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Originally Posted by packs
I was getting mixed up between major league issued sets and major leagues when you brought up Cy Young cards. Sorry about that re: Kid Nichols.
Accounting aside, there is a very practical way of looking at things and that's by looking at what happened. The Federal League was obviously not part of MLB or it would have participated in the league's play, which did include participation from both the American and National Leagues. You can define major league baseball in your own way but you cannot say the Federal League was part of one overall league. It was not.
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A lot of people are splittings hairs on the proper definition of a "major league". Some I think are being too literal in that they are more narrowly defining a major league team as having to belong to the legally formed and organized Major League Baseball as we know it today. But professional baseball has been around a lot longer that just the inception of the American and National League organizations as we know them today. Because of that, I think you have to look more at the overall level of talent of players in a league or on a team to determine if they are at a major league level, as opposed to only accepting players and their teams as major leaguers because they play in a league that calls itself part of Major League Baseball. When you go back to the Federal League of 1913-15, or the Player's League of 1890, they both included many stars and everyday players from the reconized Major Leagues at those times. So the players and talent were on par with the reconized Major League teams, so why shouldn't they also be considered major league teams as well. And the fact that the MLB and the HOF both recognize and count the stats of players in those non-traditional leagues as being part of their major league career total records pretty much seals the deal that those were in fact major league players on major league teams. And now that inclusion is being expanded even further with the recent recognition of Negro League stats as being part of a player's major league career stats. So in effect, MLB and the HOF have now more or less officially sanctioned the Negro League as part of major league baseball, whether you like it or not.