Jon Springer

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.… (meer)

Want to know the history of the Mets by uniform number from 1962-2007? Mets by the Numbers (2008) is the book for you! The book is a collaboration between Jon Springer, mastermind behind the Mets by the Numbers website that's graced the internet for the past decade, and Matt Silverman who's worked on several books about the Mets.

The book is an odyssey through Mets history uniform numbers, focusing on the best players to wear each uniform and many of the worst. Sidebars rank the best performances in various statistical categories and the idiosyncrasies of how players chose there numbers and sometimes how the numbers chose them. This is quick, easy and fun read and also a good reference that should be on the shelf in every public library in the Tri-State area. In Boston, not so much (I had to special order my copy through Brookline Booksmith).… (meer)