Johnson developed the AL—a descendant of the minor league Western League—into a "clean" alternative to the National League, which had become notorious for its rough-and-tumble atmosphere. To encourage a more orderly environment, Johnson strongly supported the new league's umpires, which eventually included Hall of Famer Billy Evans.
With the help of league owners and managers such as Charles Comiskey, Charles Somers and Jimmy McAleer, Johnson lured top talent to the AL, which soon rivaled the more established National League. Johnson dominated the AL until the mid-1920s, when a public dispute with Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis culminated in his forced resignation as league president.
The final nail in Johnson's coffin proved to be the Black Sox Scandal. Johnson paid no attention to Comiskey's claims that his White Sox may have been on the take from gamblers. However, when the scandal broke after the season, the White Sox, Red Sox and Yankees threatened to pull out of the AL and join a new 12-team National League. The enlarged league would include a new team in Detroit unrelated to the Tigers, who were owned by Johnson loyalist Frank Navin. However, Navin was in no mood for another war and persuaded the other five clubs to agree to appoint a new National Commission of non-baseball men. Federal District Court Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis was appointed as chairman. However, Landis would only accept an appointment as sole Commissioner of Baseball, with unlimited power over the game. The owners were still reeling from the damage to baseball's reputation due to the Black Sox Scandal, and readily agreed to Landis' demands.
Under the circumstances, a clash between the iron-willed Johnson and the iron-willed Landis was inevitable, and it happened prior to the 1924 World Series. Landis banned two New York Giants from the Series for attempting to bribe members of the Philadelphia Phillies late in the season. After Frankie Frisch and two other Giants stars were implicated, only to be cleared by Landis, Johnson demanded that the Series be canceled. He publicly criticized Landis for his handling of the affair, and Landis threatened to resign if the AL owners didn't rein Johnson in. After the Series, the AL owners promised to remove Johnson from office if he stepped out of line again. Johnson remained on good behavior for two years, even getting an extension of his contract to and a raise to $40,000 (he'd previously made $25,000).
However, in , Johnson criticized Landis for granting Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker an amnesty after evidence surfaced that they had fixed a game in 1919. Landis demanded that the AL choose between him and Johnson. The AL owners were prepared to remove Johnson from office at their annual meeting in January . However, Johnson was in ill health at the time, and the owners decided to put him on an indefinite sabbatical instead. Johnson tried to return in the spring and acted as if nothing had changed. However, the situation had become untenable, and Johnson was forced to resign at the end of the season. He was replaced by longtime Indians general manager Ernest Barnard.
Category:American League presidents Category:Baseball developers Category:National Baseball Hall of Fame inductees Category:People from Huron County, Ohio Category:Washington Senators owners Category:1864 births Category:1931 deaths
fr:Ban Johnson it:Ban Johnson ja:バン・ジョンソンThis text is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License. This text was originally published on Wikipedia and was developed by the Wikipedia community.
The World News (WN) Network, has created this privacy statement in order to demonstrate our firm commitment to user privacy. The following discloses our information gathering and dissemination practices for wn.com, as well as e-mail newsletters.
We do not collect personally identifiable information about you, except when you provide it to us. For example, if you submit an inquiry to us or sign up for our newsletter, you may be asked to provide certain information such as your contact details (name, e-mail address, mailing address, etc.).
When you submit your personally identifiable information through wn.com, you are giving your consent to the collection, use and disclosure of your personal information as set forth in this Privacy Policy. If you would prefer that we not collect any personally identifiable information from you, please do not provide us with any such information. We will not sell or rent your personally identifiable information to third parties without your consent, except as otherwise disclosed in this Privacy Policy.
Except as otherwise disclosed in this Privacy Policy, we will use the information you provide us only for the purpose of responding to your inquiry or in connection with the service for which you provided such information. We may forward your contact information and inquiry to our affiliates and other divisions of our company that we feel can best address your inquiry or provide you with the requested service. We may also use the information you provide in aggregate form for internal business purposes, such as generating statistics and developing marketing plans. We may share or transfer such non-personally identifiable information with or to our affiliates, licensees, agents and partners.
We may retain other companies and individuals to perform functions on our behalf. Such third parties may be provided with access to personally identifiable information needed to perform their functions, but may not use such information for any other purpose.
In addition, we may disclose any information, including personally identifiable information, we deem necessary, in our sole discretion, to comply with any applicable law, regulation, legal proceeding or governmental request.
We do not want you to receive unwanted e-mail from us. We try to make it easy to opt-out of any service you have asked to receive. If you sign-up to our e-mail newsletters we do not sell, exchange or give your e-mail address to a third party.
E-mail addresses are collected via the wn.com web site. Users have to physically opt-in to receive the wn.com newsletter and a verification e-mail is sent. wn.com is clearly and conspicuously named at the point of
collection.If you no longer wish to receive our newsletter and promotional communications, you may opt-out of receiving them by following the instructions included in each newsletter or communication or by e-mailing us at michaelw(at)wn.com
The security of your personal information is important to us. We follow generally accepted industry standards to protect the personal information submitted to us, both during registration and once we receive it. No method of transmission over the Internet, or method of electronic storage, is 100 percent secure, however. Therefore, though we strive to use commercially acceptable means to protect your personal information, we cannot guarantee its absolute security.
If we decide to change our e-mail practices, we will post those changes to this privacy statement, the homepage, and other places we think appropriate so that you are aware of what information we collect, how we use it, and under what circumstances, if any, we disclose it.
If we make material changes to our e-mail practices, we will notify you here, by e-mail, and by means of a notice on our home page.
The advertising banners and other forms of advertising appearing on this Web site are sometimes delivered to you, on our behalf, by a third party. In the course of serving advertisements to this site, the third party may place or recognize a unique cookie on your browser. For more information on cookies, you can visit www.cookiecentral.com.
As we continue to develop our business, we might sell certain aspects of our entities or assets. In such transactions, user information, including personally identifiable information, generally is one of the transferred business assets, and by submitting your personal information on Wn.com you agree that your data may be transferred to such parties in these circumstances.