Author: Jon Springer
Title: Once Upon a Team: The Epic Rise and Historic Fall of Baseball’s Wilmington Quicksteps
Publication Info: Sports Publishing (2018)
Previously Read by the Same Author: Mets By the Numbers
Summary/Review:
Generally, I would not be prone to pick up a book about 19th-century baseball in Wilmington, Delaware, but I know the author, and I appreciate his writing on baseball. Jon Springer uses a wealth of primary documents to provide a lot of detail and quotes about the rough and tumble early era of professional baseball. It’s common to think that “baseball as a business” is a recent phenomenon, but in these pages are stories of players jumping from team to team for better contracts, teams moving to new cities hoping for more profits, and snarky sportswriters covering it all.
With a preamble on the history of amateur and professional baseball clubs in Wilmington, the heart of the book focuses on the 1884 season of the newly formed Wilmington Quicksteps. 1884 is a year where professional baseball supersaturated America’s cities. The National League and their rival American Association were joined by the upstart Union Association. The new league set out to challenge the reserve clause, the means by which teams retained rights to players after their contracts expired, keeping players in a state of indentured servitude. Nevertheless, the Union Association found it difficult to lure away talented players from the two existing leagues.
The Wilmington Quicksteps began 1884 as part of the Eastern League, a minor league that was a forerunner of today’s International League. Lead by colorful characters like Oyster Burns and The Only Nolan, the Quicksteps dominated the rest of the teams in the league. The downside to this is that the team was so far ahead they had trouble drawing spectators and found themselves in a financial pickle. The Quicksteps played exhibition games against major league teams passing through Wilmington in order to bring in spectators and money, and often played competitive games.
By August, with clubs in the Union Association folding, and the Quicksteps seemingly too good for the Eastern League and in need of a financial boost, it seemed like a natural decision for Wilmington to join the Union Association as a replacement team. But fortune was not on Wilmington’s side. They played only 18 games in the Union Association and won only 2 of them. The experience brought the Quicksteps to their demise, and the Union Association was unable to return for the 1885 season.
This well-researched book is an engaging read and will be of interest to anyone curious about baseball history.
Recommended books: A Game of Brawl by Bill Felber, Ed Delahanty in the Emerald Age of Baseball by Jerrold Casway, and Connecticut Baseball: The Best of the Nutmeg State by Don Harrison
Rating: ***1/2
Panorama of the Mountains 