The Union Association was a league in Major League Baseball which lasted for only one season in 1884. St. Louis won the pennant and joined the National League the following season. Chicago moved to Pittsburgh in late August, and four teams folded during the season and were replaced.
Although the league is conventionally listed as a major league, this status has been questioned by a number of modern baseball historians, most notably Bill James in The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract. The league had a number of major league players (on the St. Louis franchise, at least), but the league's overall talent and organization was notably inferior to that of the two established major leagues. For example, the league's only "star" player, Fred Dunlap, never achieved similar success in any other major league. In the UA's only season, Dunlap hit .412, 86 points higher than his second-best season and a whopping 120 points higher than his career average. James found that the contemporary Baseball Guides didn't consider the Union Association to be a major league either. The earliest record he could find of the Union Association as a major league was Ernest Lanigan's "The Baseball Cyclopedia", published in 1922.
A relatively modern comparison could be the World Football League of the early 1970s contrasted with the National Football League. The WFL similarly resorted to putting clubs in small cities and collapsed in the middle of a season.
There was also a minor league called the Union Association that operated from 1911 through 1914.
Read more about Union Association: History, Notable Players, Highlights, Standings
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—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)