| Sport | Baseball |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1884 |
| Ceased | 1884 |
| President | Henry Lucas |
| No. of teams | 12 |
| Country | United States |
| Last champion | St. Louis Maroons (1884) |
TheUnion Association was an American professionalbaseball league which competed withMajor League Baseball, lasting for just the 1884 season. St. Louis won the pennant and joined theNational League the following season.
Seven of the twelve teams who were in the Association at some point during the season did not play a full schedule: four teams folded during the season and were replaced, while Chicago moved to Pittsburgh in late August.
The league was founded in September 1883[1] by the young St. Louis millionaireHenry Lucas, who was eventually named the league's president, with ownerTom Pratt of thePhiladelphia franchise serving as vice-president andWarren W. White of theWashington franchise as secretary.[2]
After being appointed president, Lucas bought the best available players for hisSt. Louis franchise at the expense of the rest of the league, which represented an obvious conflict-of-interest situation: the Maroons subsequently opened the season with 20 straight wins, and finished with a record of 94–19 (.832 winning percentage), winning the pennant by 21 games after having clinched it with five weeks to play.
The league not only suffered from lopsided talent distribution, but also instability - four franchises folded during the season, forcing the league to scramble to replace them with three teams from lower leagues and one new team, while Chicago moved to Pittsburgh mid-season - and a poorly drafted schedule, which saw the league derisively dubbed "The Onion League" by its detractors in the two established leagues. The list of franchise movements is as follows:
On January 15, 1885, at a scheduled UA meeting in Milwaukee, only the Milwaukee and Kansas City franchises showed up, and the league was promptly disbanded.[3]
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 theSt. Louis Browns were a power in theAmerican Association.
The lone survivor of the Union moved to Indianapolis and became the Hoosiers after 1886, having compiled records of 36–72 and 43–79 in St. Louis, and they played another three seasons before folding, with records of 37–89, 50–85 and 59–75 for a .360 win percentage in the NL, and an all-time franchise winning percentage of .432. 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 didnot jump to the new league:Charles Radbourn. With a schedule of a little over 100 games, most teams employed two regular pitchers, and theProvidence Grays in theNational League featured Radbourn andCharlie Sweeney. According to the 1991 bookGlory 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 given a raise and 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 59 games (a record) during the regular season; he has since been credited with another win for 60 that season. For an encore, he also won all three games of 1884's version of theWorld Series, pitching every inning of a sweep of theNew York Metropolitans of theAmerican Association. His performance in 1884, along with a generally strong career and an overall record of 309-194 (.614), assured Radbourn his place in theBaseball Hall of Fame.
The best hitter of the 1884 Union Association wasFred Dunlap of the Maroons, while star pitchers for the UA includedJim McCormick,Charlie Sweeney,Dupee Shaw andHugh Daily.
Notable players that made their debut in the Union Association includedTommy McCarthy, who was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1946, andJack Clements, the only man in baseball history to play a full career as a left-handed catcher.[4] Switch-pitcherTony Mullane attempted to sign with the Maroons, but the Browns had areserve clause on Mullane, and he relented after he was threatened withbanishment from the NL if he signed.
The Union Association saw two no-hitters in its brief existence: one byDick Burns of the Outlaw Reds on August 26 and one byEd Cushman of the Brewers on September 28. On July 7, Hugh Daily struck out 19 Boston Reds in a nine-inning game, a major league record that would stand for 102 years, untilRoger Clemens struck out 20 batters in a game in 1986.Henry Porter and Dupee Shaw got 18-strikeout games. The Chicago Browns executed atriple play on June 19.
Union AssociationAs teams dissolved and were replaced by others, taking over their games on the schedule, Union Association standings were printed in contemporary newspapers with a total of eight teams.
Under this system, Altoona and Kansas City were counted as one team, as were Chicago/Pittsburgh/St. Paul and Philadelphia/Wilmington/Milwaukee. In fact, the Chicago team had moved to Pittsburgh mid-way through the season, maintaining the same team ownership and player roster; the league's other team changes involved entirely new teams taking over the scheduled games for a team that folded.
The final standings for the Union Association's 1884 season, when regarded as an eight-team league, were:
| Team | W | L | Pct. | GB | Home | Road |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| St. Louis Maroons | 94 | 19 | .832 | — | 49–6 | 45–13 |
| Cincinnati Outlaw Reds | 69 | 36 | .657 | 21 | 35–17 | 34–19 |
| Baltimore Monumentals | 58 | 47 | .552 | 32 | 29–21 | 29–26 |
| Boston Reds | 58 | 51 | .532 | 34 | 34–22 | 24–29 |
| Chicago Browns/Pittsburgh Stogies /St. Paul Saints | 43 | 56 | .434 | 43 | 21–19 | 22–37 |
| Washington Nationals (UA) | 47 | 65 | .420 | 46½ | 36–27 | 11–38 |
| Philadelphia Keystones /Wilmington Quicksteps /Milwaukee Brewers | 31 | 66 | .320 | 55 | 23–31 | 8–35 |
| Altoona Mountain Citys /Kansas City Cowboys | 22 | 82 | .212 | 67½ | 17–35 | 5–47 |
When each individual team is considered separately (a situation that was not in force in 1884), the Union Association standings look like this:
| Team | W | L | Pct. | GB | Home | Road |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| St. Louis Maroons | 94 | 19 | .832 | — | 49–6 | 45–13 |
| Cincinnati Outlaw Reds | 69 | 36 | .657 | 21 | 35–17 | 34–19 |
| Baltimore Monumentals | 58 | 47 | .552 | 32 | 29–21 | 29–26 |
| Boston Reds | 58 | 51 | .532 | 34 | 34–22 | 24–29 |
| Milwaukee Brewers | 8 | 4 | .667 | 35½ | 8–4 | 0–0 |
| St. Paul Saints | 2 | 6 | .250 | 39½ | 0–0 | 2–6 |
| Chicago Browns/Pittsburgh Stogies | 41 | 50 | .451 | 42 | 21–19 | 20–31 |
| Altoona Mountain Citys | 6 | 19 | .240 | 44 | 6–12 | 0–7 |
| Wilmington Quicksteps | 2 | 16 | .111 | 44½ | 1–6 | 1–10 |
| Washington Nationals (UA) | 47 | 65 | .420 | 46½ | 36–27 | 11–38 |
| Philadelphia Keystones | 21 | 46 | .313 | 50 | 14–21 | 7–25 |
| Kansas City Cowboys | 16 | 63 | .203 | 61 | 11–23 | 5–40 |
Although the league is currently conventionally listed as a major league, this status has been questioned[5] by a number of modern baseball historians, most notablyBill James inThe New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, who found that the contemporarybaseball guides did not consider the Union Association to be a major league: the earliest record James found of the Union Association being referred to as a major league wasErnest Lanigan'sThe Baseball Cyclopedia, published in 1922.
While the league had a number of major league players (on the St. Louis franchise, at least), the league's overall talent and organization was notably inferior to that of the two established major leagues. Of the 272 players in the Association, 107 (39.34%) never played in another major league, while 72 (26.47%) playedvery briefly (less than 300 at bats and/or 50 hits) in other major leagues, and 79 (29.04%) had longer careers but little success in other major leagues.[6]
The league's only star player,Fred Dunlap, led the league in batting average with .412 (86 points higher than his second-best season, and 120 points higher than his career average), and also led the league in on-base percentage, slugging percentage, runs scored, hits, total bases, and home runs (with 13, typical for the era).
After the Association folded, Dunlap never hit higher than .274 or more than seven home runs in a season until he retired in 1891, another measure of the inferior quality of the Union Association. In point of fact, if the 1884 UA season is excluded from his career totals, Dunlap's career batting average was .276 (a drop of sixteen points), and he hit 28 career home runs (a loss of nearly one-third of his career total).
However, Richard Hershberger, responding to James in theBaseball Research Journal, has argued that the UA should be considered a major league because the then-existing major leagues, theNational League (NL) and theAmerican Association (AA), treated it as a significant competitor: "The AA added teams to block the UA. The established leagues changed their own rules via the Day resolutions [to enforce thereserve clause to ban players who played in the UA]. They were forced to pay higher salaries. TheAA Washingtons were run out of town by the UA. TheNL Clevelands were brought to the brink and forced to sell out. Finally, the NL paid Lucas off by bringing him into the league, risking renewed war with the AA. In short, we should regard the Union Association as a major league because the National League and American Association regarded it as a major threat. They were in a position to know."[7]
