Late Bloomers: Earl Averill
Before Branch Rickey, among others, started building a system of formally-affiliated minor league teams for his major league club, teams acquired players in one of two ways.
They could directly scout amateurs on high school, college, or semi-pro teams and try to sign the best ones, or…
They could scout players on unaffiliated minor league teams and try to buy the contracts of the best ones.
Because being found at your high school was a bit of a crap shoot, players with major league aspirations tried hard to latch on with an established minor league squad and do well enough to catch the attention of one of the big league teams. That was the way it always worked in the 1920s and earlier, and was still largely in place even after Rickey’s innovation because most other big league teams didn’t build out an affiliated farm system right away.
This system allowed some of the more prominent minor leagues to thrive, none more than the Pacific Coast League. There was no big league baseball west of St. Louis until the 1950s, and it was less common for major league scouts to venture that far as well. They still did, of course, but for the most part they preferred watching PCL games to find good prospects rather than hitting every high school and college up and down the coast. PCL teams essentially had free rein to mine the local talent on their own, which they could then either keep or sell off to the big leagues if the money was right.
Often called the Third Major League, the PCL fielded some incredibly talented squads that played ball at a very high level. If you looked at just the league’s annual leaderboards in the Triple Crown categories, they were packed with past or future major league stars.
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