The NA is the second large scale professional association of baseball organizations, and the second longest consistently operating organization in professional baseball outside of the National League.

The first National Association, which evolved into the National League, was the first stable group of professional baseball clubs. Formed in 1876, it dominated the landscape of the major Northeastern cities. The first National Association was plagued with drunkenness, rowdyism, and, in spite of attempts to clean up their act, corruption from gambling.

There were many other professional leagues that sprang up over the close of the 1800s that were looking for their place in the baseball landscape.

The American Association which challenged the NL in 1883 was able to co-exist as a second "major" league before failing in 1893. The Union Association barely made it through their lone season, 1884

Ban Johnson, who rose from a sports news desk to become President of the Western League in 1894, decided by 1901 that he would challenge the NL's dominance.

He renamed the WL the "American League." He publicly declared that the league would have better standards for player conduct, better officiating, and the best players. He found backers who could put their money where his mouth was.

Johnson declared war on the National League in 1901, raiding rosters of National League teams for stars by offering big names a chance to earn more and play without the dreaded "reserve clause" that made national league players effective slaves to the team that they signed with. His moves against the NL had a ripple effect: They sent shock waves through the other small and medium professional leagues.

In the Fall of 1901, Patrick T. Powers, president of the powerful Eastern League, and league presidents from six other leagues started talking about what could be done to keep their turf safe in the ongoing baseball wars.

Even though several historians use the term "minor" to refer to the other leagues of that day, none of them were really subordinate yet to the NL or the fledgling AL. Even though the NL dominated the scene, history and custom was that a group of small leagues, rather than one "major" league, were the order of business in professional baseball. These owners bristled at the idea of one league controlling baseball. They were determined to stop it.

Powers and the league presidents decided to send invitations to the other large independent leagues to attend a meeting at the Leland Hotel in Chicago on September 5, 1901 to discuss the state of affairs in professional baseball.

Teams were invited from every corner of the American baseball landscape. While Johnson envisioned going head-to-head with the National League, Powers' concept of strength through numbers was a return to the old National Association concept: Many leagues, one set of standards.

Rules would be set for officiating games, for player drafts, for the sizes of teams, as well as territorial and contract protection. The leagues were divided into four classes, lettered A to D, based on size, drawing power, and a lot of politics.

The New York State League, for example, was jockeyed into position as a class B league by Powers to insure that there would be no challenge to the Eastern League's power.

Of the leagues in attendance, fourteen signed a pact to form a second national association, this to be known as the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues ("NAPBL" or "NA"). Play in the NA was to begin with the 1902 season.

Powers was made president. One of the few league presidents with ties to the New York City entertainment industry through his operations at Madison Square Garden, he was known and respected by the National League insiders. It made him a logical candidate to speak for the rest of independent baseball.

The league office was located in Auburn, New York.

For many of the leagues from the South and West, the NA gave them much-needed legitmacy. It helped them fend off low-level pro and semi-professional leagues who might get ideas about poaching the more established leagues' turf after reading about the warfare between the NL and the AL in the East.

Both the leagues that voted to join, and some that either never joined or joined later, viewed the NA as another forming "major" league that would devour the smaller leagues that signed up.

That never came to pass. Many of the cities in the NA's leagues were decades away from being great minor league towns, let alone major league bergs.

Leagues followed the money. Even though there wasn't an official "minor" league system, the other leagues became a developmental system by default: They recruited great local talent, and the major leagues raided their cupboards for their own players. Teams had both formal and informal deals to supply the AL and NL clubs players.

Most importantly, the New York market was key to going major. If you weren't in the Big Apple's media sphere, you weren't a major league.

Prosperity did not require major league status, though. Within a few years, the ranks of the NAPBL had swollen to 35 leagues. The Eastern League became the International League.

Powers abdicated his presidency in 1909, citing a conflict of interest between...

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