NEW YORK, November 15, 1894.
TO THE NATIONAL LEAGUE AND AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF PROFESSIONAL
BASE BALL CLUBS.

Gentlemen: We the representatives of the undersigned leagues, operating under the National Agreement of Professional Base Ball Clubs, respectfully submit the following: Your body is the recognized major base ball organization of the country, and have sole right to elect the National Board and control all bodies identified with the agreement.

It has been made known to us, and we have good and substantial reasons for believing that such knowledge is correct, that a new organization of base ball clubs is contemplated, which, of necessity, must operate without the pale of the national agreement. It appears also that it is the purpose of the new association, if it materializes, to attempt to take from our respective organizations and clubs players now held by us under the right of reservation accorded us by the national agreement. We therefore request that you, as a body, take some action to protect us, so far as possible, against all outside organizations. We trust you will give this immediate attention, and we await your action.

Respectfully,

B.B. JOHNSON, Sec. Western League, P.B.B.C.
P.T. POWERS, Pres. Eastern League.

* * * * *

#The Base Ball Season of 1894.#

To professional base ball, as governed by the existing National League, is mainly due the great popularity our national game has achieved within the past twenty years. Of course the amateur class of the fraternity greatly outnumber the professionals; but the game could never have reached its present point of excellence in field work but for the time and attention the professional clubs were enabled to devote to its thorough development from the year of Harry Wright's famous "Red Stocking" nine of Cincinnati, in 1869, to the existing period of model professional ball playing. In the first place, the amateur clubs could never have given the game the time and labor required for its evolution which the professional clubs were enabled to do; and, moreover, not one club in a thousand could have spared the money required to fit up and keep in serviceable condition such finely equipped ball grounds as those now owned by the leading professional clubs of the National League. To these facts, too, are to be added the statement that to the National League's government of the professional class of the fraternity is due the lasting credit of sustaining the integrity of play in the game up to the highest standard; so much so, indeed, that it has reached the point of surpassing, in this most important respect, every other sport in vogue in which professional exemplars are employed. Take it for all in all, no season since the inauguration of the National League in 1876, has approached that of 1894 in the number of clubs which took part in the season's games, both in the amateur as well as the professional arena; and certainly no previous season ever saw the professional clubs of the country so well patronized as they were in 1894. Moreover, it was the most brilliant and successful season in every respect known in the annals of the college clubs of the country. In fact, there was but one drawback to the creditable success of the entire championship campaigns of 1894, and that was the unwonted degree of "hoodlumism" which disgraced the season in the professional arena, and this, we regret to say, was painfully conspicuous among the players of the National League clubs, this organization having been noted, prior to its absorption of the old American Association element in its ranks in 1892, for the reputable character of its annual struggles for championship honors. One result of the rowdy ball playing indulged in by a minority of each club team in the League was a decided falling off in the attendance of the best class of patrons of the professional clubs.

Much of the "Hoodlumism"—a technical term applicable to the use of blackguard language; low cunning tricks, unworthy of manly players; brutal assaults on umpire and players; that nuisance of our ball fields, "kicking," and the dishonorable methods comprised in the term "dirty ball playing"—-indulged in in 1894 was largely due to the advocacy of the method of the so-called "aggressive policy," which countenanced rowdy ball playing as part and parcel of the work in winning games. The most energetic, lively and exciting method of playing a game of ball can mark a professional club contest without its being disgraced by a single act of rowdyism—such as that of spiking or willfully colliding with a base runner; bellowing like a wild bull at the pitcher, as in the so-called coaching of 1893 and 1894; or that of "kicking" against the decisions of the umpire to hide faulty captaincy or blundering fielding. Nothing of this "hoodlumism" marked the play of the four-time winners of the League pennant from 1872 to 1875, inclusive, viz., the old, gentlemanly Boston Red Stockings of the early seventies, under the leadership of that most competent of all managers, Harry Wright. Yet, despite of this old time fact, if club managers do not adopt the rough's method of playing the game, as illustrated in the League arena in 1894, advocated by the class of newspaper managers of local clubs, the scribes in question go for the local team officials for not having a team with "plenty of ginger" in their work and for their not being governed by "a hustling manager." Is it any wonder, under such circumstances, that the League season of 1894 was characterized by "hoodlumism?"

But little advance was made in the way of effective team management in the League in 1894. About a third of the twelve teams of the League only were controlled by competent team managers, while at least another third were wretchedly managed, and the other third were not above the average in management. Two of the old drawbacks to the successful running of teams by professional clubs conspicuous in 1892 and 1893 marked the team management of 1894, viz., the employment of drinking players and the condoning of their costly offenses, and the interference of club presidents and directors in the work of the regular manager of the club team. There is a class of club officials in the League who, for the life of them, cannot keep from interfering with the club's legitimate manager in his running of the team. Some of them have the cool effrontery of stating that "the manager of our team is never interfered with in any way." One costly result of this club official interference is, that needed discipline of the players is out of the question, and in its absence cliqueism in the ranks of the team sets in—one set of players siding with the manager, and another with the real "boss of the team," with the costly penalty of discord in the ranks. It is all nonsense for a club to place a manager in the position with a merely nominal control of the players and then to hold him responsible for the non-success of the team in winning games. Under such a condition of things, the club manager might sign a team of costly star players and yet find himself surpassed in the pennant race by a rival manager, who, with entire control of his team, and that team composed of so-called "second-class players" or ambitious "colts," working in thorough harmony together, and "playing for the side" all the time and not for a record, as so many of the star players do, would deservedly carry off the season's honors.