How these ALDS teams spawned the American League

By Anthony Castrovince | 1:29 PM EDT

CLEVELAND -- As the White Sox and Guardians battle in the American League Division Series, it’s fun to look back at the role these two franchises played in the creation of the American League in the first place.

It’s story time, kids!

OK, so back in the late 1890s, professional baseball only had one major league -- the National League. You’ve definitely heard of it.

The NL was launched in 1876 as a clean and family-friendly endeavor (no alcohol sales or Sunday games). But over time, as the NL absorbed teams from rival professional leagues like the American Association, ownership became decentralized, and the NL basically lost the plot and devolved into a rowdy spectacle in which umpires were disrespected and fights in the stands spilled onto the fields.

Ban Johnson wasn’t having that. The former newspaper sports editor was running a minor league called the Western League and had an idea to turn it into a major league to challenge the NL and, much like when the NL was formed, create a more aristocratic baseball atmosphere.

But given the NL’s stranglehold on professional baseball at the time, this meant war.

“Our idea of forming a new major league is to invade the larger eastern cities,” Johnson reportedly said in an 1899 meeting of Western League personnel, as recounted by the Society for American Baseball Research. “Don’t be discouraged if the National League tries to bluff us. Fight them with fire, gentlemen!”

At the time, the Western League had eight franchises:

But the St. Paul and Grand Rapids teams were both expected to relocate to larger cities by 1900.

At the Western League’s annual meeting in the fall of 1899, the owners voted to change the name of the league to the “American League” to reflect the larger scope and ambition of the potential transition to major league status.

As for the St. Paul and Grand Rapids franchises, the initial plan reported in the newspapers was to put one team in Chicago and another in Toronto.

The Chicago idea posed a clear problem. The National League had a team in Chicago known as the Orphans (you know them as the Cubs today, which is good because “Orphans” is a little dreary). Putting another major league team in Chicago meant challenging baseball’s National Agreement, in which all minor leagues had pledged to respect the NL’s territorial rights.

Again, this meant war. To combat Johnson’s plans and intimidate Johnson, the NL talked of placing rival minor league teams in American League cities -- essentially, to recreate the Western League.

“The National League,” said Chicago’s NL owner Jim Hart, “rarely bluffs. Baseball without the National Agreement don’t amount to a pinch of snuff.”

Johnson laughed off the threats.

“The next thing we know,” he said, “[Hart] will be planning a baseball tour over to that region across the Styx with the idea of playing with snowballs and batting with icicles.”

What gave Johnson the confidence to invade NL territory was the NL’s deteriorating state of play. The NL had multiple failing franchises and was in the midst of contracting from 12 teams to eight.

One of those failing franchises was in Cleveland. In 1899, the city’s Spiders had gone 20-134, the worst season in MLB history (recently challenged by the White Sox’s staggering 121 losses in 2024).

Don’t blame the Spiders themselves, though. Team owner Frank Robison also owned the NL’s St. Louis Browns and had sent Cleveland’s best players to St. Louis (yes, it was a strange time). The Spiders operated with a hollowed-out roster, played the vast majority of their games on the road and attracted scant fans to League Park. They were the walking dead.

Forgoing the initial Toronto plan, Johnson targeted Cleveland as the other new territory for the American League’s first season in 1900.

This, too, presented a problem involving the NL. Though Cleveland was being dropped from the NL, Robison refused to allow an AL team to play in League Park. He offered to let the AL use the facility, only on the condition that Johnson (and prospective Chicago AL owner Charles Comiskey) abandon the plans to put an AL team in Chicago.

Once again, Johnson did not blink. He found two wealthy businessmen named Charles Somers and J.F. Kilfoyle to purchase the Grand Rapids team and move it to Cleveland, and they made plans to build a new Cleveland ballpark ... with construction forecasted to take just five weeks!

So the AL forged ahead, threats be damned. At a meeting at the Republican House Hotel in Milwaukee on March 5, 1900, the AL was officially incorporated. They had called the NL’s bluff.

And sure enough, it was nothing more than a bluff. Rather than follow up on the threat to venture into AL territory, all the NL did was shrink itself down to eight teams. Comiskey’s Chicago team staked its place on the South Side, with one small caveat. Hart allowed that the AL club could be formed and could use the name “White Stockings” (a former NL team name) as long as the word “Chicago” not officially be a part of the team name.

Done deal. (And yes, the White Sox are known as the Chicago White Sox now.)

Oh, and the Cleveland team, first known as the Lake Shores, wound up playing at League Park, anyway, purchasing it for about $10,000.

The AL’s first season in 1900 is still classified as a minor league season. But the following year, the AL dropped Buffalo, Indianapolis, Kansas City and Minneapolis and ventured into the larger eastern cities of Baltimore (Orioles), Boston (Americans), Philadelphia (Athletics) and Washington (Senators).

By Opening Day 1901, Johnson had declared the AL to be a major league. When the NL refused to recognize it, Johnson convinced a bunch of star NL players to switch sides for higher pay. The two leagues would continue to fight for another couple years, but the AL’s popularity became impossible for the NL to ignore. The two leagues signed a peace treaty in 1903 that resulted in the first World Series between the AL and NL champions and MLB as we know it today.

The first major league game in AL history, appropriately, featured Chicago and Cleveland. The White Stockings and Blues, as they were known at that point, played on April 24, 1901, at South Side Park before about 9,000 fans. The White Stockings won, 8-2, en route to capturing the AL’s first major league pennant.

Now, 125 years later, the Chicago and Cleveland franchises that were elemental in the AL becoming a major league are, for the first time, facing each other in the AL playoffs.

Somewhere out there, Ban Johnson approves.

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