Early this morning, representatives from the office of the Legacy Baseball League confirmed that Inaugural Commissioner Alexander Madigan perished peacefully in his sleep at his home within Madigan Hall.
A baseball visionary and lifelong patron of the game, Alexander Madigan was born to Scottish parents on the Ohio frontier. Moving to Manhattan, New York when he was just sixteen years old, Madigan worked his way up from a clerk, buying up properties along the Hudson and investing in early developments on the outer edges of the city.
Known as a stern and principled leader who met great opposition in his vision for the league, Madigan’s final years were spent embroiled in cheating scandal involving bribes and gambling rings primarily in Brooklyn. While Madigan insisted the league had no knowledge of the scandal and deferred the matter to congressional inquiry, many critics accused Madigan of his staff of turning a blind eye to the extensive corruption within the game, now resulting in greatly reduced attendance and profits in the once-booming baseball industry. The embarrassment of such an enterprise flourishing under Madigan’s stern and reproachful watch is one likely to linger in his legacy.
Madigan was a fierce resistor of both players rights and racial integration within the Legacy Baseball League, passing measures that fined Players Union members and writing anti-negro policies into the league’s constitution. However, Madigan supported salary cap and arbitration measures aimed at curtailing imbalanced acquisitions of star players and established a nation-wide Academy Baseball Program, securing federal funding to establish secondary schools for talented young ballplayers in every national region.
The Board of the Legacy Baseball League offered a brief announcement this morning, informing the public that a new Commissioner will be elected at the Summer Meetings, scheduled for this week in Manhattan.
Madigan, who never married and has no known family, is rumored to have left his substantial fortune and mansion, Madigan Hall, in trust to the Legacy Baseball League.
In accordance with the wishes of Commissioner Madigan’s will, no public funeral will be held.
“We carry the great industry of this new and hopeful century in our sacred and stainless sport—a profession and pastime of the highest order—the very soul of our pastoral memory and frontier spirit; this merry game of base-ball.
From the long streets of Manhattan; from the wells and boroughs of Pennsylvania; from the dockyards of Baltimore and riverbends of Missouri; from the domed expanses of Chicago and the green mysteries of Michigan and Minnesota; we gather as one nation, under a fair and glorious God, to run these bases of our past; these green fields of our future.”
–Alexander Madigan, Commissioner and Founder of the LBL, 1901