[Le Grande Orange]

To follow-up on the comments about how the minor league system operated in earlier times I made back in post #28, here's a couple of items I found some years back in the 8th edition of Total Baseball.

[In the early 20th century]

Working agreements became quite common during this period. The major league club furnished the minor league club with its surplus players—youngsters in need of more experience or veterans past their prime who could still strengthen a minor league club—and/or cash. In return the major league club could obtain promising players from the minor league club.

During this era, working agreements between major and minor league clubs were usually of short duration—a year or two at most—suggesting that major league clubs targeted certain minor league clubs that had two or three players they might be interested in, and established a working agreement in order to get first claim on those players which developed satisfactorily.

Note that these early 20th century major-minor arrangements (along with similar ones in the 19th century) are not considered part of the "affiliated" minor league club era, even though the function was in some ways comparable. Thus you usually won't find these sorts of de facto affiliations between the major and minor league club listed in reference sources (though I would argue perhaps they should).

Early in 1929, major league clubs owned or controlled 27 minor league clubs.

During the 1920s, when the St. Louis Cardinals were discovering, signing, and developing players at little expense, the other major league clubs were essentially operating as they always had—signing some players out of the amateur ranks, optioning them out for seasoning; and buying top prospects from minor league clubs, even though the new draft rules were driving the prices of such players to unprecedented levels.