James T. Knight of New York had attended the meeting in St. Louis at which the American Association had been born. Knight operated the New York Metropolitans, a barnstorming phenomenon and also owned a sprawling expanse of grass known as the Polo Grounds in Manhattan. Naturally the members of the AA hoped Knight would bring the Mets into the Association for the inaugural 1882 season. He didn't - but the reasons did not become clear until the following winter.
Meanwhile the National League had a new president: Alexander Taylor and his first order of business was to broker an acceptable peace between his league and the upstart Association. Taylor had a keen sense of both fair play and the bottom line and knew a war for players would redound only to the players' benefit. In the early spring of 1883, Taylor nailed down an agreement with Crenshaw and a newly created minor league (the North-West League) in which all three agreed to honor each others contracts and reserve clauses. Peace had, at least temporarily, come to the baseball world.
Knight, it turned out, had played a key role in brokering the peace and now he wanted in. The National League accommodated him first, granting him a brand-new New York franchise, which Knight dubbed the "Gotham Club." What about the Mets? people wondered. Well, they were free to join the Association. And so Knight, by sitting out 1882, found himself with a foot - and club - in both camps. Both teams would play at the Polo Grounds, the two diamonds separated by a canvas fence. The Gothams, with a 50-cent admission charge, had the better seats and amenities, while the 25-cent Metropolitans had the worse of the bargain.
Knight stocked his new Gothams club by buying out the defunct Troy franchise and supplementing their players with some from the also-defunct Worcester club and then purchasing both a pitcher and first baseman from the powerful, but financially strapped, Providence club. With these players (1B Frank Binkley and P Fred Saunders) Knight figured on contending right away.
To balance the league with their New York additions, the National League added a club in Philadelphia, rectifying a sore point that had existed since 1877, and the American Association placed a club in Columbus, Ohio.