Baseball 2001: American League Celebrates 100th

A century ago, when handlebar mustaches and horse-drawn carriages were common, the National League was the centerpiece of baseball.

That was temporary, however, about to be changed by an entrepreneurial sports editor who decided that America ought to have another major league, an American League.

Founded in 1876, the NL gradually grew to 12 cities and fought off a number of challenges by upstart leagues, most of their tenures matching the description of some relief pitchers’ stints--brief and ineffective.

Ban Johnson, sports editor of the Cincinnati Commercial Gazette, watched the success of this enterprise with interest. He had built the Western League into a profitable minor league operation and was intrigued with the idea of graduating to major league status. When the NL dropped four cities, Johnson pounced.

In 1900, he moved Western franchises from St. Paul, Minn., and Grand Rapids, Mich., to discarded NL markets in Chicago and Cleveland. A year later, they joined teams located in Boston, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore, Washington and Milwaukee to form Johnson’s new operation.

By 1903, St. Louis had replaced Milwaukee and New York took over for Baltimore, creating an eight-team American League that would remain with that lineup for the next half century. The new franchises joined Chicago, Philadelphia and Boston as cities in which Johnson’s league was in direct competition with entrenched NL teams.

The AL had some major baseball figures running teams like Connie Mack in Philadelphia and Charles Comiskey in Chicago. Now it needed players, and Johnson found his supply in the NL, blithely discarding the reserve clause that tied them to their teams in perpetuity and luring them to his new league by shattering the $2,400 salary cap the NL had established.

A fistful of top name players, including Cy Young, Nap Lajoie and John McGraw, eagerly jumped to the new AL, followed quickly by others like Ed Delahanty, Jack Chesbro and Wee Willie Keeler.

The NL sued in a number of venues with varying results. Sometimes, the reserve clause was upheld. Sometimes, it was not.

Comiskey’s White Sox won the first American League pennant in 1901 and Lajoie, playing for the Philadelphia Athletics, captured the Triple Crown, leading Johnson’s new enterprise in batting (.426), home runs (14) and runs batted in (125).

A year later, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ordered Lajoie back to the NL Philadelphia Phillies. But the order was effective only in Pennsylvania, so the innovative Johnson simply transferred Lajoie to Cleveland, where he continued to flourish while sitting out games when the team played in Philadelphia.

After two years of player raids, the NL sought peace, offering to merge. But Johnson would have none of it. He had earned his place as a major league, and he wasn’t about to abandon that status.

Peace was declared in January 1903, when the Americans were recognized as a separate and equal major league.

That same year, Barney Dreyfuss, owner of the NL champion Pittsburgh Pirates, came up with an idea that would change baseball forever. Dreyfuss issued a challenge. His team would play the AL champion Boston Pilgrims in a final showdown between the leagues. It would be a best-of-9 series. With no concern for the rest of the globe, it was called the World Series.

Boston owner Henry Killilea was intrigued by the idea and relayed it to Johnson because nothing went on in the American League without the president’s approval. Johnson saw the proposal as an opportunity for his new league to win further acceptance. He gave Killilea the green light with one admonition. “You must beat them,” he advised the Pilgrims owner.

Killilea’s team came through, defeating the Pirates in eight games, a sort of exclamation point for Johnson and his new enterprise.

The American League was here to stay.

The league flourished, fueled by a parade of players who would write baseball history. The early stars that Johnson lured to his league were followed by Goliaths of the game like Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth, who became cornerstones of the AL.

Cobb won 12 batting championships in 13 seasons, hit over .400 three times and finished with the highest average in history at .366. He had 4,189 hits and stole 892 bases, including 96 in one season--all records since broken by modern players.

Ruth was the long ball version of Cobb, a home run hitter whose power prowess saved baseball after Comiskey’s White Sox were accused of fixing the 1919 World Series. He was a brilliant pitcher, winner of 89 games with Boston before his home run stroke prompted a switch to the outfield. He hit 714 home runs, including 60 in 1927, both records.

It was the magnetism of Ruth that rescued the game from the Black Sox scandal and laid the foundation of the New York Yankees dynasty. The franchise won its first World Series in 1923, beginning a string of success unparalleled in team sports. When the Yankees beat the New York Mets in last year’s Series, it marked the 26th world championship, more than any team in any sport.

There were other stars--Walter Johnson, who won 416 games, Nolan Ryan, who pitched seven no-hitters, Joe DiMaggio with a 56-game hitting streak, Ted Williams, baseball’s last .400 hitter.

Johnson’s eight-team league remain undisturbed until 1954 when the St. Louis Browns moved to Baltimore. Owner Bill Veeck had tried all kinds of gimmicks to make the team successful, even sending a midget to bat in one game, but eventually he gave up and sold the team.

A year later, Mack’s Philadelphia A’s moved to Kansas City, where they would struggle and eventually be sold in 1960 to a flamboyant Chicago insurance executive, Charles O. Finley, who moved the team to Oakland in 1968. By then, Johnson’s eight-team league had taken on a vastly different look.

In 1961, the AL expanded, adding teams in Los Angeles and Washington to replace the original Senators, who moved to Minnesota that year. The replacement Senators would also move, relocating to Texas in 1972. And the AL’s Los Angeles franchise settled in the suburbs, moving to Anaheim in 1966. When Finley moved the A’s to Oakland, the AL replaced them with a new Kansas City franchise in 1969 and added Seattle the same season. The Pilots lasted just one year in Seattle before moving to Milwaukee and being renamed the Brewers.

Once again, the AL moved to replace a departed franchise, expanding to Seattle in 1976 when Toronto also was added. Tampa Bay signed on in 1998 and Milwaukee was moved to the NL.

The city-hopping was dizzying but in 1973, the AL did something much more dramatic than just moving teams. It changed the rules. In an attempt to invigorate offense, the league added a designated hitter--a 10th player in the traditional nine-man game who would bat in place of the pitcher. Eventually, the DH was embraced by most other leagues. The NL held out, though, causing the World Series and All-Star games to be played with different rules depending on whether games were in AL stadiums (with the DH) or NL parks (without it).

By 1976, another rule, this one off the field, would change. The reserve clause--the same rule the AL ignored when it raided the NL for players to stock its fledgling teams--was overturned in arbitration. That created free agency and an economic revolution with a dizzying rush of multimillion-dollar contracts that was capped after the 2000 season when shortstop Alex Rodriguez signed the richest contract in sports history--$252 million for 10 years with the Texas Rangers.

It was a milestone deal as the American League prepared to celebrate its 100th anniversary. And it was a far cry from the $2,400 salary ceiling that Ban Johnson shattered when he started this enterprise a century ago.