With college football and college basketball getting plenty of attention in TWIFS write-ups, the amateur and minor leagues that develop talent for FABL and the NAHC are much more of a mystery. As we wait for the 1972 baseball season to be completed, and we edge even closer to the resumption of weekly sims and human General Managers in 1975, we thought we would take a closer look at the supply chain for the Federally Aligned Baseball League and the North American Hockey Association.
Like football and basketball, baseball does draw some of its talent from the AIAA (American Intercollegiate Athletic Association) with more than 200 teams scattered through multiple levels including 131 that compete at the Division 1 level and a berth in the Collegiate World Championship Series, which is a season ending 16-team tournament.
AIAA baseball rivalled college football for attention in the early days of the sport, but its significance has dropped as more and more often FABL clubs are selecting high school players, most of whom sign and turn pro immediately. As a result, the AIAA College World Championship Series receives almost no attention when compared to college football and basketball.
During the human GM era TWIFS would use a fairly basic excel spreadsheet to determine the CWCS winner but during the yearly advances -due to a lack of time- I just created an OOTP AIAA league and simmed it out, making small adjustments each season to team talent levels to account for the top prospects in the Figment Universe, which runs in a completely separate file.
We used to have All-Americans in baseball and they were selected based on their "created" stats from the draft classes, but that was dropped, also for time reasons, when we went to the fast-forward. For posterity, here are the college baseball champions each year. The pre-1932 winners were from a feeder league and when that was abandoned next came the excel sheet and then in the 1950s and from 1963 to today it was with the separate college file. The whole idea of the college WCS and the All-Americans was to further flesh out the Figment universe since draft class support is an area lacking in OOTP
Baseball does have an extended minor league system with each FABL club having five affiliates scattered over 13 different minor leagues.
The three Triple-A level leagues and many of the lower level loops enjoy a rich history of their own. The Great Western League perhaps is the most colorful as in 1946 it broke away from the minor league hierarchy and declared itself a major league, with the lofty ambition of going head to head against the Federal and Continental Associations.
It survived four seasons as a major league with the San Francisco Hawks winning the inaugural league championship, known as the Bigsby Cup after Thomas Bigsby who was the owner of the Los Angeles Stars and the only President the GWL had during its brief tenure as a major league. The other three titles were won by the Oakland Grays.
In 1950, the west coast major league experiment failed and it went back to being a minor league affiliated under the FABL umbrella but five of the eight cities that were part of the 1946-50 experiment - Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle- are now home to FABL clubs.
The AAA Century League and AA Dixie League actually pre-date FABL as each was formed before William Whitney brokered a peace between rival big leagues and the current structure we know today as FABL was born in 1892. A full eight years before that the Century and Dixie League's took flight. The Century League folded in 1965 but was reborn as a new league three years ago while the Dixie League has continued uninterrupted every year since 1884 and is the longest run professional baseball league in the world.
All eight of the original Dixie League clubs are still alive in some form today. Some have relocated, some have switched leagues and four of the original Dixie League franchises are still in the same city that they were formed in back in 1884 and have never switched leagues. That would be the Birmingham, Knoxville, Memphis and Nashville clubs.
The Nashville Chieftans are a Montreal Saints affiliate and have won a record 15 Dixie League titles. Next are the Knoxville Knights, who had a long affiliation with the old Brooklyn Kings and now work with the New York Imperials. The Knights were originally known as the Aces and have won the league title 13 times. Memphis, has 8 titles and is now called the Cougars after their parent club, the Chicago Cougars. The club had previously been known as the Blue Stockings and Excelsiors. The final original club is Birmingham, who have always been known as the Ironman and long been partnered with the Pittsburgh Miners. Perhaps it is a fitting partnership as the Miners have not won a World Championship Series since 1901 and the Ironman have struggled to break similar streak. Birmingham won 8 Dixie League titles in the first 22 years of the loop including six in a row, but they have not won a Dixie League pennant since 1905- a span of 66 years.
The first Dixie League champion, the Louisville Stallions, are also still alive today but they have a new moniker and have switched leagues. The Stallions were rebranded the Derbies and moved to the Union League, which is a AAA level loop, in 1906. Louisville won 5 titles in the Dixie League and 11 more on the Union League where they have long been the top farm club of the Philadelphia Keystones.
Here are the minor leagues association with FABL currently.
There is also an international aspect to the Figment baseball universe. A Caribbean winter league ran for much of the 1950s and into the early 1960s and may appear again in the future. There have also been several leagues based in Japan over the years with the longest running one being the Baseball Association of Nippon, which was debut in 1950 out of the ashes of the old Japanese Baseball Federation and continues to this day, operating with 12 teams.
The most successful team is the Kobe Bulls, who can trace their history back to the birth of big league baseball in Japan when they were one of the original JBF teams that debuted in 1938. They won three titles before that league was shelved in 1944 and have won six more in the BAN, all coming in the last eight years.
The greatest player in the BAN is widely considered to be Susumu Ishii, who is the all-time leader in most career batting stats include hits with 2,685 as of this writing. He is still active at the age of 39, is a 3-time league MVP and 10-time all-star selection. The outfielder began his career at the age of 20 with the Vesutan Bees before moving to the Sapporo Bears in 1966. The top pitcher is also currently 38 years of age. That would be Arata Komatsu, a five-time Kagawa Award winner (top pitcher) who has pitched for Sapporo and Kobe. He leads Japan baseball with 230 career victories.
A number of American players have spent time in the Baseball Association of Nippon with the most successful being Pat Ponder, an infielder who played his college ball at Eastern State and spent a couple of years in the low minors before heading to the Far East in 1954. Another successful one would be outfielder Hank Dunham, who is still playing in Japan for the Hosho Reliables and has for the past decade after a failed attempt to move up the chain in the Washington Eagles system. Dunham is a 4-time BAN all-star and was joined on the Reliables a year ago by Billy McCullough.
There are a few players with plenty of FABL experience currently playing in Japan. William Davis is a 37-year-old pitcher who went 6-13 last season for Sapparo. Prior to that he won a pair of WCS titles with the Philadelphia Keystones and had a career FABL record of 156-131. Dick Champ once won 19 games in a season for the Chicago Cougars and is a 4-time FABL all-star who has spent the past three seasons pitching for the Nagasaki Stars and Hank Walker, who is now pitching for Vesutan, won 110 FABL games while pitching for three different teams.
To date only one Japanese born player has ever played in the major leagues. However, it was well before the days of FABL as Masanori Murakami was a first basemen who appeared in 69 games in the 1870's for the Philadelphia Centennials.
BASEBALL ASSOCIATION OF NIPPON
CANADIAN AMATEUR HOCKEY ASSOCIATION SUPPLIES MOST NAHC TALENT
In the early days teams in the North American Hockey Association recruited players from a wide range of junior teams scattered across Canada. That changed in 1950 when a dozen of the top junior clubs got together to form the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association. It was considered a "Tier One" league in Canada and, much like the NAHC, it holds a draft to divvy up the top 15-year-old hockey players in the country each year. The CAHA continues to thrive and nearly every player to play in the NAHC since has got his start in the CAHA. Among the CAHA stars now shining in the NAHC include Detroit Motors great Hobie Barrell, who led the Halifax Mariners to a CAHA title in 1958 and Danny Cabbell. Cabbell is with the New York Shamrocks now and coming off an 87-point season as a 25-year-old but before joining the Greenshirts spent five seasons with the Sherbrooke Industrials and is currently the CAHA's all-time scoring leader with 473 points.
Since its formation in 1950 the CAHA has featured 12 teams as that was more than sufficient to provide top level talent to the NAHC and the two minor leagues. However, the sport has grown rapidly in recent years with the NAHC growing to 14 teams and more minor league clubs than ever before. Nothing has been confirmed, but there is expectations that the CAHA will expand in the near future.
Parity has ruled the CAHA as 11 of the 12 teams- the Windsor Dominions being the lone exception- have won the league title at least once. Two teams, the Verdun Argonauts and Sherbrooke Industrials, led the way with four titles each. The most recent champion was the Kingston Cadets, who claimed their third crown by doubling the Kitchener Roosters recently in game seven of the 1971-72 league finals. The hero for Kingston, was 20-year-old defenseman Craig MacDonald. A New York Shamrocks draftee, MacDonald scored the series clinching goal and also had two assists in the deciding game.
Here are the teams of the CAHA
There are also three minor leagues for players not quite ready for the NAHC. The top level is the Hockey Association of America, which has been around since the 1920s and contains the primary affiliate for most of the NAHC clubs. The Cincinnati Bobcats, who only joined the HAA four years ago and are affiliated with the St Louis Sawyers, have won each of the last two playoff titles. The Bobcats swept through the current playoffs without losing a game. The Springfield Hornets, who have been the Boston Bees top farm club for more than two decades, lead the HAA with six titles.
The Great West Hockey League was once an elite league but with GWL cities Los Angeles, San Francisco and Vancouver leaving the league when they were granted NAHC expansion teams, the GWL's reputation has dropped quite substantially. The Spokane Lumberjacks have been the GWL champion each of the past three years while the Portland Ports, with 9, have claimed the most titles. Pete Bernier, a long-time Chicago Packer who is now with Quebec and Tim Bernard, who is also with the expansion Citadels after a number of years in Montreal, are two of the best players to suit up for the Ports.
In 1966 a new league was created, called the Prairie Hockey League. Founded in Western Canada originally as a semi-pro league, it now has 8 teams with four Canadian and four American clubs ranging from Edmonton in the north to Seattle in the west and Kansas City in the south. The Regina Wheat Kings have won each of the past three league titles with 24-year-old captain Ray Leblanc, who was drafted by the Detroit Motors but never signed, leading the way.
So that is just a bit of background on the minor league structure for hockey and baseball. The 1972 baseball recap will be the focus of the next update.