Union Association

From SoSH

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 commentators, most notably Bill James. 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 perspective, a relatively modern comparison would be the World Football League of the early 1970s contrasted with the National Football League.

1 League History
2 Notable Players
3 Highlights
4 Union Association Teams
- 4.1 Original Franchises
- 4.2 Midseason replacement teams
5 Trivia
6 External links
7 See Also

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League 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. Extrapolated to the length of a modern 162-game schedule, that would be 134 wins.

The lopsided competition and the revolving-door nature of its franchises and schedules earned the UA the dubious nickname "The Onion League." The league was desperate to fill out its schedule and began picking up strays. The St. Paul franchise was acquired from a failed minor league, and played 9 games, all on the road, trying to earn enough money to get train fare home for the players. Three other replacement franchises played 25 games or less as the UA struggled to play a full schedule. 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 then the strongest team in all of baseball. 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.

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Notable Players

The star 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 thirteen, 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.

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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.

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