William Shea
| William A. Shea | |
|---|---|
Shea in a 1959 photo.
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| Born |
June 21, 1907 New York City |
| Died | October 2, 1991 (aged 84) New York City |
| Occupation | Lawyer; co-founder of Continental League |
William Alfred "Bill" Shea (June 21, 1907 – October 2, 1991) was an American lawyer and a name partner of the prominent law firm of Shea & Gould. He is probably better known as the founder of the Continental League, which was instrumental in bringing National League baseball back to New York City with the New York Mets, and for being the namesake of the stadium where that team played for 45 years.
Shea began undergraduate work at New York University, where he was admitted to the Zeta Psi fraternity, and later graduated from Georgetown University and the Georgetown University Law Center. He was a member of the Georgetown Hoyas men's basketball team.
After graduating from law school, Shea worked for two state insurance bureaucracies before entering private practice in 1940. He accumulated political contacts through volunteer work on influential boards such as the Brooklyn Democratic Club and the Brooklyn Public Library. As one account put it: "Shea was neither a litigator nor a legal scholar. Rather, he was the sort of lawyer whom powerful men trusted with their secrets and whom they could rely upon as a go-between. ... [H]e earned a reputation as a man who could get things done."
In 1958, one year after the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants left for Los Angeles and San Francisco, respectively, Mayor Robert Wagner of the City of New York asked Shea to chair a committee to return the National League to New York. He first tried to bring an existing franchise to New York, but the Cincinnati Reds, Philadelphia Phillies, and Pittsburgh Pirates all refused his overtures. When requests for expansion were declined, Shea proposed a new league, the Continental League, and travelled to a farm outside Philadelphia to talk Branch Rickey out of retirement to help him. The formation of the Continental League was announced by Rickey in 1959. The Continental League would have been a third major league and would have begun play in 1961.
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