earned The Sporting News title of No. 1 minor-league executive. It was as president of the Pacific Coast League where Rowland came to real prominence. "Pacific Coast baseball men are fed up with playing Santa Claus to the major leagues", said a TIME magazine article in December 1944, "...They do not like losing their Buck Newsomes, Joe Di Maggios and Ted Williamses. They think postwar air travel may well lure some big league club to pick up a Los Angeles franchise (the St. Louis Browns nibbled at it two years ago). Above all, they await the day when they can support a third big league of their own." Rowland was the cheerleader for the PCL battle cry of independence. Air travel was still primitive, and the PCL teams had near major-league standing in the rapidly growing cities of the Western United States. He took on major league baseball commissioners Kenesaw Mountain Landis and Happy Chandler, trying to free the league from losing players to the American and National League for a minuscule $7,500 buyout of their contract. He went to the 1944 winter meetings of the NABPL (National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues) in Buffalo with a two-plank agenda. He proposed that minor leagues get $10,000 (a compromise figure) instead of $7,500 when one of their players is drafted by a major-league club. He also suggested that if & when the major leagues invade minor-league territory, the incumbent minor-league owners should get first crack at the major franchise. To his surprise, Rowland won support for both of his proposals. Landis opposed the PCL proposal and threatened to "outlaw" the league if it tried to move up in the world. The former judge, who had been brought in by the owners of baseball to clean up the mess from the 1919 Chicago scandal, held anyone connected with the organization at that time in particularly low esteem. Rowland's ties to the last season of pre-Black Sox ball tarred him with the same brush in the eyes of the man called the "baseball tyrant." Rowland tried his hand at establishing the PCL as a major league after Chandler had succeeded Landis. Chandler and his fact-finding team, which included National League and American League presidents Ford Frick and Will Harridge, begged off again. At a meeting in September 1951 in San Francisco, California, Rowland led the charge of the club owners, who voted to