SI Vault
Robert Creamer
August 01, 1955
One angry minor league club owner has rebelled against the major leagues. On his success or failure may rest the future of baseball
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August 01, 1955

Civil War In Virginia


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Number of Leagues

Number of Teams






















1955 (July)



*Most minor leagues suspended play during World War II. 1943 marked the lowest point.

Minor league baseball in Portsmouth, Va., is largely the care and responsibility of the portly, graying grandfather pictured on the left. His name is Frank Dudley Lawrence. He is a banker, the founder and president of Portsmouth's American National Bank, the largest and oldest surviving bank in the city. He is a businessman, with interests in several profitable concerns in Portsmouth. He is in the truest sense of the phrase a public-spirited citizen, with an abiding love for the city of Portsmouth. He was born there 64 years ago. His grandfather was mayor. He himself served for years on the city council. He married twice, fathered seven children, founded his bank at the age of 27 and fostered its growth to the point where it was largely responsible for the prevention of a bank panic in Portsmouth during the bank-failure years of the depression.

Yet, for all of this, for all the crowded detail of his years, the great passion of Frank Lawrence's life is baseball. He has been in it off and on since 1907, the year he graduated from high school, the year he began his banking career as a runner at $5 a week. That year he took over the program concession for the Portsmouth club in the old Virginia League and made himself $300. Now, almost 50 years later, he likes to say that this was the only money he ever made from baseball.

"We just don't make money in the minor leagues," said President Harold O. Totten of the storied Three-I League in Cedar Rapids, Ia. last week.

In the years that followed, Lawrence organized and managed a semipro team, became part owner and then sole owner of the Portsmouth Truckers, sold Pie Traynor and Hack Wilson to the major leagues, became the friend of John McGraw, Connie Mack, Kennesaw Mountain Landis and other high men in baseball and, in 1928, was the bitter and disillusioned owner of a defunct franchise in a defunct league, as the Virginia League folded and died in the advent of the great depression.

Lawrence at 37 withdrew from baseball, burned his books, his papers, his pictures, kept nothing that reminded him of his baseball past except two photographs—one of his old semipro team and the other of Judge Landis—and his memories, which he could not burn. Seven years later, with the revival of baseball after the depression, Lawrence almost inevitably found himself back in the game as owner of the newly organized Portsmouth Cubs in the Piedmont League.


This is his 21st consecutive season in the Piedmont League. The makeup of the league bas changed, the name of his team has changed, the entire outlook of the minor leagues has changed. The constant growth of the late 30s and the boom years of the late 40s have given way to a steady, precipitous decline in attendance and gate receipts.

Two weeks ago the neighboring Norfolk Tars dropped out of the Piedmont League. Norfolk (the largest city in the league) had won four consecutive Piedmont pennants and just last year led in season's attendance with 130,000 ( Portsmouth had 45,000). Nevertheless, Norfolk lost money; rumors said $100,000 in four years. Frank Lawrence obtained six players from Norfolk's roster, licked his wounds and carried on.

Here are the problems facing Frank Lawrence. His team, which has seldom finished out of the first division in its 20 years in the Piedmont League, has been a dull, dispirited seventh. His attendance is low (last year's 45,000 was the lowest ever). And though his gate receipts have dropped—even in the face of an inflated currency—to the dollar levels of the mid-30s, his operating expenses have not, despite their stark simplicity.

Where a big league club's management and service roster may run to 500 people—including directors, comptrollers, accountants, doctors, lawyers, groundkeepers, cleaners and ushers—Lawrence runs the Portsmouth Merrimacs with a crew of a dozen. Lawrence is president and treasurer, his wife is vice president, his sister is secretary. Ticket sales at the park are supervised by a personal friend, J. S. Pitchford, who is helped in the booths and at the gates by a handful of friends and acquaintances. The city-owned Portsmouth Stadium is supervised and maintained by Lewis Brown, a city employee, and two helpers. These three men mow, water and rake the grass, mark base lines and coaches' and batters' boxes, clean out the stands after games, take care of the press box, the dugouts, the clubhouses and the rest rooms. Occasionally, they are obliged to meet other problems. Two weeks ago an automobile careened down a street outside the stadium in the early hours of the morning, crashed through the poured-concrete wall in right field, skidded across the outfield grass and came to a gentle stop near second base. Nobody was hurt, but a temporary barrier had to be erected over the hole in the fence and the tire tracks had to be raked down and smoothed out.

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