He started in baseball at age nine, where he earned his nickname, "Pants", from base-running antics while wearing his father's workday overalls at games of the Dubuque (Iowa) Ninth Street Blues.

In 1938, as a scout for the Chicago Cubs, he was tasked with the unenviable job of obeying owner Phil Wrigley's orders to obtain Dizzy Dean's contract at any cost.

"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).

Air travel was still primitive, and the PCL teams had near major-league standing in the rapidly growing cities of the Western United States.

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."

At a meeting in September 1951 in San Francisco, California, Rowland led the charge of the club owners, who voted to serve an ultimatum on the majors.

"We're all living or dying together in this deal, and if the majors won't go along, to hell with 'em", said C. L. "Brick" Laws, owner of the Oakland team in a TIME Magazine story on the PCL.