What mistake did the movie “Major League” have regarding player numbers?”
The film’s opening montage is a series of somber blue-collar images of the Cleveland landscape synchronized to the score of Randy Newman’s melancholy “Burn On”: an ode to the infamous night in Cleveland when the heavily polluted Cuyahoga River literally caught fire. The filmmakers chose the Cleveland Indians as their example of a notorious losing franchise because the actual Indians had a very similar history of futility—the franchise was the butt of many jokes and fit in perfectly with the premise of the film. While it is not known if there was any inspiration taken from this source, the attempt by an owner to manipulate a roster to create the worst team possible actually was done with a Cleveland baseball team, in 1899, when Frank Robison, then owner of the National League’s Cleveland Spiders, sent almost all of the Spiders’ major league caliber players to another team he had simultaneously purchased (owning more than one franchise was allowed in baseball at this time) and thus left
