4. Baseball Feudalism and the Rise of the American League

The Players League was extinct by the end of January 1891; its financial backers (with the exception of the Buffalo group, which ended up with nowhere to go) had merged their holdings with franchises in either the National League or the American Association. The National League’s structure remained intact, but the Association undertook a thorough reorganization, abandoning Toledo, Syracuse, and Rochester; keeping Baltimore (where the Brooklyn Association club had moved during the previous season); and setting up new operations in Boston, Cincinnati, and Washington. A new National Agreement, concluded by the National League, the American Association, and the minor-level Western Association (soon renamed the Western League), created an overall governing body called the National Board, made up of the presidents of the three leagues, one of whom would be its chairman.

What many expected to be a peaceful arrangement that would return baseball to normality actually lasted about two weeks. The 1889 League and Association reserve lists and various stipulations on particular men were supposed to determine where the Players League defectors would be assigned for the coming season. The Pittsburgh Nationals, though, signed infielder Louis Bierbauer, slated for the Philadelphia Association team, and thereby prompted an outcry against the “pirates” in Pittsburgh (a pejorative that quickly caught on as the team’s new nickname). Meanwhile Harry Stovey, instead of joining the Boston Association club to which he was assigned, simply walked over to the office of Arthur Soden, president of the Boston National Leaguers, and signed to play in the senior circuit.

The newly constituted National Board ruled in favor of the League in both cases, whereupon the Association owners convened, fired president Allan W. Thurman (who’d voted against the Association’s claims on the two players), elected Louis Kramer of Cincinnati their new leader, and voted to notify Nick Young, president of the League and chairman of the National Board, that the freshly signed National Agreement was dissolved.

To the dismay of the Sporting News, Sporting Life, and numerous other informed observers, the League and Association were again at war. By terminating the National Agreement, announced the League, the Association “has annulled the approval of the contracts its clubs have made with players, and its clubs have released all their players from reservation.” The Association people denied the charges, but that didn’t keep the League from going after their best players. Again, as in the first League-Association war, the Union Association episode, and the recent Players League challenge, quality players found themselves courted with offers of more money.

More ravaged by the Brotherhood strife than the better-capitalized Nationals, the Association clubs were less equipped than they’d been in 1882 to bid for players. Pete Browning, Harry Stovey, Dave Foutz, Bob Caruthers, and Arlie Latham, among others originally assigned to Association clubs, jumped to the League. About the only big names corralled by the junior circuit were Mike Kelly, who signed as player-manager of the Association Boston Reds (and then was loaned to Cincinnati to strengthen that shaky franchise), and Dan Brouthers, who also decided to play in the Association at Boston.

It was another bad year for most people who’d put money into major-league baseball; twelve of the sixteen franchises ran deficits. Even Mike Kelly’s presence wasn’t enough to sustain the Association in Cincinnati. In August, Chris Von der Ahe, the St. Louis president who also owned about three-fourths of the Cincinnati franchise, turned over the club to Association headquarters, which moved it to Milwaukee. Kelly returned to Boston, moved back into the house given him by the local Association club before the season—and then blithely jumped to the local National Leaguers. Kelly’s defection killed negotiations then going on in Washington to end the war.

Although National League clubs weathered the latest storm better than their rivals, allegations of “hippodroming” against the New York Giants added to the League’s troubles. Jim Hart, who’d recently become president of the Chicago club upon Spalding’s nominal retirement, charged that Giants manager Jim Mutrie, on John Day’s orders, had refused to play Buck Ewing, Roger Connor, and pitching mainstay Amos Rusie in a season-ending five-game series at Boston. Day, declared Hart, had sought to ensure a pennant for Arthur Soden and his Boston associates, who owned substantial stock in the Giants as a consequence of the rescue mission Spalding had organized for the New York club during the Brotherhood conflict. Boston won all five games from the Giants and finished three and a half ahead of Chicago.

Hart didn’t mince words: “Were I under indictment for murder, with the circumstantial evidence against me as strong as it appears to be against the New York Club, I should expect to be hanged.” The Chicago president filed an official protest with League headquarters. In November, Nick Young and the League’s board of directors threw out Hart’s protest, finding plausible reasons in each instance why the three Giants stars hadn’t appeared in the Boston series.

The affair again pointed up the hazards in permitting part-ownerships in franchises by people who also controlled other franchises. However obnoxious that practice might appear to later generations, the baseball businessmen of the nineties weren’t prepared to do anything about it. As Hart no doubt was aware, Spalding, still the biggest stockholder in the Chicago club, owned even more Giants stock than Soden did! Interclub stock ownership—baseball’s version of the increasingly common “interlocking directorates” in the larger business world—would become an increasing aggravation in the National League.

Meanwhile the Boston Reds, managed by fielder’s glove inventor Arthur Irwin, won handily in the Association, even without the services of Mike Kelly. In the bitter atmosphere of the moment, a post-season series between pennant winners was out of the question, so disappointed Boston cranks had to console themselves with having three champions in three leagues—Players, National, and American Association—within two baseball seasons.

In the fall of 1891 the Association’s leaders put up a brave front, even going so far as to establish a franchise in Chicago to challenge Spalding’s hold on that rich baseball territory. But in doing so, Harold Seymour has written, “The owners were behaving like young boys whistling in the woods when dark approaches.” In fact the Association was too debt-ridden to carry on. Von der Ahe, facing the prospect of having to spread his money among several weak franchises to keep the circuit going, was receptive to overtures from the League offered by Cincinnati’s John T. Brush, Brooklyn’s Charles H. Byrne, and Cleveland’s Frank DeHaas Robison when they visited him in St. Louis.

Von der Ahe’s willingness to consolidate with the League doomed the Association. In December 1891, in Indianapolis, four Association clubs—St. Louis, Baltimore, Washington, and Louisville—joined the National League to form a single twelve-team major-league organization. The League agreed to compensate investors in the other Association franchises—Boston, Philadelphia, Columbus, Milwaukee, and the new one in Chicago—for a total of about $135,000. That debt, assumed equally by all twelve clubs in the enlarged League, would be paid off from a ten percent deduction from all gate receipts. The ten-year-old American Association of Base Ball Clubs then formally disbanded.

After sixteen seasons, the National League finally sanctioned Sunday baseball in those cities—Cincinnati, St. Louis, Chicago, and Louisville—where state laws or municipal ordinances didn’t prohibit it. Although the regular base admission remained at fifty cents, League clubs could charge as little as a quarter for uncovered “bleacher” seats and standing room. As for liquor sales on the grounds, that was again left up to local discretion.

On March 1, 1892, the National League owners and minor-league representatives formulated still another National Agreement. The major innovation in the new pact was provision for a player draft. No longer willing to recognize a minor club’s unqualified right to reserve players (and to thereby hold on to them until a major club paid its asking price), the League persuaded the minors’ representatives to accept classification into “A” and “B” leagues. In return for reservation rights, “A” clubs would be permitted to draft players in the off-season from “B” clubs for $500 each; National League clubs could draft “A” players for $1,000 each. The lower-classified minors would have no reservation rights at all.

If the National League moguls were arrogant in their dealings with the minors, they treated their players with something approaching contempt. With neither a rival major league to compete for their services nor a surviving union to represent their collective discontents, the players had no choice but to accept a reimposed salary limit—now set at $2,400.

In addition to arrogance and contemptuousness, the National League operators exhibited an extraordinary obtuseness. Apparently it never occurred to them to structure their twelve-club monopoly into eastern and western divisions of six teams each. Such an alignment would have held down travel costs, intensified intercity rivalries, and prolonged spectator interest by setting up an annual postseason series between the division winners to decide the League championship. Instead the League lumbered along season after season with its unwieldy top-to-bottom competitive format, which meant that season after season at least half the teams were hopelessly out of the pennant race by mid-July.

For 1892 the owners announced that the season would be split, with the winners of each half meeting in a championship series. They thereby invited allegations that whoever won the first half would deliberately slack off and let somebody else win the second half to ensure postseason play and extra money for the competitors. The Boston club, now familiarly known as the Beaneaters, ran up a 52–22 record over the first half; Cleveland’s Spiders, getting thirty-six wins from big Cy Young and twenty-eight from little George “Nig” Cuppy, took the second half with an almost identical record. In the playoff for the pennant, Boston reasserted itself, winning five games while Cleveland could manage only a twilight-necessitated tie.

Directing the Beaneaters to their second straight National League title was Frank Selee (pronounced See-lee), a mild-mannered New Englander, then thirty-three years old, destined to become the least-known highly successful manager in baseball history. Selee came to Boston in 1890 from Omaha, where he’d just won a Western Association pennant. A canny judge of talent and a clever strategist, he sat on the bench in street clothes, the first nonplayer actually to run his team from the bench once the game started.

At Boston, Selee combined the best youngsters assembled during the Brotherhood war with several returning Players Leaguers to make up what was possibly the best baseball team up to that time; anyway, their 102 victories in 1892 were the most ever recorded. Mike Kelly, worn down by many years of hard play and high life, caught only about half the time and batted a pathetic .189 in his next-to-last major-league season. (Two years later the onetime “King of the Diamond” would die at thirty-six.) But Selee got strong infield play from Tommy Tucker at first base, Billy Nash at third, and Herman Long at shortstop. He also counted on timely hitting from outfielders Bobby Lowe, Hugh Duffy, and Tommy McCarthy. Jack Stivetts and Charles “Kid” Nichols, two young right-handers, pitched thirty-five wins apiece.

Despite reductions in players’ salaries (sometimes exceeding fifty percent) before the 1892 season started and another round of cuts in midseason, all the National League clubs lost money, with the exception of Boston and Brooklyn. Under Monte Ward’s leadership, the Trolley Dodgers (so called because several pedestrians had recently been run down by trolleys in Brooklyn) finished third. The consensus among the club owners was that the quickest way to boost attendance would be to give customers more batting, base-running, and scoring. The aggregate League batting average in 1892 had been only .245, down ten points from the previous season.

In the off-season the League adopted possibly the most significant changes in baseball’s rules since the Knickerbocker clubmen began playing their new game in the mid-1840s. In fact, “modern” baseball ought to be dated not from the beginning of the twentieth century, as popular lore conveniently assumes, but from the season of 1893. Under the new rules, the pitching distance was lengthened from fifty feet to sixty feet, six inches; the rectangular pitcher’s box was eliminated; and, as he delivered the ball to the batter, the pitcher was required to keep his back foot anchored to a twelve-by-four-inch rubber slab (enlarged to twenty-four by six inches in 1895).

The results were everything the rule-makers could have desired. The 1893 season brought the sharpest increase in batting figures in the sport’s history: a thirty-five-point rise in the overall National League average and almost a thousand more runs. While every pitcher experienced some trouble throwing from ten and a half feet farther out, younger men such as Cy Young, Kid Nichols, and Amos Rusie adjusted fairly easily. They gave up more hits and runs but continued to win lots of games.

For others, though, the extra ten feet on their pitches made for badly diminished skills. As examples, Boston’s Jack Stivetts dropped from thirty-five wins in 1892 to nineteen in 1893, Cleveland’s Nig Cuppy from twenty-eight to seventeen, Brooklyn’s George Haddock from twenty-nine to eight, Philadelphia’s Gus Weyhing from thirty-two to twenty-three (and to sixteen in 1894), and Chicago’s Bill Hutchinson from thirty-seven to sixteen (and fourteen in 1894). Although earned run averages weren’t figured in that period, historical statisticians have determined that the e.r.a. for the League as a whole jumped from 3.28 in 1892 to 4.66 in 1893, then soared to 5.32 the next year, the highest ever computed.

The new pitching rules provided only that there would be a rubber slab, not that the slab would be set in a pile of dirt to give the pitcher a little compensating leverage as he threw from the greater distance. Although evidence is scanty, what seems to have happened is that, as early as the 1893 season, pitchers and groundskeepers in various places got together to devise the wholly extralegal pitcher’s mound—a critical element in the craft of the “moundsman” ever since.

Mound or no mound, pitchers remained at a disadvantage for the rest of the decade. Strangely, the biggest batting surge came not in 1893 but in the second year after the pitching rules were changed. For 1894 the entire League averaged .309; the third-place Philadelphia Phillies, with such sluggers as Sam Thompson and Ed Delahanty, compiled a majestic .349 team mark. Baltimore (.343) and six other clubs topped .300.

Hugh Duffy’s .438 was the highest individual average ever made except for Tip O’Neill’s in 1887, when bases on balls had counted as hits. Besides Duffy, three other players (Thompson, Delahanty, and Tommy Turner, all Phillies) topped .400. In a 132-game season, Philadelphia’s fleet little Billy Hamilton (besides batting .399) scored nearly two hundred runs; five teams scored at least a thousand times that year.

Inasmuch as nobody claimed the ball had changed, nothing really explains why batters should have clouted more lustily in 1894 than in the previous season. (A change in scoring rules that no longer assigned a time at bat for a sacrifice bunt made some difference, but hardly enough to account for the 1893–1894 batting anomaly.) Clout lustily they did, and play lustily as well.

The general abuse of umpires got worse in the 1890s. In 1893 Selee’s Boston club, maybe reflecting his own low-keyed civility, won a third straight pennant with a minimum of umpire-baiting. Throughout the League, though, many players had come to assume that intimidating the arbiters (or at least trying to) was a useful, even necessary tactic—an essential part of the professional game. Inasmuch as the individual club owners showed little interest in curbing their players and League president Young (a naturally timid soul to begin with) knew his job depended on not antagonizing the owners, the League’s umpires could do little but try to endure.

In the nineties, the highest salary any of them would ever receive was $2,100—good money, but hardly adequate compensation for what they had to put up with. When he quit the League umpiring staff in midseason 1895, onetime Giants pitching star Tim Keefe described baseball as having become “absolutely disagreeable. It is the fashion now for every player to froth at the mouth and emit shrieks of anguish whenever a decision is given which is adverse to the interests of the club.”

The decade was probably the roughest, toughest, generally most disorderly time in the history of the National League. Many years later, when baseball men got together to reminisce about the old days, their talk almost invariably centered on the exploits of the Baltimore Orioles, who supplanted Boston as League champions in 1894–1896. The Orioles weren’t the best baseball team ever—they probably weren’t even the best team in the nineteenth century—but they gained an enduring reputation as the rowdiest assortment of ballplayers ever brought together on one club. They were also one of the most successful.

During ten years in the American Association, Baltimore’s entries had never done better than two third-places. In 1892, in the consolidated twelve-member National League, the Orioles finished eight and one-half games behind the eleventh-place club. In the middle of that season, though, Ned Hanlon came over from Pittsburgh to manage the team.

After buying a big block of Orioles stock and getting himself elected club president, Hanlon enjoyed a free hand. He acquired big Dan Brouthers from Brooklyn to play first base, Hugh Jennings from Louisville for shortstop, Joe Kelley from Pittsburgh and Walter “Steve” Brodie from St. Louis for left and center field, respectively, and Willie Keeler from New York for the other outfield position. Combining those newcomers with holdovers Wilbert Robinson, a sturdy veteran catcher, John “Sadie” McMahon, a beer-loving but talented pitcher, and John McGraw, an erratic, hot-tempered little third baseman, Hanlon had the makings of a champion.

Drilled and grilled in “baseball as she is played” (in Hanlon’s phrase), the Orioles climbed to eighth place in 1893 and then, the next year, won Baltimore’s first pennant in any league. In doing so they antagonized opposing players, cranks, writers, and most of all umpires with their truculent, swaggering style. The respected Boston writer Tim Murnane protested that the Orioles, exhibiting a readiness “to maim a fellow for life” in their ruthless pursuit of the pennant, were “playing the dirtiest ball ever seen in this country.” Their everyday tactics, as cataloged by Murnane, included plowing into basemen, holding and bumping base runners, interfering with the catcher on pop fouls, and (in catcher Robinson’s case) throwing equipment in front of opponents trying to score.

That no-holds-barred baseball, together with what people around the League complained was a systematic effort to terrorize and intimidate the umpires, had much to do with the Orioles’ success—or so they themselves believed. Keeping the umpires alert with “artful kicking,” claimed John McGraw, could earn his club as many as fifty extra runs a season. But the Orioles were also good ballplayers—smart, mostly fast, resourceful, and determined. “We talked, lived and dreamed baseball,” said McGraw many years later. Although Selee’s Bostons and other teams had earlier used the hit-and-run play, the Orioles developed that particular maneuver into a fine art, especially as executed by McGraw, a leadoff man with unequaled ability to coax walks or get hit by a pitch, and Keeler, a 5-4 left-handed batter who uncannily “hit ’em where they ain’t.” The Orioles’ hit-and-run became the most effective weapon in the game.

Of the Orioles’ three straight pennants, the toughest was the first—a gruelling struggle with the Giants, now led by Monte Ward, and Selee’s Boston champions. The city of Baltimore, long denied a winner, celebrated robustly and feted, fed, and fawned over Hanlon and his men. After a year without any kind of postseason competition, William H. Temple, a wealthy Pittsburgher, came forward with a proposal for a series between the first- and second-place finishers, the winner to receive most of the gate receipts as well as a big silver loving cup donated by Temple.

It was still a poor substitute for the closely followed World’s Championship meetings between League and Association winners in the mid-eighties, but the League was willing to give its official sanction to a seven-game series between Baltimore and New York. Demanding a guarantee of half of the receipts, the Orioles almost didn’t take the field. When they did they paired off with Giants players in informal fifty-fifty splits, and played listlessly and carelessly. Ward’s club swept four straight games, with Amos Rusie and Jouett Meekin, who’d each won thirty-six games that season, throttling the heavy-hitting Orioles.

In 1895 and 1896 the Orioles had an easier time, beating out the Cleveland Spiders in both seasons. Their casual approach to Temple Cup competition continued in 1895, when they were dispatched by Cy Young and his mates in five games in a series marked by extraordinarily bad behavior (even for the nineties) by both Cleveland and Baltimore cranks. After the Orioles were showered with vegetables, beer bottles, seat cushions, and a variety of other objects during three games at the Cleveland park, hoodlums in Baltimore attacked the Spiders’ horse-drawn bus with rocks, bricks, and dirt clods. As soon as the fifth and final game ended in Baltimore, the Spiders hurriedly left town with their $580 shares out of the Cup receipts.

Although tales of the rough-and-rowdy “old Orioles” became a staple of baseball folklore, the Cleveland Spiders may actually have been a more ferocious lot. Oliver “Patsy” Tebeau, Cleveland’s first baseman-manager, was a more combative leader than Ned Hanlon, who under League rules couldn’t leave the bench in his street clothes. Cy Young, a tough but usually even-tempered competitor, concentrated on his mound chores and left the nonathletic part of the fray to his teammates, but they hardly needed Young’s help.

One day in 1896 in Louisville, for example, the Spiders created such a ruckus that the local club president had the whole starting nine arrested and hauled into court. Found guilty of disturbing the peace, Tebeau, outfielders Jimmy McAleer and Jesse Burkett, and shortstop Ed McKean paid fines ranging from $50 to $100 each. The reputation of the Spiders’ home crowds—“Cleveland hoodlums,” Cap Anson called them—matched that of the ball club.

Yet for all that, the Cleveland National League club never did better than two second-place finishes and one Temple Cup triumph. In 1896 Baltimore finally proved its mettle in postseason play by sweeping the Spiders four straight games behind right-handers Bill Hoffer and Joe Corbett (the latter the younger brother of heavyweight boxing champion Gentleman Jim Corbett). Turnouts in both cities were so low that the Orioles came away with only $200 apiece, the losers $117.

That gate was symptomatic of the League monopoly’s persistent financial woes; only in 1894 did a majority of its members (nine, to be exact) show a profit. Attendance sagged the next year under generally bad economic conditions; the crowds never reappeared in the same numbers. The Spanish-American War, which began coincidentally with the 1898 baseball season and was over by midsummer, provided a convenient if unconvincing explanation for the fact that, even with economic recovery, only five clubs could meet their expenses that year.

Much of the League’s trouble had to do with the absence of a winning team in New York City after 1894. Even at that early date, it should have been apparent that without a successful operation in baseball’s biggest market and the nation’s communications center, everybody else would find it hard to make profits. Early in 1895 thirty-four-year-old Andrew Freedman, a wealthy real-estate speculator and bondsman who was intimately involved with the Tammany Hall political organization, bought John Day’s controlling interest in the Giants for $48,000. A lifelong bachelor who centered his attentions on his business affairs, Freedman generated controversy almost from the beginning of his career as a club owner, while the Giants became one of the League’s consistent losers.

Although criticism of Freedman sometimes carried anti-Semitic overtones, he was actually just about everything his growing number of enemies around the League charged. Overbearing, egotistical, short-tempered, capricious, he tolerated no resistance to his authority as club president. Monte Ward had the good sense to quit and return to his legal studies at Columbia, so that he was spared Freedman’s incessant meddling in on-the-field matters. After dismissing player-manager George Davis a third of the way into the 1895 season, Freedman hired and fired at a dizzying pace: fifteen more managerial changes up to 1902, including the venerable Cap Anson, who lasted only twenty-two games in 1898.

Freedman’s exploits also included barring unfriendly sportswriters from the ballpark and using his influence to have umpire John Heydler fired from the League staff. Amos Rusie, arguably the best pitcher in baseball, sat out the entire 1896 season in a $200 salary dispute with the Giants’ president. In July 1898 Freedman stormed onto the field to demand the ejection of Baltimore’s Bill “Ducky” Holmes after Holmes, an ex-Giant, yelled to a heckling spectator, “Well, I’m glad I’m not working for a sheeny anymore.” When umpire Tom Lynch wouldn’t go along, Freedman had Giants manager Bill Joyce take his team off the field, whereupon Lynch declared a forfeit to Baltimore.

The difference between Freedman and the rest of the National League “magnates” (as they liked to see themselves called in the press) was only a matter of degree. Each club owner operated his ball club like a medieval fiefdom. If the owners did little to inhibit their players’ unruly behavior, they also did little to improve their circumstances. Although team captains received $500–$600 extra and outstanding players frequently got something under the table, the official $2,400 salary limit remained in force. The owners wouldn’t try to curb spectator rowdiness, wouldn’t do anything to improve umpiring, wouldn’t build dressing rooms for visiting teams, and of course wouldn’t consider modifying the reserve clause.

A few players eventually got fed up and went on to other things. Early in the 1892 season, when Baltimore cut the salary of Charlie Buffinton, already the victor in 230 major-league games at the age of thirty, the pitcher went home to Fall River, Massachusetts, and never appeared again in Organized Baseball. John Montgomery Ward, one of the National League’s highest-paid performers, gave up playing at the age of thirty-four in the afterglow of his New York Giants sweep of Baltimore in the first Temple Cup games. Winner of ninety-three games in six seasons (1896–1901) with the Boston Beaneaters, Welsh-born Ted Lewis retired at twenty-nine to begin a long career as an educator, most notably as president of the University of New Hampshire. And Bill Lange, a husky outfielder who averaged .330 in seven seasons with Chicago, was only twenty-eight when, in 1899, he married into a wealthy family in his native San Francisco and put aside baseball for business and civic affairs. Lange was as good a center fielder as the game had ever seen, according to Clark Griffith, Lange’s teammate at Chicago in the early part of Griffith’s own career of sixty-odd years in baseball.

Yet whatever its drawbacks, a career in professional baseball held an irresistible allure for millions of young males throughout the United States. Many of those aspiring millions played the game within what, by the 1890s, had become a vast infrastructure below (or outside) Organized Baseball. Neighborhood “sandlot” clubs, with players ranging anywhere from fifteen to fifty years old, competed once or twice a week in cities everywhere. The urban sandlotters had their counterparts in a multitude of village and rural aggregations, commonly called “town teams.” At the end of each academic year, resort hotels operating from upstate New York to Maine sponsored teams stocked mainly by Ivy League college players, nominally employed as waiters and busboys but expected to spend most of their time on the ballfield.

In baseball at those levels, the line between professional and amateur was always indistinct. “Semipro” became a generic designation for virtually any adult, noncollegiate competition unaffiliated with Organized Baseball. That included everything from the summer resort teams, to loosely formed sandlot and town clubs, to the considerably organized competition sponsored by urban manufacturers and insurance and retail concerns, Appalachian and western mining companies, New England and southeastern textile mills, and southern lumber companies. Such employee baseball teams were some of the earliest manifestations of what, decades later, would be called “welfare capitalism.”

Devotees of simon-pure amateurism focused their criticism on college athletes hired to play summer baseball for hotels and other businesses; otherwise nobody much cared if boys and men worked at something else full-time and picked up a few dollars extra playing on weekends. John McGraw, for example, technically became a professional at about fifteen, when he collected five dollars for pitching (and winning) a game for East Homer, New York. Hugh Jennings, McGraw’s future teammate and bosom pal at Baltimore, was even younger when he discovered that on Sundays, when he wasn’t laboring in the coal mines at Pittston, Pennsylvania, he could sell his baseball skills.

The dream of a becoming a big-leaguer was most compelling for working-class youths such as McGraw and Jennings, who stood to make four or five times as much in a half-year of ballplaying as in a full year of regular work. The eighties, and even more so the nineties, brought a flood of Irish-American and German-American players, young men who came largely from northeastern and midwestern cities and mining and mill towns, but also frequently from villages such as Truxton, New York, where McGraw grew up, or River Point, Rhode Island, which produced Boston’s hard-hitting Hugh Duffy. (Before the twentieth century, only a few Californians and Southerners reached the major-league level.)

If baseball at that level, in the era of the National League’s monopoly, wasn’t profitable most of the time for most franchises, the sport nonetheless remained very near the center of life in the twelve League cities. Of course, that was particularly the case when the local favorites were battling for a pennant. On September 22, 23, and 25, 1897, the biggest crowds in Baltimore’s National League history—some fifty-one thousand in all—saw their adored Orioles lose three times to Boston and miss a chance for a fourth straight title. It was small consolation for the Baltimore faithful that Ned Hanlon’s club won four of five sloppily played games from the Beaneaters in the Temple Cup series. Always seen by both players and cranks as an anticlimax to the pennant race, and thus never much of a gate attraction, Temple Cup competition received its coup de grâce from the club presidents when they met in Philadelphia later that autumn.

After that the Baltimore club’s fortunes waned, even as the legend of the “old Orioles” began to grow. In 1898 Baltimore finished a full six games behind Boston, as Frank Selee became the second man in baseball history (after Cap Anson) to direct five pennant winners. Matching their 102 wins of 1892, the Beaneaters fielded an everyday lineup without weaknesses. The outfield of Charles “Chick” Stahl, Billy Hamilton, and Hugh Duffy was the best in baseball, as was the infield of Brown University’s Fred Tenney at first, Bobby Lowe at second, Herman Long at shortstop, and the brilliant Jimmy Collins at third. The team had the best catcher since Buck Ewing, according to some baseball seers, in Marty Bergen—a tragically troubled young man who, early in 1900, would take his own life after murdering his wife and two children. In 1898 Selee used an unprecedented four-man pitching rotation, headed by Kid Nichols with twenty-nine wins and including Ted Lewis (twenty-six), Vic Willis (twenty-four), and Bill Klobedanz (nineteen).

The 1899 season proved the last for the League in its twelve-club incarnation, and also brought the full ripening (or rottening) of syndicate baseball. No longer able to overcome Boston with the club he managed in Baltimore, Ned Hanlon, together with Orioles vice president Harry Von der Horst, bought a half-interest in the Brooklyn franchise. At the same time, Frederick A. Abell and Charles Ebbets, principal stockholders at Brooklyn, bought half of the Orioles.

Now president and manager at Brooklyn while he retained the presidency of the Baltimore club, Hanlon loaded his Brooklyn roster with Joe Kelley, Hugh Jennings, pitcher Jim Hughes, two-time batting titlist Willie Keeler, and other Baltimore mainstays. When John McGraw and Wilbert Robinson refused to leave Baltimore, Hanlon named the twenty-six-year-old McGraw to manage the Oriole remnants, with Robinson to assist him.

Meanwhile the brothers Frank and Stanley Robison, owners of the Cleveland franchise, also bought a controlling interest in the St. Louis Browns from Chris Von der Ahe, whose life had taken a succession of bad turns. The onetime kingpin of the American Association had watched his franchise deteriorate steadily in the absence of Charles Comiskey, who joined the Cincinnati Reds following the Brotherhood war. Trying everything to draw customers, Von der Ahe staged bicycle races, installed a merry-go-round, and built an artificial lake and shoot-the-chute at Sportsman’s Park—all to no avail. Two divorces, a big fire at the ballpark, bad real-estate investments, and other reverses finally forced “der Boss President” to sell his beloved “Prowns.”

The Robisons, convinced that St. Louis was rich territory, proceeded to strip the Cleveland club of manager Patsy Tebeau, the great Cy Young, batting star Jesse Burkett, and everybody else they thought might strengthen their new property. It was syndicate ball with a vengeance, and the 1899 Cleveland Spiders were probably the worst team to start and finish a major-league season. Certainly their record of 20–134 gave them the worst winning percentage for a full schedule. About a third of the way into the season, with hardly anybody showing up for the Spiders’ games, the Robisons simply locked the Cleveland ballpark and transferred remaining home dates to other League cities. Thus the previously proud and pugnacious Spiders became the Orphans or Wanderers, as the writers now dubbed them.

In Baltimore, John McGraw’s presence made for a different outcome. McGraw was a small man of limited athletic ability who by grit, guile, and bellicosity had made himself into one of the National League’s top performers. In 1899 he not only played the best ball of his career, batting .391, scoring 140 runs, and, one way or another, reaching base about half the time; he also managed an assortment of leftovers and pickups to a strong fourth-place finish. The Orioles might have done even better if McGraw hadn’t been lost to the club for three weeks late in the season because of his wife’s death. McGraw’s success with the 1899 Orioles established his reputation as the smartest young manager in the business.

As they were favored to do, the players Hanlon had assembled brought Brooklyn its first National League championship, by a comfortable eight games over Selee’s Boston club. St. Louis, made up mostly of former Cleveland players, could do no better than fifth place. Yet the Brooklyn champions’ home attendance—about 270,000—was less than what the tenth-place 1898 team had drawn. Philadelphia and Chicago, finishing third and eighth, respectively, cleared substantial profits and Brooklyn made a small one; otherwise it was another year of general losses in the National League.

That winter the baseball press was full of rumors about franchise reductions. The question seemed to be not whether the League would cut back, but how many cities would be dropped—and when. It wasn’t until early March 1900, little more than a month before the new season started, that the League owners voted officially to operate with only eight franchises. Baltimore, Washington, Louisville, and Cleveland were left out.

John McGraw, resigned to the loss of Baltimore’s franchise and at first unwilling to play anywhere else, threw himself into an abortive effort to revive the American Association. Others involved in the project included Cap Anson, Alfred H. Spink of the Sporting News, and Francis C. Richter, editor of Sporting Life. Formally organized in Chicago, the new Association sought financial backing in Boston, Milwaukee, Louisville, Providence, Detroit, and Philadelphia, besides Chicago and Baltimore. Philadelphia’s participation was crucial; in mid-February, when the local backers in that city ran into trouble securing playing grounds, the whole enterprise fell apart.

Sold to St. Louis for $15,000 (along with Wilbert Robinson and infielder Billy Keister), McGraw remained in Baltimore until May, when he signed with the Robison brothers for $10,000, the biggest amount any player had ever been paid. The contracts both he and Wilbert Robinson signed, moreover, specifically omitted the reserve clause, so that both would become free agents at season’s end.

Although he batted .344 over the remainder of the schedule, McGraw’s presence at St. Louis did nothing to pump life into a ball club with lots of talent but little inspiration or direction from Patsy Tebeau, now affected by a mysterious lassitude on and off the field. The Cardinals, as local writers had started calling them (because of their red-trimmed uniforms), finished in sixth place. Brooklyn, again sparked by former Orioles and now including Joe “Iron Man” McGinnity, McGraw’s ace at Baltimore the previous year, had little difficulty repeating as champions.

The eight-team National League was a trimmer organization with fewer also-rans, but it still suffered from the inability of the Chicago and New York franchises to field contenders. The Chicago club (now called the Cubs, after its youthful players) had done no better than fourth place since 1891; the Giants, having finished ahead of only the doomed Washington and Cleveland clubs in 1899, settled on the bottom in 1900. The Polo Grounds—as the Players League park under Coogan’s Bluff was renamed after the Giants occupied it in 1891—could accommodate about eighteen thousand people, more than any baseball facility in the country, but in the Freedman regime it had rarely been half-filled.

The National League’s problems, as frequently rehashed in the baseball press, stemmed from inadequate capitalization for several of its clubs, lordly owners who wouldn’t stand for a stronger central administration, and a long-standing willingness to tolerate rowdy players and bad umpires. Maybe a rival major league was needed. All of that accorded closely with the views of Byron Bancroft Johnson, the thirty-six-year-old president of the minor circuit that had operated in middle-sized midwestern cities as the Western League until 1900, when it took the name American League.

Ban Johnson was a Cincinnati native who’d attended Marietta College and the University of Cincinnati law school (although he received a degree from neither), before serving about ten years on the staff of the Cincinnati Commercial-Gazette, becoming its sports editor. Among the close baseball acquaintances he made was player-manager Charles Comiskey of the Cincinnati Reds. While professional baseball at all levels went through sharp ups and downs in the 1890s, under Johnson’s presidency the Western League not only held together but prospered—mainly, it was agreed, because Johnson ran things with authority and resolution, paying his umpires well and wielding tough discipline over the players. Jowly and rotund but possessed of seemingly inexhaustible energy, Johnson was brilliant in his way. If inclined to be high-handed and bombastic, he also proved a shrewd judge of men and decisive moments.

Ban Johnson’s horizons extended far beyond the Western League; once the Nationals dropped four franchises, he began to move. At that juncture his chief lieutenant was Comiskey, who’d given up playing in 1894, bought the Sioux City Western League team, and moved it to St. Paul. At Johnson’s behest, Comiskey now moved from St. Paul into Chicago’s South Side, where he revived the old nickname White Stockings for his team. In 1900, renamed the American League, Johnson’s organization still operated as a minor league in conformance with the National Agreement; but that winter, when the Nationals refused to accord the American League equal status, Johnson announced that his organization would no longer abide by the pact.

In the meantime many minor-league players and a number of prominent big-leaguers had formed the Ball Players Protective Association. Their main demand, an increase in the salary ceiling from $2,400 to $3,000, got nowhere with the National League owners. Clark Griffith, an outstanding pitcher for the Chicago National League club and the driving force behind the Protective Association, secured pledges from its members not to sign National League contracts without the Protective Association’s approval.

Griffith himself then signed to manage and pitch for Comiskey’s Chicago White Stockings and, in close consultation with Johnson, began urging players to come over to the new league. John McGraw, having turned down a chance to manage at Cincinnati, also joined with Johnson, in exchange for the chance to return to Baltimore as a manager and part-owner in the American League. And Connie Mack, manager of the Western-American League’s Milwaukee club the past four years, sold his stock there and carried the new circuit’s banner into Philadelphia.

Another man close to Johnson was Charles Somers, a Lake Erie millionaire who loaned money to lift various franchises off the ground and was majority stockholder in the Cleveland club. Washington was the remaining territory abandoned by the Nationals and now occupied by the American League; the AL’s three other charter members would be Boston, Detroit, and Milwaukee. Thus in its first season as a self-proclaimed major league, the AL would go head-to-head with the Nationals only in Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago.

From November to March, Griffith, Mack, and McGraw rode the trains across the country, selling the American League to players. Johnson declared that nobody in his league would sign any player currently under contract to another club, which of course encouraged National Leaguers to delay signing their 1901 contracts until they’d met with Johnson’s agents. In all, the American Leaguers signed 111 men who’d played in the National League at one time or another.

The catches included some of baseball’s biggest stars. The Boston American Leaguers, for example, grabbed Cy Young from St. Louis and, from the rival Beaneaters, Chick Stahl, Ted Lewis, and Jimmy Collins, the last becoming player-manager of the AL entry. In Chicago, Griffith signed outfielder Fielder Jones of the 1899–1900 Brooklyn pennant winners, who also lost Joe McGinnity to John McGraw’s entreaties from Baltimore. Hugh Duffy became player-manager at Milwaukee. Johnson even went after the Nationals’ umpires, offering them a few hundred additional dollars and recruiting veterans Tom Connally, Tim Hurst, and Jack Sheridan, half the NL’s staff.

Apart from Cy Young, the AL’s biggest prize was Napoleon Lajoie, the Philadelphia Phillies’ brilliant second baseman, who went over to Connie Mack’s new Philadelphia Athletics. A Woonsocket, Rhode Island, native of French-Canadian ancestry, Lajoie was twenty-five years old at the end of the 1900 season. Since entering the National League in 1896, he’d hit for an accumulative .362 average. At 6-1 and nearly two hundred pounds, Lajoie was a far-ranging, graceful fielder, one of the finest all-around players the game had seen. Joining Lajoie in deserting the Phillies for the Athletics were Charles “Chick” Fraser and Bill Bernhard, two first-rate pitchers.

It didn’t take a lot of money above the National League’s salary limit to lure players into the new league; Lajoie signed for about $3,500, Cy Young for the same amount. As he bid good-bye to St. Louis and the National League, Young told Frank Robison, “Your treatment of your players has been so inconsiderate that no self-respecting man would want to work for you if he could do anything else in the world.”

The American League’s first major-league season was generally successful. A good pennant race kept attendance up in most ballparks, and at the end a total of 1,683,584 people had paid to see AL games, only about 236,000 fewer than National League teams drew. Comiskey’s Chicago club, with manager Griffith pitching twenty-four wins, overcame Boston and Cy Young, who won thirty-three times. Lajoie won the batting title with a majestic .422, highest for the twentieth century in the American League, and also hit an extraordinary fourteen home runs and scored 145 times.

American League batting averages and scoring were higher than in the National League. Although the Americans had also installed the new seventeen-inch-wide, five-sided home plate adopted by the Nationals following the 1900 season, Johnson’s circuit didn’t go along with the Nationals’ new foul-strike rule, and wouldn’t until 1903. Batters had always been able to foul off an unlimited number of balls without accumulating strikes, as long as they actually swung at the ball (foul bunts were ruled strikes in 1894). Under the NL’s new rule, the first two foul balls counted as strikes. Lajoie and other American Leaguers could still foul off pitch after pitch without penalty.

But the level of competition remained tough in the older league. The Pittsburgh Pirates—benefiting from the addition of several quality players who’d been at Louisville before the NL dropped that franchise and Louisville owner Barney Dreyfuss bought the Pirates—gained the “city of smoke” its first major-league championship. John “Honus” Wagner, twenty-seven in 1901, a broad-shouldered, bow-legged shortstop with huge hands and a powerful throwing arm, was the Pirates’ top player—and maybe the biggest prize that got away from the American League. The NL’s batting leader in 1900, Wagner hit .353 in 1901 but still trailed St. Louis’s Jesse Burkett, Philadelphia’s Ed Delahanty, and Brooklyn’s Willie Keeler.

That winter the National League owners, unwilling to reelect Nick Young as league president and unable to agree on a successor, also wrangled protractedly over Andrew Freedman’s self-serving plan for making the National League in effect a holding company. Freedman proposed that the NL reorganize itself as the National Baseball Trust and then issue common stock in its different franchises; New York would get thirty percent of the stock, more than twice as much as any other club. With his own stock plurality and the twelve percent to be awarded to Cincinnati owner John T. Brush, Freedman’s close ally, the New Yorker hoped to dominate the whole league. Thanks mainly to A. G. Spalding’s impassioned opposition, Freedman’s scheme was eventually voted down, but the National League lacked a president at the start of the 1902 season.

While the National Leaguers fought among themselves, Ban Johnson and associates worked in concert to further their American League enterprise. Milwaukee, the weakest link in the new league, lost its franchise to St. Louis, where owner Robert Lee Hedges coaxed Jesse Burkett and shortstop Bobby Wallace to desert that city’s National League club. At Baltimore, John McGraw talked his old Oriole teammate Joe Kelley into jumping from Brooklyn. Washington landed its first outstanding National Leaguer when the Philadelphia Phillies’ Ed Delahanty, one of the top hitters in the National League for a decade, signed to play in the nation’s capital.

After the season began, amid much confusion, Connie Mack finally persuaded George Edward “Rube” Waddell, a big fastballing left-hander who’d pitched for Pittsburgh and Chicago in 1901, then jumped to Los Angeles in the “outlaw” California League, to play for him in Philadelphia. Joining the Athletics in June, the fun-loving, beer-guzzling, hugely talented Waddell won twenty-three games, struck out 210 batters, and was the main reason Mack’s team finished in first place.

Waddell had come to Philadelphia just in time. Five days into the season, during Baltimore’s home opener against the Athletics, an officer of the Pennsylvania supreme court served injunctions on Napoleon Lajoie, Chick Fraser, and Bill Bernhard, permanently forbidding them to play for any Philadelphia baseball club except the Phillies. The outcome of a suit brought by the Phillies against the Athletics a year earlier, the injunctions might have proved a crippling blow to the American League if not for Ban Johnson’s ingenuity.

Acting with the kind of authority no National League president had ever possessed, Johnson simply reassigned the contracts of the three players to Cleveland. Fraser decided to jump back to the Phillies, but Lajoie and Bernhard helped transform a weak Cleveland team into a strong fourth-place finisher. Whenever Cleveland had playing dates in Philadelphia, however, Lajoie and Bernhard, legally barred from the Athletics’ grounds, spent their time on the beaches at Atlantic City.

Johnson might finesse the Philadelphia Phillies and the Pennsylvania supreme court, but there was no handling John McGraw—through finesse or any other means. Drawn together by burning ambition and mutual need, McGraw and Johnson were always improbable collaborators in the American League venture. During the 1901 season a number of disruptive on-the-field incidents involving the Baltimore manager and his players had corroded relations with the American League’s president.

McGraw insisted on using the same bullying tactics on Johnson’s umpires that he had in the National League; Johnson was determined to have disciplined behavior from players and managers. McGraw thought he was being singled out for fines and suspensions; Johnson became convinced that McGraw was an unregenerate National Leaguer of the old-time “anarchistic” school. Moreover, it was generally understood that for 1903 Johnson would transfer the Baltimore franchise to New York City, where the American League would have to establish itself to remain viable. McGraw became convinced (no doubt correctly) that Johnson intended to close him out of the New York operation altogether.

In June 1902, McGraw and Andrew Freedman hatched a plot that would not only bring McGraw to New York to manage the somnolent Giants, but that would sabotage the American League as well. McGraw got the Baltimore directors to release him from his contract in exchange for turning back his $6,500 worth of stock; through a succession of complicated transfers, Freedman obtained that stock and other holdings, enough to gain control of the Baltimore franchise.

On July 8 McGraw signed a four-year contract to manage the Giants, at a record salary of $11,000 per year. The American League, he told the New York press, was controlled by “Czar Johnson” and his Chicago-Philadelphia-Boston combine. The Baltimore operation hadn’t made a penny in the American League, and “the big white elephant” in Philadelphia was no better.

Freedman now directed the releases of ace pitcher Joe McGinnity and four other Baltimore players, all of whom went immediately to New York to sign Giants contracts. Joe Kelley, also released on Freedman’s order, signed to manage the Cincinnati Reds and brought along Orioles outfielder Cy Seymour. Thus Freedman assisted his ally, Cincinnati owner John T. Brush, who in turn was preparing to buy control of the New York franchise from Freedman.

Facing his worst trouble so far, Ban Johnson again proved equal to the test: He declared the Baltimore franchise vacant and took control in the name of the American League. Left with only five players, the Orioles forfeited one game, then received enough men—reassigned by Johnson from other teams—to resume play and complete the season, albeit in last place. Johnson never forgave McGraw, nor did McGraw ever express any regrets about jumping the American League. “If [Johnson] planned to ditch me,” McGraw said many years later, “I ditched him first.” The two never spoke again.

Like the advent of the American and Union associations and the Players League, the rise of the American League disrupted a tightly restrained salary structure and cost everybody a lot of money. Not only had National Leaguers jumped to the new circuit at healthy increases, but a number of players had also jumped back to the NL for still bigger salaries. The campaign to persuade some players to jump and others not to jump promised to heat up again in the winter of 1902–1903.

By then just about all parties concerned were ready to talk peace, with the notable exception of John T. Brush, who hated Johnson from Western League days (when Brush had owned the Indianapolis franchise) and who’d formally taken control of the New York Giants the past September. The National League had experienced an attendance decline of more than three hundred thousand the past season—mainly because Pittsburgh finished 27½ games ahead of the nearest competitor—and could ill afford to continue the struggle. After all, the Americans had outbid them for players in most instances, had outdrawn them by more than half a million the past season without a New York franchise, and would undoubtedly have a franchise in Manhattan next season.

In December 1902 the National League owners elected Henry Clay “Harry” Pulliam, the thirty-three-year-old secretary of the Pittsburgh club, as their new president. Over Brush’s bitter opposition, they then agreed to approach Johnson with a peace overture. The American League president was equally ready to bring labor costs under control, and he, Comiskey, Charles Somers, and Henry Killilea of the Boston AL club began talks with Pulliam, St. Louis’s Frank Robison, Chicago’s Jim Hart, and August “Garry” Herrmann, president of the Cincinnati club and a friend of both Johnson and Comiskey. On January 10, 1903, hostilities officially came to an end with the signing of an agreement in Cincinnati.

The National League affirmed the American League’s status as a separate and equal entity; the two leagues mutually recognized each other’s player contracts and reserve lists; and existing operating territories (including the AL’s new New York franchise) were recognized. The two leagues would play under a common set of rules, which meant that the AL adopted the NL’s foul-strike rule, and they agreed to avoid scheduling conflicts as far as was possible.

The fifth baseball “war” in twenty years had ended in a restored dual-league structure, one that would last. The American League had achieved its goals largely because its enterprise enlisted men such as Charles Comiskey, Connie Mack, Clark Griffith, and (for a time) John McGraw—well-known, experienced baseball figures who were able to recruit playing talent much more effectively than the American or Union associations had been able to do. Thus from the outset the AL exhibited a brand of baseball that was very close to, if not the equal of, that in the older circuit. Promoted in generally prosperous times, the well-run new league also offered an attractive alternative to the NL’s characteristically discordant, disorderly way of operating.

Most of all, the American League had the dynamic talents of Ban Johnson, the strongest, most resourceful baseball executive since William Hulbert. Johnson’s success in putting over the American League inaugurated a new era in baseball’s history. “Modern baseball” had begun.