St. Louis Cardinals: Cardinals could have been in Houston or Milwaukee?!
So what if the St. Louis Cardinals had left?
If the Cardinals had gone elsewhere, the backlash could have been significant around the game. A purchase by the group from Milwaukee could have led to plenty of backlash, simply because of Perini’s presence in the market. He likely would have blocked any other team into the area, and the move of his own major league team into the Milwaukee market came for the 1953 season.
The Cardinals remaining in town meant that the Browns left town, eventually becoming the Baltimore Orioles after the 1953 season when the Cardinals purchased away their stadium, laying claim to the city.
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The Houston market would pick up their first major league team in 1962. The second two-team town would be split up when the Philadelphia Athletics left town after 1954 for Kansas City, becoming the first team to move west of St. Louis.
The A’s would be followed a few years later by both the Giants and Dodgers, who moved after the 1957 season was complete, interestingly a season that one of the teams affected by the sale of the Cardinals to Busch, the now-Milwaukee Brewers, won the World Series. Both teams moved to the West Coast in California.
The St. Louis Cardinals were coming off an 88-win season in 1952, a win total that they would not reach again until a decade later, in 1963. The St. Louis Cardinals won the World Series in 1964, their first since 1946, two seasons before Saigh purchased the team.
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In the end, Saigh served prison time for his personal tax fraud and paid over $260,000 for the back taxes of the St. Louis Cardinals. He made sure the Cardinals stayed in St. Louis, and Cardinals fans certainly thank him for that.