Throwback Thursday: MLB Almost Taps J. Edgar Hoover as Commissioner

_(Each week, VICE Sports takes a look back at an important event from this week in sports history for Throwback Thursday, or #TBT for all you cool kids. _You can read previous installments here.)

J. Edgar Hoover's convergence with baseball began at an early age, and in the most literal fashion imaginable. The story goes that the longtime FBI director's famously crushed nose was the result of a baseball careening into it when he was a child.

So, yes, Hoover was never much of an athlete. But as one of the most impactful American figures of the 20th century, it was inevitable that his story would dovetail with what was then the national pastime. And 65 years ago this week, that overlap nearly altered the course of history.

It was 1951, and baseball was in crisis, with a number of owners dissatisfied with the leadership of Commissioner A.B. "Happy" Chandler. The Lords of the Game met in Miami in the second week of March. "The general view," wrote the New York Times, was that Chandler—a polarizing figure with owners for, among other things, his handling of the Mexican League defections of a number of players, including Danny Gardella—would not be able to pull in the sufficient number of votes to win another seven-year term. A stalemate was likely, the Times wrote, though it also suggested in its subheadline that "J. Edgar Hoover Seen Capable of Winning Commissioner's Job at Baseball Meetings."

Hoover had been the head of the FBI for almost 30 years, and this was not the first time he had been linked to baseball. Back in 1945, shortly after the death of longtime commissioner Kenesaw "Mountain" Landis, Detroit Tigers owner Walter Briggs floated Hoover's name as possible replacement down the line. The "graybeards" running baseball were "making a mess of things," Briggs declared in decrying a leadership vacuum, and then he cited former Postmaster General James Farley and Hoover as potential replacements with the proper gravitas to cure what he viewed as baseball's ills. (One of the key issues, Briggs said, was "the mistake of unlimited night ball," which "keeps the kids" from seeing games—an argument that still festers some seven decades later.)

The problem, Briggs said, was that Hoover—officially appointed as FBI director in 1924—was doing such an excellent job that it would be a "grave mistake" to remove him from the government. (By then, Hoover and his agency had been credited with the arrest of several famous gangsters; Hoover used that political capital to expand the domestic spying capability of bureau.) But, Briggs added, "I would be willing to stagger along with the punchy committee of three now in charge until Hoover becomes available from the government."

A week later, Hoover expressed his support for the "wartime morale value" of baseball, stating that "the game's representatives should be more aggressive in coming out openly and saying so." So it's not surprising his name resurfaced in 1951. In fact, the list of the 18 leading candidates to replace Chandler was a testament to baseball's overwhelming popularity: In addition to Hoover, it included multiple Supreme Court Justices, the governor of Ohio, the Secretary of Commerce, and famed sportswriter Grantland Rice.

On March 12, the 16 league owners decided on Chandler's fate by secret ballot. They voted nine to seven in favor of him, but that was three votes short of what was required for Chandler to remain. The commissioner's job was now wide open, but it would not go to Hoover, who reportedly turned down an offer.

(The specific details of how close Hoover got to actually taking the job are difficult to suss out. An inquiry by VICE Sports to the Baseball Hall of Fame's research department revealed "nothing in the files on this," which, in light of Hoover's predilection for keeping copious files on various public figures, is perhaps a touch ironic.)

Chandler stayed on the job until July of 1951. Given that he supported and presided over the debut of Jackie Robinson and created the first pension fund for major-league ballplayers, his legacy would grow over subsequent years. He eventually returned to his former post as governor of Kentucky. The owners delayed and debated his replacement for months; in the fall of 1951, the commissionership wound up going to National League president Ford Frick, a former reporter and press agent, after a 12-hour meeting that the _Chicago _Tribune__ characterized as an "all-time peak in dilly-dallying." Frick remained commissioner until 1965, and wound up presiding over the decision to encourage record-keepers to list Babe Ruth and Roger Maris's home run records separately following the 1961 season, apparently due to his friendship with Ruth. "(Frick) was a caretaker, not a czar," longtime baseball writer Jerome Holtzman wrote.

As for Hoover? He continued to be associated with the sport, so much so that he was rumored to have attended the "Shot Heard Round the World" game in October of 1951, in which Bobby Thomson hit a three-run homer to lead the New York Giants over the Brooklyn Dodgers. The story was that Hoover sat with Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason, and restaurateur Toots Shor—and that an overserved Gleason threw up in Sinatra's lap just before Thomson hit his home run. As author Joshua Prager discovered, Hoover was meeting with President Truman that day, but this didn't stop author Don DeLillo from featuring Hoover prominently in the fictionalized account of the game that opens his iconic novel Underworld.

In real life, Hoover further consolidated his power. Amid frustrations over limitations on his abilities to prosecute Communists and other dissenters, Hoover commenced the COINTELPRO program that was utilized to spy on the Black Panthers and Martin Luther King Jr., among others. He became one of the most controversial and divisive figures in modern American history, and it's fascinating to wonder what might have happened if he'd detoured into baseball instead. At the very least, the sport would have gotten a czar, not a caretaker.