[FuzzyRussianHat]

“In Soviet Russia, baseball plays you!”

When the European Baseball Federation was being formed and discussed, there were initial overtures to include teams within the Soviet Union and the Soviet-aligned eastern states. Ultimately, that fell through due to the geopolitical conflicts of the time. But plenty throughout the Second World had taken to baseball and saw the massive potential the game had there. Leaders throughout the USSR and its allies began planning their own multi-national baseball organization in the 1950s.

They looked at the successes of the EBF and other world leagues and tried to put together what they thought would be successful within the socialist ideology and framework. Leaders in Moscow especially wanted to create something strong that could compete with the US and Europe on the world stage in an attempt to flex about the superiority of their way of doing things. Eventually, what came to be was called Eurasian Professional Baseball (EPB). To that end, the new league would also join the Global Baseball Alliance sanctioning body to facilitate participation for the member states in the World Baseball Championship.

The original and prevailing format from its founding in 1955 until the 2000 mass exodus would be 32 total teams divided into two 16-team leagues. There would be the European League and Asian League, each split into two eight-team geographic divisions. Due to the massive amount of landmass between the two, the leagues would not participate in any interleague play. Unlike the EBF, EPB used the designated hitter for both leagues. The amateur draft would use a regional format like many of their competitors The postseason would see both division champs and two wild cards from each league with a best-of-five first round hosted by the division champ; a 2-3-2 league championship and the 2-3-2 “Soviet Series” for the overall title.

The European League's North Division would feature Russian teams from Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Kazan; along with Minsk (Belarus), Warsaw (Poland), Helsinki (Finland), Vilnius (Lithuania) and Riga (Latvia). The South Division had Kyiv and Kharkiv (Ukraine), Budapest (Hungary), Prague (Czechia), Bratislava (Slovakia), Tirana (Albania), Bucharest (Romania), and Sofia (Bulgaria). At the time, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, and Latvia were states within the Soviet Union, while the others mentioned were aligned with and/or heavily influenced by the Soviets.

In the Asian League, the North Division had seven Russian teams; Omsk, Chelyabinsk, Yekaterinburg, Ufa, Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk, and Irkutsk. The eighth member was the Mongolian capital Ulaanbaatar. The South Division had teams from what would later become the independent states of central Asia and the Caucasus. The teams were in Tbilisi (Georgia), Baku (Azerbaijan), Yerevan (Armenia), Tashkent (Uzbekistan), Almaty (Kazakhstan), Bishkek (Kyrgyzstan), Dushanbe (Tajikistan), and Asgabat (Turkmenistan).