[Darknight Smith]

Thought some of you might be interested in the league I’ve been working on for some time. (Warning: this is a pretty lengthy post...)

I wanted to redo the history of baseball, starting in 1871, with all the years normalized to modern baseball, so everybody’s on an equal footing, stats-wise. No deadball era, no homer-happy nineties—everything would be calibrated to a brand of baseball like the NL of the early-to-mid 1980s, with league averages around .255-.260, league e.r.a.’s around 4.25 or so, an average of maybe 110 homers a team. There wouldn’t be any park effects, either, so it would be easy to judge players team to team and era to era.

The problem with starting a modern-style league in 1871 is, as everybody knows, the shortage of pitchers. There are just one or two pitchers per team. Unless you’re willing to put up with fictional players mixed in with real ones, you’ve got a problem, at least until the American Association and Union Association come along in the 1880s.

In part, you can help this by giving everybody a start at the same age, so that players who in real life debuted, say, in their late twenties can get in a fuller career (Guy Hecker, for example). Also, players like Pud Galvin, who left the National League in the early, unstable years to play in other leagues that were nearly as good (in his case, the International Association in the late 1870s), would get their full careers. And OOTP will likely keep around early retirees like Al Spalding and Candy Cummings for several more seasons than they actually played.

That still doesn’t nearly solve the problem. The first thing I looked at to fill out 1871 rosters were managers and umpires who never played in the majors. It seemed not too much of a stretch to pretend, in this alternate universe, that all these guys were former players. Using the manager and umpire lists in David Nemec’s 19th-century encyclopedia, I was able to add a few players to the 1871 league. Since there are no birthdates listed there for umpires (and many of the managers), I assumed that their playing careers would have started ten years before their umpiring or managing careers did. I also made them all pitchers, mostly relievers (leaving the real-life pitchers as the league’s starters).

There still weren’t enough players. I was beginning to think I’d just have to fill out the league with fictionals when I discovered a book that changed everything: Marshall Wright’s The National Association of Base Ball Players, 1857-1870, a book about the national amateur league that ruled baseball before the professional National Association. For early baseball buffs, this is an astonishing resource: a year by year listing of every pre-major league team’s roster and results, with player statistics (!) when available.

The statistics are crude, mostly runs and outs, with hits getting listed later in the 1860s, and total bases and batting average appearing toward the end. But you can form a crude idea of who was better than whom. You can get an idea of the early careers of players like Joe Start, Al Reach, Dick McBride, George Wright, and other big stars of the 1860s and 70s. Best of all, though, are the names—hundreds of them. No birthdates or other biographical info, but you can follow anybody’s baseball career, from their beginnings with a minor amateur team to the big time (Brooklyn Atlantics, Cincinnati Red Stockings, Philadelphia Athletics).

So, problem solved. Here were more than enough players to fill out 1871 rosters, including the minors. So many, in fact, that it began to seem like you could start a league before 1871.

Which became a tantalizing prospect…you could put those early players—Start, Reach, etc.—on an equal footing with their successors. Going even further, I scoured every baseball history book I could find for nineteenth-century names—anybody who had anything to do with baseball, from organizers and club presidents to promoters, umpires, and managers—and gave them all playing careers. Whenever possible, I use real birthdates and attributes to give shape to these people. For example, Alex Cartwright, one of baseball’s “inventors,” was in fact a pretty big guy (6-4, 200 pounds—huge for his time) who played first base on those early Knickerbocker teams. So he becomes a power-hitting first baseman. Dr. Daniel Adams, also of the Knicks, invented the position of shortstop and batted lefthanded, while serving as one of the early leaders and organizers. And so on. I don’t have details like that for everybody, but I use them when I can.

Combining Wright’s book with all my other sources, I was able to find enough people to populate a league starting in 1839, the year of baseball’s mythical invention by Abner Doubleday. It’s still a stretch. It has to start as a four-team league, and half the 200 original players are fictional. But at this point, even the real people are “fictional” as baseball players, so I figured it wasn’t that big a deal. I’ve made also sure, in editing the players, to make the fictional players bad enough that they wouldn’t have much impact on history. In the first few amateur, there will still be some fictionals, but they will gradually diminish. From 1845 on, I will have all real, historical people drafted.

The Diamond Republic, then, will start with baseball’s mythical, legendary, or “prehistoric” figures (Doubleday, Cartwright, Adams), then gradually turn historical as real players and statistics come into the record. It will be an ideal version of what might have been. I want the league to represent the whole baseball world—its spread from New York to the rest of the country and beyond. Negro League players will be included of course, as well as Latin American and eventually Japanese players. If I can, I’ll try to give a fair shake to career minor league stars like Buzz Arlett, Tony Freitas, Ox Eckhardt, Perry Werden. Franchises will spread according to the historical spread of professional baseball (not just the majors, but the high minors and foreign leagues), so that the West Coast, for example, will get major league representation long before it did in real life. Ignoring technological and political reality, franchises will probably get extended to Cuba, Mexico, even Japan.