Labor pains and the birth of Major League Baseball
The St. Louis Browns of 1898 finished last in the 12-team NL, with a record of 39–111. For 1899, renamed as the Perfectos, they rose to fifth place, winning 84 games. It didn’t hurt that their ranks were augmented by the best of the 1898 Cleveland Spiders, including Cy Young (standing at lower left) and catcher Chief Zimmer (upper right), plus Cupid Childs, Patsy Tebeau, Bobby Wallace, Jack Powell, and Jesse Burkett.
In the National League ownership construct of the late 1890s, syndicates controlled the shares of several clubs at once and shuffled players between them as the need or opportunity arose. In 1899–1900 the League’s heedless pursuit of monopoly threatened its very existence. From a national pastime with so many adherents in the ’80s that it seemed almost a secular religion, baseball took on the aspect of just another trust or cartel, of the sort most Americans hated.
All of these things had come to pass in the solitary big league of the 1890s, culminating in Andrew Freedman’s idea for a National League Base Ball Trust, under which all clubs and players would be governed by a single management, with clubs in the bigger markets receiving larger equity shares (New York, for example, would receive a 30 percent stake, Brooklyn only 6 percent).
The Robison brothers, who owned both the St. Louis and Cleveland clubs, denuded the roster of the latter (including the unparalleled pitcher Cy Young) for the benefit of the former, condemning the Spiders to an all-time-worst record of 20–134. Brooklyn and Baltimore, too, were commonly owned; Ned Hanlon acted as manager of the Superbas (a.k.a. Bridegrooms and Dodgers) and as team president of the Orioles. While retaining their ownership of the Baltimore team, Harry Van Der Horst and Ned Hanlon also purchased control of Brooklyn and sold the best Oriole players to the Dodgers. Infused by such talent as Willie Keeler, Joe Kelley, Hughie Jennings, Dan McGann, Doc McJames and Jim Hughes, in 1899 Brooklyns improved by a remarkable 47 games in the standings, leaping from 10th place to the pennant. The once-vaunted Orioles, meanwhile, who had finished in first or second place in each of the previous five years, fell to fourth.
1900 Brooklyn Superbas, bolstered by most of the great Orioles of the 1890s — except John McGraw and Wilbert Robinson — copped the NL pennant.
In 1900 both Cleveland and Baltimore were exiled from the NL along with Washington and Louisville. The syndicate clubs hoped that by consolidating their interests they could cut their losses, and by reducing the league to eight teams they might heighten interest in the pennant race . . . or at the very least conclude the season with only seven also-rans rather than eleven.
Louisville owner Barney Dreyfuss, who was paid a measly $10,000 to disappear, nonetheless outflanked his adversaries, borrowing money to buy a half-interest in Pittsburgh and then moving the best of his Louisville players there (including future Hall of Famers Honus Wagner, Fred Clarke, and Rube Waddell), thus turning the consolidated Pirates into a dominant team.
The great consolidation from twelve clubs to eight, which had left many major league players suddenly unemployed, emboldened Ban Johnson. In 1900, he renamed his Western League, well-established as a top-rank minor circuit, as the American League, with designs on East Coast cities and thus major-league status. Foremost among these was New York, where the Giants had fallen on hard times under Freedman’s erratic ownership.
Big-league attendance in 1900, when the eight-team National League was the only game in town, was 1.7 million; three years later, with two eight-team major leagues, it was 4.7 million. The upward trend line for the game’s popularity was evident.
The AL would have to bide its time until 1903 before entering Gotham but for 1901 the AL picked up the NL’s discarded franchises in Washington and Baltimore, as well as placing direct rivals in Philadelphia and Boston. These complemented Johnson’s strong western franchises in Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, and Milwaukee. Falling to the wayside when the AL declared itself a major league in 1901 were four AL cities of 1900: Buffalo, Minneapolis, Kansas City, and Indianapolis.
The new league was not immune to syndicate ball, either. Charles Somers, a coal magnate from Cleveland, was the cornerstone of AL finances, at one time or another taking a piece in five of its eight clubs: Cleveland, Chicago, St. Louis, Philadelphia, and Boston (which as a result was briefly called the Somersets instead of the Red Sox). When, in 1910, the American League officially renounced syndicate ball, the National League followed in short order, outlawing dual ownership yet leaving a loophole in place by which an owner in one club might continue to hold stock in another. It could be argued that the sale of Babe Ruth from Boston to New York in 1920 was the last gasp of syndicate ball, as the Yankees took the mortgage on Fenway Park.
Buck Freeman hit 25 homers in 1899 with Washington, which in the mind of most baseball fans was the record that Babe Ruth challenged and broke in 1919. Only after Ruth hit his 26th did someone point out that Ned Williamson had hit 27 in 1884 (with only two on the road and the rest at home, where foul lines were less than 200 feet). After Washington was excised from the NL, Freeman continued Boston, first with the NL club and then, for many years, as a star in the AL.John McGraw received this notice of a fine for swearing in a game played at Brooklyn on April 28, 1899. In that year he batted .391 and posted an on base average (not computed when he was active) of .547, a record surpassed only twice in all of baseball history, by Ted Williams in 1941 and Barry Bonds in 2002. When Baltimore was excised from the NL for 1900, the cantankerous McGraw played one year in St. Louis before being lured to the new AL franchise in Baltimore for 1901; Ban Johnson had promised him the manager’s post in a New York entry. When Johnson seemed to renege in mid-1902, McGraw conspired with prospective Giants owner John T. Brush to control the shares of the Orioles and bring them to ruin.Cincinnati’s owner in 1899 was John T. Brush, who would also control the Indianapolis franchise formerly in the NL and use it as a farm club. He would become de facto owner of the Giants in 1902, when the Baseball Trust idea was foiled and Freedman stepped aside’ he purchased the Giants outright from Freedman in 1903. At that time Brush still owned the Reds as well as the American League’s Baltimore Orioles, and the rash of personnel transactions that preceded the sale of his Cincinnati and Baltimore shares positioned New York to be a juggernaut.The Western League ballparks of 1899. The parks in Detroit and Milwaukee were used for major league games in 1901.The 1899 Columbus & Grand Rapids club in the Western League featured the wandering Rube Waddell, who was purchased by Louisville and then, when that club was contracted out of the NL, went to Pittsburgh. (Serendipitously, the man who in 1891 gave the Pittsburgh club its nickname of Pirates, Lou Bierbauer, stands at the left above.) Manager Fred Clarke shipped Rube back to the minors; he finished 1900 at Milwaukee, where his manager was Connie Mack. After a one-year stint with the Cubs, in 1902 he would win 12 games for Los Angeles in the Pacific Coast League, then another 24 with Mack’s Athletics.The 1901 Pittsburgh were stacked, taking the NL flag with Honus Wagner (fourth from left, middle row), Fred Clarke (third from right, middle), and a great pitching staff including Rube Waddell (foreground, second from left) and Jack Chesbro (third from left, middle), both of whom would later jump to the AL.The Minneapolis Millers of the 1899 Western League were dominated by older players with National League experience, from 37-year-old slugger Perry Werden (seated at left, middle row) to former pitching star Wild Bill Hutchinson (top, right), 39.Atlanta’s Morris Brown College nine, 1899. In this year Bill Galloway played in five games for Woodstock, Ontario in the Canadian League, thus becoming the last African American to play in Organized Baseball until Jackie Robinson in 1946.Women continued to play baseball after Lizzie Arlington made here Organized Baseball debut in 1898, but still were largely regarded as a novelty act.The Boston Beaneaters had finished a strong second to Brooklyn in 1899 but faded to fourth in 1900 despite retaining its stars: pitcher Kid Nichols (third from left, front) and the great infield of (left to right after manager Frank Selee) Herman Long, Fred Tenney, Jimmy Collins and (upper left) Bobby Lowe.In his ghosted autobiography of 1900, Cap Anson wrote bitterly of his falling out with Al Spalding: “Just at this stage of affairs [1898] my plans for the future were apparently a matter of great interest to both press and public, and if the statements made by the former were to be believed, I had more schemes on hand than did a professional promoter, and every one of them with ‘millions in it.’ I was to manage this club and manage that club; I was to play here and play there, and, in fact, there was scarcely anything that I was not going to do if the reporters’ statements could be depended upon. One of the most senseless of these was the starting of the A. C. Anson Base-Ball College … the real plan being to create a real-estate boom and enable Mr. Spalding to dispose of some of his holdings, using me as a catspaw with which to pull the chestnuts out of the fire.”El Score covered the Cuban Baseball League, with this 1900 issue featuring NL players George Davis and Kid Gleason. It was in this year that the long-lived Cuban League (1878–1961) first allowed black players. The San Francisco Club was admitted to league play as an all-black entry, though it later added a white pitcher. Another such publication was El Base Ball, paralleling the U.S. rivalry between Sporting News and Sporting Life.Pittsburgh owner Barney Dreyfuss, here portrayed on a Tip-Top Bread card of 1910, the year after his Pirates won the World Series from Detroit. He had proposed to the Boston Red Sox a meeting of the two league champions in October 1903, thus reviving the World Series after an absence of a dozen years. Only recently admitted to the Hall of Fame, Dreyfuss and Ban Johnson may be said to have created, between them, today’s Major League Baseball.
