Justin McKinney

Justin McKinney is a Canadian baseball researcher, archivist, and author whose work focuses on nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century baseball. He grew up in Calgary, attending Calgary Cannons games, and became interested in the Baltimore Orioles through Cal Ripken Jr. and the club’s logo. His research includes biographies, unusual episodes, and attempts to recover the identities and images of players overlooked in familiar accounts.

McKinney has contributed to the Society for American Baseball Research’s Biography Project, its research publications, and the Pictorial History Research Committee. His books include Baseball’s Union Association, a history of the short-lived 1884 league, and The Shortstop Was a Crook, an account of Billy Geer’s baseball and criminal careers. Both investigate subjects whose lives and organizations require reconstruction from scattered historical records.

His SABR author profile credits him with locating photographs of more than eighty previously missing players for the organization’s Player Image Index. His biographical contributions include players such as John Coleman, Jack Farrell, and Marshall Quinton. He has also written about the Chicago Tribune’s 1915 amateur baseball contest. Alongside that formal research, he publishes stories about deceased players and unusual baseball history through Baseball Obscura.

Baseball Books

Baseball's Union Association: The Short, Strange Life of a 19th-Century Major League: McKinney reconstructs the Union Association, the rival major league that operated for one season in 1884. Backed by young St. Louis millionaire Henry V. Lucas, it challenged the established baseball organizations and recruited an uneven mix of players. The book follows the league’s creation, competition, instability, and collapse, examining an experiment that disturbed the business arrangements of professional baseball. Published in 2022.

The Union Association was organized in 1883 for the following season, entering an already contested professional market. Its founder’s willingness to challenge established interests created opportunities for players and disruption for existing clubs. The narrative examines both the ambition behind the venture and the inconsistent collection of talent it assembled. That brief season becomes a way to investigate how major-league status, financial backing, and institutional survival operated in early professional baseball. Lucas was only twenty-six when he backed the venture. The players it attracted included dissatisfied professionals and men whose strongest seasons were behind them, producing uneven competition. McKinney follows a league whose ambitions were substantial but whose ability to sustain clubs and a credible competitive structure proved much less secure.

The Shortstop Was a Crook: The Sordid Baseball Life and Crimes of Billy Geer: This biography follows William H. ‘Billy’ Geer, a nineteenth-century shortstop whose life extended from major league baseball into repeated forgery and imprisonment. McKinney reconstructs a criminal career involving numerous aliases and movement across states and countries. The account connects Geer’s playing record with the identities he adopted while pursuing social standing and attempting to evade the authorities. Published in 2026.

Geer’s criminal record complicates the task of identifying a historical ballplayer. The book’s description records at least thirty-five aliases, forgeries across dozens of states, and eight prison terms under different names. Reports placed him in South America, South Africa, and Britain as well as the United States. McKinney follows those shifting identities to connect the player with events occurring after baseball, making the biography both a sports history and an investigation of a life repeatedly concealed.