St. Louis Pandas · St. Louis, Missouri · 1939

Indoor Diamond League Inaugural Delayed

Nine days after the cocktail party: the National Professional Indoor Baseball League schedule is suspended for a week or 10 days while the league finds out whether Chicago exists. Also, St. Louis's team is called the Pandas.

Nine days after the happy tea kettles of the cocktail launch, the Associated Press moved this from St. Louis: “Robert Blattner, secretary of the St. Louis Pandas of the newly organized National Professional Indoor Baseball League, has announced the league schedule has been suspended for ‘a week or 10 days.’”

The reason is stated with the straightest face in wire service history: officials agreed the action should be taken “in order to ascertain if Chicago, the fourth city in the western section of the league, is ready to play.” The league that promised eight clubs, each “backed soundly enough to carry through for at least two years,” was pausing its schedule to find out whether one of the eight was there at all. In 1891 Chicago had gone wild on this game, several leagues deep. By 1939 the wildness apparently needed confirming.

But do not let the obituary bury the lede. The St. Louis entry in the National Professional Indoor Baseball League was named the Pandas. Somewhere between Tris Speaker accepting the presidency and the schedule going into the shop, a grown man in St. Louis chose the panda as the mascot of a winter base ball concern. The great-names ledger takes all comers, and it takes the Pandas gladly.