as he later put it, "They offered me a contract but wouldn't let me read it." Pittsburgh sent him straight to its new Las Vegas farm club and Veale made his professional debut at Cashman Field on June 27, striking out 12 Reno hitters before leaving in the seventh inning of a loss. He picked up his first professional win two weeks later, an 11-strikeout 3-2 defeat of Modesto won on his catcher's ninth-inning homer. He was raw in every direction at once, striking out 74 in 63 innings while walking 55 and uncorking ten wild pitches, and six years later he led the National League in strikeouts, beating out Bob Gibson, on his way to two All-Star selections with the Pirates. His professional career began as a Las Vegas Wrangler. And in the very announcement that welcomed Veale to town, the club returned a young right-hander named Tom Butters to Salt Lake City. Butters had gone 1-5 for the franchise that year; he went on to pitch parts of four seasons in Pittsburgh and then found his true calling at Duke University, where as athletic director he made a hire in 1980 that worked out reasonably well: a young basketball coach named Mike Krzyzewski. The future strikeout king and the future architect of Duke basketball passed each other in the transactions column of a last-place Class C team in the Nevada desert.
And almost nobody saw any of it. The team closed the first half 19 games out of first, taking a 14-0 shutout from Fresno on the way, then flickered to life with a 4-1 start to the second half that briefly held second place before the slide back to seventh; the combined season ended 54-81, with 902 runs allowed, the most in the circuit. The town that was packing showrooms and casino floors every night of the week did not come back to the ballpark. The franchise drew fewer than 24,000 fans all season, an average of around 350 a night, and the largest crowd of the entire Las Vegas season, the 1,935 who turned out for Veale's 12-strikeout debut, fell short of the 2,000 Brimacombe had predicted for opening night alone. An Associated Press story that July called them the Las Vegas Mustangs; the team was so short-lived even the wire services didn't even learn the correct name. The team had escaped the Giants' shadow only to land in the Strip's, squeezed in a single season between the two great entertainment forces of postwar America: major league baseball at one end of the road, Las Vegas at the other.
In the city where the house always wins, the home team never did.
The end came quietly, and on the house's terms. Two months after the season, the Reno paper reported, the Wranglers "tossed in the towel after a poor year at the gate"; Las Vegas announced it simply would not continue. Nobody dropped them. In a town that teaches you to know when to walk away, the baseball team folded its hand. That same October, Burt King, a former president of the Wranglers, died in Las Vegas at 66; he had come to town through the hotel world, an associate of the man who built the Last Frontier, and in that detail sits the whole story, because in Las Vegas even the baseball men were casino men. The league's directors spent the winter refusing to run a seven-team circuit, chasing Merced or Porterville as an eighth member, and watching Salinas, the other gate the Giants' arrival had broken, fall out as well; the California League opened 1959 with six clubs. The same winter, the major league parents more than doubled their cash aid to Class C teams, from $4,000 to $8,500 plus the manager's full salary. Help was coming for the minors the majors had wounded. It came one winter too late for Las Vegas.
The Wranglers name was done for good, and so, for a generation, was professional baseball in Las Vegas. The city that would eventually become one of the great sports towns in America went twenty-five years without a professional team, until the Triple-A Las Vegas Stars arrived in 1983 to find a metropolis ten times the size of the one the Wranglers had failed to charm. The other Nevada club, the Reno Silver Sox, survived and played on for another two decades, which means the rivalry reborn that June night at Cashman Field lasted exactly one summer, and as it turns out, The Biggest Little City in the World was the Nevada town that made baseball work.
Our Las Vegas Wranglers design is adapted from the team's actual 1958 artwork, a genuine relic of the season baseball went to Las Vegas and, for once in that town, the house lost its shirt.
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