20th Century Baseball Tidbits

• 1900
  Cincinnati trades young pitcher Christy Mathewson to the New York Giants for fading P Amos Rusie.
  Willie Keeler achieves his seventh consecutive 200-hit campaign. His National League-leading 204 hits come in just 136 games.
  Pittsburgh leads the league in triples with 100.
  Charlie "Piano Legs" Hickman of the last-place Giants commits a record 86 errors in his only season playing third base.
  
  
• 1901
  The American League begins play with eight teams. The new league directly competes with the old league in three cities: Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia. More than 100 players from the National League jump to the new league for increased salaries, including John McGraw, Cy Young, Clark Griffith, Hugh Duffy, and Jimmy Collins.
  For the first time in the National League, foul balls are counted as strikes (before the count reaches two strikes). So total runs dropped by almost 800. The league batting average falls from .279 to .267. Even stolen bases are affected as at-bats are shortened and strikeout totals skyrocket.

Source: 20th Century Baseball Chronicle: A Year-by-Year History of Major League Baseball