taken from the player through the wrongful operation of the reserve-rule.
The remedy for these abuses may be difficult to find; the system has become so rooted that heroic treatment may be necessary to remove it; but go it must, like every other, founded upon so great injustice and misuse of power. The only question is, Whence shall the remedy proceed? Shall it come from the clubs, or from the players, or from both conjointly? The interests of the national game are too great to be longer trifled with in such a manner, and if the clubs cannot find a way out of these difficulties the players will try to do it for them. The tangled web of legislation which now hampers the game must be cut away, and the business of base-ball made to rest on the ordinary business basis. There will be little need, then, of extra-judicial rules to regulate salaries, for these will regulate themselves, like those of the dramatic and other professions, by the law of supply and demand; "base-ball law," that wonderful creation which no one individual seems ever yet to have mastered, will be laid away as a curious relic among the archives of the game, and the time-honored and time-proven common law will once more regulate base-ball affairs; "deals" will be confined to legal limits; "phenomenons" and "wonders" will no longer receive advertising salaries, for the careful business manager will keep within justified figures; contracts may be made for periods of more than one season, the leagues will be composed of cities of nearly equal drawing strength, and the percentage system will be re-enacted, thus reducing to a minimum the temptation to compete for players; the players will catch the spirit of the new order; base-ball, to them, will be more of a business and less of a pastime; contract-breaking will be impossible, and dissipation will disappear; the profession of ball-playing will be looked upon as a perfectly honorable calling, and the national game be more than ever the greatest of out-door sports. All of these changes may never come; many of them certainly will. But it will be when the game is governed by the law of the land, when its financial conduct is placed in the hands of thorough business-men, when the "greats" and the "onlys," the "rustlers" and the "hustlers," have gone "down the back entry of time."
