Baseball’s Wildest Season: Three Leagues, Thirty-Four Teams and the Chaos of 1884 by William J. Ryczek (review)

Reviewed by: Baseball's Wildest Season: Three Leagues, Thirty-Four Teams and the Chaos of 1884 by William J. Ryczek Scott D. Peterson William J. Ryczek. Baseball's Wildest Season: Three Leagues, Thirty-Four Teams and the Chaos of 1884. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2023. 273 pp. Paperback, $45.00. Chronicling the chaos created by three major leagues and thirty-four teams is no small task, but William Ryczek has done just that in Baseball's Wildest Season. The book examines the sport of 1884, some fifteen years into its era of acknowledged professionalism. The product on the field was more like that of today than that of thirty years earlier, but the issue of sports as a viable business was still unsettled, as witnessed by the wooden ball parks, the number of teams that folded before completing the schedule, and the attitudes of the ownership class toward grown men playing a children's game for pay. Given Ryczek's impressive backlog of publications, including five books about baseball's early history, he knows the subject and clearly has done the research to marshal an impressive array of facts to include one after another about the upstart American Association (AA), the even more recent upstart Union Association (UA), and the only slightly better-established National League (NL) of 1884. The first eight chapters of the volume's nineteen provide the considerable amount of backstory required for such a task. Four of those chapter titles include quotes from the era to help establish the developing culture around the game regarding business, the Reserve Clause, managers, and umpires. The other four background titles are more direct in heralding their subjects: the game, the players, the magnates, and, inevitably, given the era, the drunks. [End Page 124] Each chapter provides an extensive list of thumbnail sketches along with occasional case studies for more focused discussion and table setting. Internally there is little logical organization to these chapters, so the reader must allow the streams of data to roll over them. Occasional tables featuring facts from all three leagues, such as in chapter three about the ages of the players, go a long way to helping the reader build a framework for the discussion of the titular season to follow. In other places the reader might lose sight of the 1884 season, as in the case in the chapter that discusses the oft-covered topics of Cap Anson's long, racially charged career and Albert Spalding's business acumen. The lead of Moses Fleetwood Walker's 1884 debut as an African American player is buried in the middle of chapter three. Chapter Four starts with a promising quote about the Reserve Clause and then moves to a discussion of the blacklists employed by the major leagues. The Reserve Clause was often enforced with blacklists, but the two are not the same thing as the organization of the chapter might imply. The case study of Charley Jones does help illustrate the murkiness surrounding the Reserve Clause as it was expanded and used to create a monopsony that effectively stripped MLB players of the right to negotiate the terms of their labor. When the chapter returns to the Reserve Clause by name, this essential element in baseball history is previewed in under one page. Ryczek quotes from the journalism of the era—one of the most effective parts of the book when this strategy is used—regarding the potential success of the UA, but he misses the opportunity to note how the journalist had effectively prophesized the advent of the Players' League six years later in response to the restrictions of the Reserve Clause and how the Brush Classification System rated the players and paid them based on their comportment on and off the field. The run-up section of the book concludes appropriately with previews of the three major leagues. When Ryczek gets to the UA, the focus of the analysis sharpens, and the depth of the discussion provides the reader with numerous quotes, citations, and relevant details. The efforts of the NL and AA to starve out the UA are outlined to the degree that one can make a comparison to how one of the...

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