David Nemec
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By: The Lyons Press
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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 5
Average rating: 4.5 of 5
Nemec and Rucker bring a long dead baseball league to life 4 out of 5 stars.
11 of 11 people found this review helpful.
Many a baseball fan, frustrated by conniving team owners and spoiled multimillionaire players, must have wished that someone would start a new baseball league. In 1882, someone did--and the resulting American Association provided stiff competition for the then dominant National League for the following ten years.The League, to be sure, quickly coopted the Association in some ways. The two circuits agreed to honor each others' player contracts--including the "reserve clause" which bound players to their teams even after their contracts expired--and the league champions met in a postseason playoff which foreshadowed the Twentieth Century World Series. The leagues competed for fans, however, with entirely salutary results--lower admission prices, Sunday baseball, and better umpiring and administration.
Most A.A. players have receded into the mists of time. The only player in "The Beer and Whisky League" whom most readers will recognize will be ! Charlie Comiskey, the player-manager of the St. Louis Browns who subsequently founded the Chicago White Sox. Nemec and Rucker, however, do an outstanding job of bringing the lost players to life and involving the reader in long forgotten pennant races and controversies. Any fan with an interest in baseball history can enjoy this book.
"The Beer and Whisky League" features a large number of photographs accompanied by captions illuminating interesting anecdotes about A.A. players and teams. The pictures, however, are not well integrated with the text.
The brief presence of African American players in the American Association--sixty years before Jackie Robinson--is bound to intrigue contemporary readers. Nemec and Rucker, perhaps hindered by a lack of documentary evidence, unfortunately devote only a couple of paragraphs to this aspect of Association history.
In 1890, the National League--but not the Association--attempted to impose a salary cap on its players! , who rebelled and formed yet a third major league. The th! ree leagues drove each other toward bankruptcy. The resulting financial squeeze led the League and the Association to raid each others' players and franchises, and the better heeled National League eventually prevailed. Four American Association teams defected to the National League in 1892. The Association itself folded and faded into obscurity, from which Nemec and Rucker have rescued it in this enjoyable book.
Editorial Review:
Although the American Association lasted only a decade, from 1882 to 1891, it featured some of the game's great pennant races and most notable players, and introduced innovations that its more established and powerful rival, the National League, made standard practice in time. Writer David Nemec and photographer Mark Rucker have put together a book that vividly tells the Association's story and sets a new standard for books on baseball in the 19th century.
