[legendsport]

The National League's twelve owners, known to the media simply as the "Base Ball Magnates," gathered in New York for their annual winter meeting. It didn't take long for the topic on everyone's mind to be brought into the open: the twelve-team league simply did not work and to survive, the strong must get rid of the weak. At least two - and probably four - clubs needed to be jettisoned.

New York's Alton Fender, who until just a year previously had owned the Louisville club, had been vocal in previous meetings: the Giants club was of key importance to the health of the League as, in Fender's words, "the flagship franchise in the nation's greatest metropolis." The Giants had often been a poorly-performing club, only Fender's purchase and subsequent stripping of Louisville's best players to send to New York had reversed the club's sickly fortunes. Now Fender made a demand: either the weak sisters be removed or he would be forced to reduce his financial commitment to the Giants. Everyone recognized this would be disastrous.

Results on the field exacerbated the problem. The same teams won, the same lost, year after year. Boston, Brooklyn and Louisville (and New York, using Louisville's players in 1899) had dominated the 1890s. The Temple Cup, an artificial attempt at some form of postseason drama, had been a failure - no one outside the cities involved cared; after all, everyone "knew" who the real champions were - the regular season had proven it. All roads led to the same destination: four teams must go.

The easiest to dismiss was Washington. A weak sister, the Senators had never been particularly competitive, nor had they proven profitable in the nation's capital. Baltimore, which had briefly been a good club in the middle of the decade, had fallen on hard times and was mediocre at best and playing to indifferent crowds. Similarly, Louisville, once a league power had first been stripped of its best players by Fender and then sold off. What was left was neither competitive nor profitable. Finally Cleveland, which had been competitive though never a top-notch club, was named as the fourth club simply based on economic factors.

A potential wrench in the works was the possibility of a new American Association. The last things the magnates wanted was to dispatch four clubs only to have them show up as the core of a reborn major league challenger. Therefore, the four magnates would have to be "bought off" - the main issue was for how much. In the end, it came down to each of the eight surviving clubs contributing 5 percent of their gross revenues over the 1900 and 1901 seasons into a pot to be split evenly among the four cast-offs. The estimated total for each of the four was about $105,000.

So the National League, base ball's most successful organization, jettisoned four teams, slimming down an eight-team circuit as the new century approached. Moving into the 20th century would be Boston, Brooklyn, Chicago, Cincinnati, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and St. Louis.

Even as the surviving eight began fighting over the players left jobless by the contraction of their clubs, a new threat, greater than any ever before faced by the venerable 25-year-old pro loop, was growing right under their very noses.