Robert Lee Howsam (February 28, 1918 – February 19, 2008) was an American professional sports executive and entrepreneur. In 1959, he played a key role in establishing two leagues—the American Football League, which succeeded and merged with the National Football League, and baseball's Continental League, which never played a game but forced expansion of Major League Baseball (MLB) from 16 to 20 teams in 1961–62. Howsam then became a prominent MLB executive as the highly successful general manager (GM) and club president of the Cincinnati Reds during the Big Red Machine dynasty between and , when his team won four National League pennants and two World Series titles. He also served as GM of the St. Louis Cardinals from August 17, 1964, until January 1967, where he inherited a team that would win the 1964 World Series, but made material contributions to the Redbirds' 1967 world champions and 1968 pennant-winners. Born in Denver, Howsam attended the University of Colorado and served as a U.S. Navy pilot during World War II. He was the son-in-law of Edwin C. Johnson, a three-term United States Senator and two-term governor of Colorado. Johnson also was involved with professional baseball as founder and first president of the postwar Class A Western League, an upper-level minor league that played from 1947 to 1958. Efforts to bring Major League Baseball to Denver Howsam first made a name for himself as a highly successful baseball executive. He led the family-owned Denver Bears of the Western League and Triple-A American Association from 1947 to 1962. He built one of the most successful minor league franchises of the 1950s and was twice (1951 and 1956) named Minor League Executive of the Year by The Sporting News. Howsam, his brother Earl and his father Lee also built Bears Stadium, a minor league baseball park which, after renovation and expanded capacity, became famous as Mile High Stadium, the Denver Broncos' noisy, raucous and perpetually sold-out home from 1960 to 2001. While the Bears achieved great success as the top farm team of the New York Yankees in the late 1950s, an earlier stint as a low-level affiliate of the Pittsburgh Pirates (1952–54) served to introduce Howsam to Pirates' general manager Branch Rickey, the Baseball Hall of Fame executive, who had revolutionized baseball in his earlier career with the St. Louis Cardinals and Brooklyn Dodgers. Rickey would play an influential role later in