Frank Shaughnessy was the architect of the first widely used method for a multiple-team, post-season series to determine a league champion, what today we call a playoff format. Initially, in 1933, this playoff format applied to minor-league baseball, but it quickly expanded to professional basketball and ice hockey in the 1930s and 1940s and eventually was adopted by professional football in the 1970s and by major-league baseball in the 1990s.
Shaughnessy had a long pedigree in professional baseball, beginning as a minor-league player (1903-1908) with brief stints in the major leagues in 1905 and 1908. He then moved up as player-manager for several minor-league teams (1909-1916), business manager (1913-1924), and major-league scout (1925-1928). Moving to his wife’s hometown of Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, in 1913, Shaughnessy managed not only the Ottawa baseball team in the Canadian League, but also the Ottawa hockey team in the National Hockey Association, forerunner of the NHL. He led the baseball team to three consecutive pennants and the hockey team to the finals of the Stanley Cup in 1915.
In 1932 Shaughnessy was the business manager of the Montreal Royals of the International League. He was a frequent spectator at the hockey games played by the Montreal Canadiens of the NHL, who were Stanley Cup champions in 1930 and 1931. Because he saw how successful the Stanley Cup post-season format was in the NHL, Shaughnessy pitched an exact replica of the NHL approach to International League team owners in December 1932 to conduct playoffs in baseball.
The onset of the Great Depression challenged the economic viability of minor-league baseball, as attendance dropped precipitously and several top-caliber leagues went out of business. The International League was challenged to retain the conventional best-record format to determine the champion when the Newark team was a runaway pennant winner in 1932 and largely eviscerated attendance at ballparks throughout the league.
To keep the fans interested throughout the season, Shaughnessy hatched an idea to maintain the integrity of the regular season but yet avoid the pitfalls of the split-season format, then the only alternative method to crown a league champion besides the traditional best-record format. Abandoned in the Shaughnessy Plan was baseball’s longstanding principle that having the best won-lost record was required to achieve success.
Before Shaughnessy announced his proposal, the American Association unveiled a split-league format for the 1933 season, dusting off the concept originally advocated by Joe Carr, which the National Football League had considered in 1927 and American Basketball League did implement for one season in 1928. On December 7, 1932, the American Association revealed that it would separate into two divisions of four teams each, with the first-place finishers in each division contesting for the league championship in a best-of-seven-games series. While the innovation was heralded as a “radical move to help baseball,” its downside was prominently noted as “the plan makes it possible for a team finishing fifth in the general averages to win the pennant in the championship series.”1
Shaughnessy pitched his more intricate Stanley Cup-oriented plan to International League ballclub owners in December, but failed to gain their agreement, as they determined that having six of the eight teams qualify for the playoffs was too radical. In January 1933 he presented another proposal to the owners that contained three alternatives: (1) his replica of the NHL format, (2) a duplicate of the earlier-announced American Association plan, in which only the first-place teams in each division met, and (3) “an elimination tournament between the first-division clubs [where] the first and fourth clubs would play while the second and third clubs were meeting, with the winners to play for the title.” The third alternative is, of course, version 3.0 of the Shaughnessy Plan, but it was decidedly Shaughnessy’s third choice in trying to persuade the International League to adopt a playoff system.
In his quest to institute change, Shaughnessy enlisted the help of Jack Zeller, an associate from his days with the Detroit Tigers, to persuade the Texas League to adopt a playoff system using the Shaughnessy Plan. Shaughnessy leaked the three-alternative proposal to Zeller, who represented the Beaumont club, to present at a Texas League meeting on January 7, just a few days before Shaughnessy was to meet again with International League owners. The Texas League agreed to use the Shaughnessy Plan concept during the 1933 season, opting for alternative number three, since the Texas League was nowhere near any NHL franchise and had no reason to consider the Stanley Cup format. The third alternative in the three-alternative discussion document may have been planted precisely to offer the Texas League a viable structure to adopt at its January 7 meeting, to provide Shaughnessy with some momentum in that the plan was desired by another minor league. Ironically, the Texas League-adopted format shortly became the standard format for the Shaughnessy Plan, not Shaughnessy’s preferred concept.
On January 10, 1933, the International League owners agreed to implement Shaughnessy’s Stanley Cup-inspired format for the 1933 season, but with one modification: only four teams would qualify for the playoffs.2 The league split into two divisions, and the two first-place finishers as well as the two second-place finishers qualified for the playoffs. In this version 1.0 of the Shaughnessy Plan, the two first-place finishers played in one series while the two second-place finishers met in another series; the winners of those two series met in the playoff finals to determine the league champion. Bizarrely, one first-place finisher was immediately eliminated and one second-place club was guaranteed to advance to the final round.
There was not simply one Shaughnessy Plan but rather three incarnations of it, which are dubbed versions 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0 in this book. Version 3.0 is what we now recognize as the standard playoff format in sports, where the team with the best won-lost record squares off against the playoff-eligible team with the worst record, with the intervening teams matching up accordingly. For instance, a four-team playoff would be characterized as 1 vs. 4 and 2 vs. 3; an eight-team playoff would be 1 vs. 8, 2 vs. 7, 3 vs. 6, and 4 vs. 5.
However, after the International League’s experience with the Shaughnessy Plan in 1933, the scheme was nearly scuttled after just one year of existence. When Newark was eliminated in the first round, after finishing with the best record during the season, and Buffalo was crowned champion by winning the playoffs after finishing the regular season with a sub-.500 record, the Shaughnessy Plan was roundly criticized as a joke, since the worst team among the four teams in the playoffs was crowned champion.
There was intense opposition to continuing the Shaughnessy Plan for the 1934 season. The Sporting News editorialized a few weeks after the playoffs concluded “that championships can be more satisfactorily settled by play throughout the entire season—and trusts that baseball will get back to that method of deciding pennants.”3 New York Yankees owner Jacob Ruppert, who controlled the Newark team as a farm club, was outspoken in his opposition to the playoffs. “What do I or the players get out of it? They happen to have a couple of off days playing this play-off business and where are we? It’s all wrong. It’s a joke,” Ruppert said. “They may be satisfactory in hockey, but they’re silly in baseball.”4
Buffalo, however, led the International League in attendance. Shaughnessy defended the system based on its beneficial financial impact. “The best defense of the play-offs … will be found in the receipts during the month of August and early September among the contending clubs,” he declared in October 1933. “The public is sold on the play-off idea even if some of the magnates suffered disappointment,” in that a so-called “inferior” team won the championship.5
For his playoff scheme to continue in 1934, Shaughnessy had to appease Ruppert and the other team owners by modifying the format to increase the odds that the team with the best won-lost record would also be the playoff winner. The International League reverted to an eight-team standings approach, and instituted version 2.0 of the Shaughnessy Plan, under which the first-place and third-place teams met in the first round while the second-place and fourth-place teams squared off, with the winners of the two rounds meeting for the title. That way one of the two best teams in the league would not automatically be eliminated in the first round. The league also lengthened the first-round series from five games to seven.
Additionally, Shaughnessy had to abandon the concept that the playoff winner would be declared the pennant winner and official league champion, as Buffalo had been in 1933. The team with the best record in the regular-season would be the pennant winner. This created “champion confusion,” since the playoff winner advanced to the Little World Series against the American Association champion and was perceived to be the “champion.” To help resolve the confusion over exactly which team was considered to be the International League champion, the Governors Cup was introduced in 1935 as the trophy that the playoff teams competed for (similar to the Stanley Cup in hockey). Today, any list of International League champions is a list of playoff winners; during Shaughnessy’s tenure in the league, that was rarely the case.
For the 1935 season, three more minor leagues joined the Class A Texas League in using version 3.0 of the Shaughnessy Plan in 1935: two Class A leagues (Southern Association and Western Association) and the Class D Evangeline League. In 1936, all three Class AA leagues used the Shaughnessy Plan, with the American Association using version 2.0 and the Pacific Coast League adopting version 3.0. The International League adopted version 3.0 for its playoffs in 1939. By the end of the decade, the Shaughnessy playoffs (which had replaced Plan in the term) were nearly universal across minor-league baseball. All leagues in Class AA, A, and B had instituted the format as had many of the leagues in Class C and D (the others clung to the split-season format).
A new audience of working-class fans dominated minor-league baseball in the 1930s, as a result of the adoption of night baseball in most minor-league ballparks. The excuse that “fans will never accept the playoffs” was never a serious impediment to the expanded use of the Shaughnessy Plan. “What we got was an entirely new interest from fans and players at the point where most teams generally dropped dead, when they fell too far behind in the pennant race,” Shaughnessy later recalled.6
New Deal legislation pushed by President Franklin Roosevelt to rescue the nation from the Great Depression helped to create this new audience for minor-league baseball played at night, to replace the shrinking patronage of small-business owners who had been the staple audience for day baseball. These new ballpark spectators were more receptive to the playoff format than the previous daytime audience, because the Shaughnessy playoffs resembled the American Dream that the New Deal legislation fostered.
In his sixth fireside chat, FDR said that the nation under the New Deal was moving “to greater security for the average man than he has ever known before in the history of America.” The new laws increased unionization, which led to blue-collar workers entering the middle class through increased wages, shorter hours, and stable employment. New laws also increased regulation of publicly-held corporations, which led to more white-collar jobs (accountants etc.). Growth in the number of corporations led to demand for managers, office workers, and salesman, who were a natural middle-class audience for night baseball.
The greater acceptance of stable corporate employment replaced the previous aspiration to be a small-business owner as the typical means to achieve upward social mobility. Since more people could rise above their earlier station in life through hard work as a corporate employee, they were receptive to the similar concept embedded in the Shaughnessy Plan, where you didn’t need to be at the top to achieve success (e.g., the first-place team with the best record) and with hard work a second-, third-, or fourth-place team could become league champion.
Instrumental in the expansion of the Shaughnessy Plan throughout the minor leagues was Joe Carr, the NFL president. During the mid-1930s Carr was also the publicity director for minor-league baseball, where his duties included setting up new leagues, an effort that often entailed espousing the merits of the Shaughnessy playoffs. Carr had fame in his own right when the NFL adopted a split-league format in 1933 to determine its champion.
Notes
- “Radical Move to Help Baseball,” New York Times, December 8, 1932.
- “International League Adopts Play-Off System for Deciding Pennant Winner,” New York Times, January 12, 1933.
- “Vindicating Play-Offs,” The Sporting News, October 19, 1933.
- “Ruppert Flays Play-Offs,” The Sporting News, October 5, 1933.
- “Shaughnessy Sticks Loyally to Play-Off Plan,” The Sporting News, October 19, 1933.
- Joe King, “The Frank Shaughnessy Story,” The Sporting News, December 21, 1960.
Sources
Bevis, Charlie. “How the Shaughnessy Plan Redefined Success in Sports.” NINE: A Journal of Baseball History & Culture, Fall 2011.
Jillson, Calvin. Pursuit of the American Dream: Opportunity and Exclusion Over Four Centuries. University of Kansas Press, 2004.
Johnson, Lloyd, ed. The Encyclopedia of Minor League Baseball. Durham: Baseball America, 1997.
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