Clipping:The Players' League divided
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| Date | Saturday, November 8, 1890 |
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| Text | Excuses and explanations by the dozen will not alter the glaring fact that these individual negotiations, immediately after the conference had been broken off...were directly responsible for the present deplorable situation of the Players' League. These individual negotiations defied and nullified the action of the Players' League; gave notice to the world and the enemy that the organization was divided against itself, and that it contained an element which would rule or ruin; exposed its weakness to the very party from which it should have been studiously concealed; put the Players' League clubs individually in the position of mendicants; made it difficult to meet bluff for bluff; depreciated the value of every franchise in the Players' League; and made it impossible for all of the Players' League clubs to treat with their League rivals upon even footing, or to exact an equitable settlement. This is a heavy indictment, and yet a calm, unprejudiced survey of the situation will convince any fair-minded person that it has not been overdrawn in the least, and that these conditions confront the Players' League to-day as the direct, though perhaps unlooked-for, result of the reopening of unauthorized consolidation negotiations by the capitalist members of the Players' League Committee upon their own responsibility. If anything of real value to base ball or towards a mutually satisfactory clearing up of the situation had been accomplished the end would perhaps have justified the means. But so far from achieving their object the few Players' League capitalists bent upon consolidation have actually defeated it. Had they accepted the decision of their organization and held hands off it is pretty certain that the League would in time have ceased bluffing, as it always does when bluff fails to work, reopened negotiations through the proper channel and with the regularly organized committees, and then the Players' League would have had the advantage of an equal footing, and been able to make satisfactory terms for all of its members. But the consolidationists manifested as little diplomacy here as they did in their dealings with the League when they showed their entire hand to the old magnates and in return got so little of a peep at the latter's hand, that while the League knew the exact conditions of affairs in the Players' League the latter has nothing but mere surmises as to the real situation in the League. They rushed in where angels would have feared to tread, showed their condition so plainly, their desire for consolidation and disregard for other considerations so completely... |
| Source | Sporting Life |
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| Submitted by | Richard Hershberger |
| Origin | Initial Hershberger Clippings |
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