The League That Failed cuts through the haze that surrounds 19th-century
baseball history, and portrays a classic, colorful era when baseball was
chaotic, struggled over by players, coaches, sportswriters, fans, and
owners. It recounts the stormy atmosphere after the Inter-League Wars of
1890 and 1891, when the victorious National League made a bald-faced bid
to monopolize major league baseball in the United States, succeeding for
eight years with the self-styled "Big League," which dominated the game
while simultaneously gaining infamous notoriety for such high-handed
acts as unilaterally capping players' salaries, failing to protect
umpires from physical abuse, and threatening city governments if
ballpark attendance dipped. By the turn of the century, weakening
financial returns and internecine squabbles allowed an interloping
upstart, the American League, to gain a toehold, forcing the National
League to abandon its fantasies of monopolizing American baseball. An
agreement between the two leagues in 1903 ushered in a long era of
prosperity and stability under the umbrella of a familiar dual major
league system. Voigt explores the historical origins of baseball from
stick-and-ball games, through the popular players, significant rules
changes, and seedy business practices of the final years of the 19th
century, years that were crucial to the formation of baseball as it is
played today. The League That Failed scrutinizes the active promotion of
a new, grandiose baseball atmosphere of the "Big League," that included
improved stadiums and the increasing importance of until then unknown
sports figures: the concessionaire and the sportswriter. The League That
Failed convincingly insists that many of the vexing problems of
contemporary baseball (falling attendance, embattled club owners, bitter
player strikes, and tension between franchises over profitability)
originate with the practices of the "Big League" years. Gloomy scenarios
touted by many sportswriters today eerily resemble sentim
