The Players League: History, Clubs, Ballplayers, and Statistics (review)

Ed Kozarek died shortly after delivering the manuscript to the publisher, and final arrangements on this book were completed by his brother. In many ways this remains an incomplete, loosely written, and not thoroughly organized piece of work.

The Players League was a most important phenomenon in the transition years of late-nineteenth-century professional baseball. Kozarek carefully—and with some effectiveness—ties together the evolution of the game, the impact of the reserve clause and American and Union Associations of the 1880s, and the subsequent attempt led by John Montgomery Ward to create yet another challenge to the supremacy of the National League. The Players League and its challenge ended the impact of the American Association and ushered in a decidedly difficult decade of turmoil in the National League.

Kozarek carries forward a rather objective review of the need for a Players League, which offered players a role in management and a broader control over their own fortunes and which presented another challenge to the reserve clause that had been instituted in the National League in 1879. This was the next-to-last challenge to the rule of governance that remained firmly in the control of owners until the 1970s. Kozarek looks clearly at the role of the Brotherhood in the mid-1880s and concludes that chapter of player relations with the faulty, undercapitalized creation of the Players League.

Kozarek articulates intrinsic reasons that the Players League failed: 1) a lack of money, 2) inadequate and hastily constructed fields, 3) a dissembled governance structure, and 4) an inadequate head. Frank Brunell, former sports editor for the Chicago Tribune, had neither the power nor the structural authority to rule the league into permanence. Kozarek also blames Arlie Latham for losing the original list of American Association players who had agreed to play in the challenging league.

Kozarek does a good job for about fifty pages, relating the reasons the league came into existence. The rest of the manuscript is an unnecessarily long account of each individual player, who they played for, what they did before the league came into existence, and their successes or failures after the league. Most players had been in either the National League or the American Association. The exodus to the Players League opened opportunities in the National League as well, allowing a rookie Cy Young to begin his run toward the record for most Major League victories ever. The player records are solidly put together, using SABRmetrics to place them into a longer-term context. Based on the players about whom I have some knowledge, Kozarek does a credible job of outlining their role before, during, and after the Players League's existence.

The book could have been improved if it had included more about the ebb and flow of the season and its premier games; the history of franchises and why, for example, the preseason favorite Chicago Pirates did not succeed; the qualities of play; and the specific by-play between player-managers and "backers," or financiers, who provided operating capital. The Players League is an important though brief event in the evolution of the game, and the definitive story of this league is yet to be written.