owing to the vicissitudes of the sport from a professional standpoint, were cheerful and optimistic as to the future.
Forty-nine organized leagues completed their season and were awarded championships in 1910. Probably about sixty leagues, working under direct rules and following the system which governs the parent major leagues, endeavored to make progress through the year, but some of them weakened through causes which experience teaches to avoid and were unable to last to the final games' scheduled for their circuits.
In addition to these leagues, we must not omit in summing up general Base Ball conditions the great number of municipal and what are known as semi-professional leagues which were in existence from one ocean to the other.
How many of these are to be found in the States of the Union is without the pale of known data. In some cities there are as many as fifty such leagues. In others there are half a score. In general, it would not be far amiss to say that there probably are not less than 5,000 scattered throughout the cities. This may appear to be a high estimate, but when the radius of the national game is taken into consideration, and when the actual number of contests played on a certain day amount to more than 200, as was indicated in one Eastern newspaper alone, it would seem that the local leagues are a far greater factor in the national sport than many imagined.
Add to these the college and school games, which are also sufficiently well organized to become fixtures, and one can begin to conceive of the expansion of the national
