The
Union Association was a league in
Major League Baseball which lasted for
only one season in
1884. St. Louis
won the pennant and joined the
National
League the following season. Chicago moved to Pittsburgh in
late August, and four teams folded during the season and were
replaced.
Although the league is conventionally listed as a major league,
this status has been questioned by a number of modern baseball
historians, most notably
Bill James in
The Bill
James Historical Baseball Abstract. The league had a number of
major league
players (on the St. Louis franchise, at
least), but the league's overall talent and organization was
notably inferior to that of the two established major leagues. For
example, the league's only "star" player,
Fred Dunlap, never achieved similar success in
any other major league.
A relatively modern comparison could be the
World Football League of the early
1970s contrasted with the
National Football League. The WFL
similarly resorted to putting clubs in small cities and collapsed
in the middle of a season.
Union Association franchises
Midseason replacement teams
History
The league was founded in September 1883 by the young St. Louis
millionaire
Henry Lucas. His
favoritism toward his own team doomed the league from the
beginning. He acquired the best available players for his St. Louis
franchise at the expense of the rest of the league. The Maroons won
94 games while losing only 19, for an .832 percentage. For
comparison, if extrapolated to the length of a modern 162-game
schedule, that would translate to 134 wins.
The lopsided competition and the revolving-door nature of its
franchises and schedules was a continual problem, and the league
was derisively dubbed "The Onion League" by its detractors in the
two established leagues. Four different franchises folded during
the season, forcing the league to scramble to replace them from
lower classification leagues or from scratch. The
Altoona team was the first to fold in
May, and was replaced by a newly-formed team in
Kansas City. After
the
Philadelphia franchise
folded in August, the Unions recruited the
Wilmington Quicksteps from the Eastern
League; the Quicksteps lost many of their best players, and dropped
out of the Association in September. The Chicago franchise had
moved to Pittsburgh in August and finally disbanded about the same
time as Wilmington, and both teams were replaced by two teams from
the disbanding Northwest League,
Milwaukee and
St. Paul. On January 15, 1885, at a
scheduled UA meeting in Milwaukee, only the Milwaukee and Kansas
City franchises showed up. The league was promptly disbanded.
The St. Louis franchise itself was deemed to be strong enough to
enter the National League in 1885, but it faced heavy competition
within the city, as the
St. Louis
Browns were a power in the
American Association.
Thus, the lone survivor of the Union folded after the 1886 season,
having compiled records of 36-72 and 43-79 in NL play. These
figures perhaps reveal the gulf in class between the UA and the
established major leagues.
Perhaps the most obvious impact of the short-lived league was on
the career of a player who did
not jump to the new league:
Charles Radbourn. With a schedule
of a little over 100 games, most teams employed two regular
pitchers. The
Providence Grays'
entry of the
National League
featured Radbourn and
Charlie
Sweeney. According to the book
Glory Fades Away, by
Jerry Lansche, Sweeney fell out of grace with the Providence team
in late July after he refused to be replaced in a game while drunk,
and was expelled. Rather than come crawling back, Sweeney signed
with Lucas' team, leaving Radbourn by himself. Leveraging his
situation, Radbourn pledged to stay with the club and be the sole
primary pitcher, if he would be granted free agency at season's
end. Radbourn, who already had 24 wins at that point to Sweeney's
17, pitched nearly every game after that, and went on to win an
astounding 60 games during the regular season. For an encore, he
won all three games of 1884's version of the
World Series, pitching every inning of a sweep
of the
New York Metropolitans
of the
American
Association.
His performance in 1884, along with a
generally strong career topping 300 wins overall, assured his place
in the Baseball Hall of
Fame
.
Notable players
The best hitter of the 1884 Union Association was
Fred Dunlap of the Maroons. Dunlap led the
league in batting average, on-base percentage, slugging percentage,
runs scored, hits, total bases, and home runs (with just 13,
typical for the era). Dunlap hit .412 in 1884, but after the league
folded, he never hit more than .270 in a career that ran through
1891 - another measure of the inferior quality of the Union
Association. Star pitchers for the UA included
Jim McCormick,
Charlie Sweeney,
Dupee
Shaw and
Hugh Daily. Players that
made their debut in the Union Association included
Jack Clements, remembered as the only man in
baseball history to play a full career as a left-handed
catcher.
Highlights
The Union Association saw two no-hitters in its brief existence:
one by
Dick Burns of the Outlaw Reds on
August 26 and one by
Ed Cushman of the
Brewers on Sept. 28. On July 7, Hugh Daily struck out 19 Boston
Reds in a nine-inning game, an "MLB" record that would stand for
102 years, until
Roger Clemens struck
out 20 batters in a game in 1986.
Henry Porter and Dupee Shaw got
18-strikeout games. The Chicago Browns executed a
triple play on June 19.
Standings
References and external links
- David Pietrusza Major Leagues: The Formation, Sometimes
Absorption and Mostly Inevitable Demise of 18 Professional Baseball
Organizations, 1871 to Present Jefferson (NC): McFarland &
Company, 1991. ISBN 0-89950-590-2
- Union Association at baseball-reference.com.
- Union Association and 1884 in baseball at baseballlibrary.com
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