The Masters Tournament is approaching a milestone its stewards have carefully tried to keep at bay for a half century.

When the deadline for inviting top-50 players hits at the conclusion of this week’s events, the tournament field will be on the brink – if not there – of triple figures for only the fourth time in its history and the first time in 49 years.

Currently 95 players are already qualified for the season’s first major, but four players not already invited are stationed inside the top 50 this week and two others are loitering just a top-10 finish outside the magic number with one week remaining to secure a spot.

The Masters will also automatically invite the tournament winners of this week’s Valero Texas Open and next week’s Shell Houston Open. If those PGA Tour winners are not already qualified, the 100-man mark will be breached.

“We’re wild and crazy about field size and we watch it like a hawk,” Masters chairman Billy Payne said in 2014 announcing the creation of the Latin American Amateur Championship, which added a seventh amateur to this year’s field. “You want exactly the right number. We’re going to figure out how to make it work no matter how many qualify.”

The last time the Masters field eclipsed 100 was in 1966, when 103 players teed it up. The record was 109 in 1962. The first time the field at Augusta National topped the century mark was in 1957, the year the tournament implemented the 36-hole cut with 101 invited participants.

It’s not a figure Augusta National prefers to accommodate.

“I would say that we are, of course, happy to have all hundred of them here,” Payne said the last time the field threatened to tip the scales in 2011 with 99 entries. “At the same time, looking at the number – freestanding, independent of the individuals who comprise it – it is difficult. It is borderline to be able to present the kind of competition that we want to. It is more than we normally have – the most we have had in some 40-something years.

“We say every year in response to that question, that we look and we study the qualifications, which we do. ... There is a maximum number of competitors for which we can give the experience that we want them to have and do it in a way that’s manageable. The hundred pushes that limit quite significantly.”

Since those three supersized fields in the era when the Masters was first entering the television broadcast era, the club has continually manipulated its qualifications criteria to, as Payne said two years ago, “maintain Bobby Jones’s desire to keep the Masters an intimate gathering of the world’s best competitors and to afford all players a reasonable expectation of completion in the reduced hours of sunlight in early spring.”

There have been some incremental contractions and expansions as the tournament gradually worked to draw the best possible field from around the world. After the 1966 Masters, when a record 64 players made the cut, the tournament started to be more restrictive with its invitations. The next year’s field was only 83 players.

The field size averaged 77.9 during the 1970s and 84.4 during the 1980s. By the 1990s, fields ranged from 83 in 1992 to 96 in 1999 – averaging almost 88 players.

The 1999 Masters, however, was the start of watershed uptick in the field size when chairman Hootie Johnson began inviting players based on top-50 world ranking and expanded PGA Tour money leaders instead of tournament winners in 2000.

“Well, candidly, I think that the changes we’ve made have strengthened our field,” Johnson said in 1999. “It was a combination of those things that helped strengthen the field and kept it at an acceptable field for us number-wise.”

Only once since – when 89 players teed it up in 2002 – has the field dipped below 90 players. The average field size in the 16 years since the world rankings were included is 94.4.

At that number, the club was forced to start using threesomes instead of twosomes, flipping the morning and afternoon groupings the first two rounds.

“We think that in twos, you’re right on the margin at about 90 and it was better as far as the tournament is concerned to go to threes,” said Will Nicholson, the former chairman of the competition committee.

Payne made further tweaks to the qualification criteria, restoring automatic invitations to certain PGA Tour winners in 2008 and expanding that in 2014 to include fall events in the wrap-around schedule. He’s also added two new amateur champions from Asia-Pacific and Latin America. The U.S. Public Links was played for the last time in 2014, so that invitation will go away next year.

To accommodate the increased pool of potential winners, the Masters tightened its return offerings to top finishers in the previous Masters and other majors and eliminated the money list category. But it’s still pushing the limit for the tournament to continue sending every player off the first tee instead of splitting them off both the front and back nines.

It looked like the Masters might luck out with the first five PGA Tour events of 2015 being won by players already qualified. But four of the past six qualifying events have added winners to the field, with Matt Every becoming the 95th player with his second consecutive victory at Bay Hill on Sunday.

Three international players are guaranteed to be in the top 50 at the end of the week – India’s Anirban Lahiri (No. 35), Austria’s Bernd Wiesberger (41) and South Africa’s Branden Grace (43), pushing the field to 98. England’s Paul Casey is currently No. 49 and will sit out the Texas Open hoping two players don’t pass him and knock him out of the top 50.

Two more players are loitering within striking distance with perhaps top-15 finishes in Texas – No. 52 Marc Warren and No. 53 Harris English. Six top-70 players are in the European Tour field in Morocco and could reach the top 50 with a victory.

Assuming four-time champion Tiger Woods doesn’t extend his current leave of absence and withdraw, the worst-case scenario for Augusta is that the field reaches 102 with five players making it in off the top 50 list and two new PGA Tour winners qualify in San Antonio and Houston.

The excessive field could prompt the Masters to take another look at its future qualifications, though the retirement of Ben Crenshaw after this Masters and Tom Watson in the near future along with the loss of the Public Links exemption will ease some of the strain on the tee sheet.

But 100 is a breaking point the Masters won’t let become a habit.