Becoming Big League: Seattle, the Pilots, and Stadium Politics

Becoming Big League: Seattle, the Pilots, and Stadium Politics

Becoming Big League is the story of Seattle's relationship with major league baseball from the 1962 World's Fair to the completion of the Kingdome in 1976 and beyond. Bill Mullins focuses on the acquisition and loss, after only one year, of the Seattle Pilots and documents their on-the-field exploits in lively play-by-play sections. The Pilots' underfunded ownership, led by Seattle's Dewey and Max Soriano and William Daley of Cleveland, struggled to make the team a success. They were savvy baseball men, but they made mistakes and wrangled with the city. By the end of the first season, the team was in bankruptcy. The Pilots were sold to a contingent from Milwaukee led by Bud Selig, who moved the franchise to Wisconsin and rechristened the team the Brewers. Becoming Big League describes the character of Seattle in the 1960s and 1970s, explains how the operation of a major league baseball franchise fits into the life of a city, charts Seattle's long history of fraught stadium politics, and examines the business of baseball. "Any person going through the turnstiles, any person in an already established MLB city, and anyone who finds themselves in a potential city considered for expansion have an indelible resource for reference in Mullins' work." --Matthew J. Bartkowiak "The Journal of Popular Culture" "Bill Mullins has covered all angles of this expansion club, delivering a book replete with details of the year-long effort to place a major-league team in the Pacific Northwest and of the team's swift decline that led to its transfer to Milwaukee on the eve of the 1970 American League season. . . . Mullins shows a most capable hand in developing the central characters of this drama." --Paul Hensler "NINE Spring Training Conference" "Mullins is able to keep the many threads of the story . . . from tangling . . . It cannot be overstated how difficult and important this task is: sports business is an impossible morass, so to tell the tale without leaving the reader dizzy is a real accomplishment." --Jason Wojciechowski "Baseball Prospectus" (1/1/2013 12:00:00 AM) "Places the Pilots in baseball's broader historic context, but also brings the underlying subject matter home for the reader...a fascinating history and walk down memory lane." --Katherine J. Ringsmuth "Pacific Northwest Quarterly" "The story of how major league sports finally came to Seattle--and then left after only one year. Stadium politics remain at the heart of Seattle's ongoing struggle with sports, even nearly fifty years later, as the city vies for an NBA team." -- "Publishers Weekly" (1/1/2013 12:00:00 AM) Becoming Big League is the story of Seattle's relationship with major league baseball, from the 1962 World's Fair to the completion of the Kingdome in 1976 and beyond. Bill Mullins focuses on the acquisition and loss, after only one year, of the Seattle Pilots. At once a look at the business of baseball and an explanation of how a major league baseball franchise becomes part of the life of a city, Becoming Big League is essential reading for sports fans and people interested in modern urban life and politics. Bill Mullins is professor emeritus of history at Oklahoma Baptist University. He lives in Federal Way, Washington.