AL’s birth led to modern era

How to pass time during the offseason? I know — let’s start another major league.

So reasoned baseball executive and former sportswriter Byron Bancroft Johnson 106 years ago tomorrow. On Nov. 21, 1900, at Chicago’s Grand Palace Hotel, he announced that his minor Western League would expand into Eastern cities for the 1901 season and become a full-fledged rival of the 25-year-old National League.

Of course, the league would need a new name, and Johnson gave it one: the American League of Professional Baseball Clubs. Thus was the national pastime drastically and permanently changed for the better entering the new century.

As with so many monopolies, the National League was bloated and arrogant as the Gay Nineties ended. An unwieldy 12-team circuit, it mercilessly lopped off four clubs after the 1899 season — Washington, Baltimore, Cleveland and Louisville — and to heck with their fans.

It also froze player salaries at a maximum $2,400, turning even its stars into candidates for the poorhouse. It did nothing to prevent rowdiness on the field and flagrant gambling off it, thereby thumbing its nose at women and children patrons. (In those days, “kill the umpire!” often seemed a genuine threat rather than merely a drunken cry.)

The National League had repelled previous challenges to its exclusive major league status from other circuits. But now Johnson and his allies were prepared and fiscally able to fight.

How well did they plan and organize? So well that after the Milwaukee franchise moved to St. Louis in 1902 and the Baltimore franchise to New York in 1903, the American League’s lineup of cities remained the same for half a century — until the impoverished St. Louis Browns became the Baltimore Orioles in 1954.

Actually, haughty National League owners sewed the seeds of challenge themselves. As author Lee Allen relates in his superb 1950 book “100 Years of Baseball,” Johnson tried to attend an NL meeting in October 1900 with the goal of explaining his aims and possibly effecting a merger with his Western League. The owners responded by keeping him waiting outside interminably in the corridor and, when he stepped away for a moment, ending the session.

Learning that the National League intended to stifle his effort by forming its own minor league in the Midwest, Johnson abandoned Minneapolis, Indianapolis, Kansas City and Buffalo and moved into Washington, Baltimore, Boston and Philadelphia for 1901. And so the battle was joined.

Johnson’s allies were formidable (and, along with him, future Hall of Famers). Connie Mack, a highly regarded former National League catcher and manager, became manager and part owner of the new Philadelphia Athletics — roles he would fill for 50 years. Star pitcher Clark Griffith became playing manager of Charles Comiskey’s Chicago White Stockings and led them to the first AL pennant. John McGraw, previously a scrappy third baseman on the NL’s legendary Orioles of the mid-1890s, returned to Baltimore as manager.

On the field, many top players gladly jumped to a league in which there was no salary cap. Included, for starters, were Cy Young, Nap Lajoie, Ed Delahanty, Jack Chesbro and Wee Willie Keeler — the Johan Santanas, Ryan Howards and Derek Jeters of their day. But McGraw, still a star player, didn’t last long. Constricted and conflicted by Johnson’s insistence that American League umpires be treated with respect, the fiery Muggsy jumped back to the NL in 1902, beginning a notable 30-year tenure as manager of the New York Giants.

Other outstanding players then followed suit — literally since many of the cases wound up in court. After Lajoie won the AL’s first batting championship by hitting .422 for Mack’s Athletics in 1901, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ordered him to return to the NL’s Philadelphia Phillies. Johnson got around that by assigning Lajoie’s contract to Cleveland for 1902, forcing him to sit out only its games in Philly. This was considered such a significant development by Ohio fans that the club promptly was renamed the Cleveland Naps.

Finally wearying of the costly battle for players, the National League in effect sued for peace in 1903 by agreeing to recognize the American as an equal. Then Barney Dreyfuss, owner of the NL’s champion Pittsburgh Pirates, proposed a best-of-nine set of games against the AL champ Boston Pilgrims — the first World Series.

“You’ve got to win it!” Johnson told Boston owner Henry Killilea. And the Pilgrims did in eight games.

The following year, when the Giants won the NL pennant, McGraw and owner John T. Brush refused to play the “bush leaguers” from Boston. This raised such an outcry that by 1905, the game’s ruling National Commission decreed that an annual series between the two league champions was mandatory.

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