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Old 11-10-2013, 08:57 PM   #63
chucksabr
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1891 Baseball League Season Is Nigh!

New Clubs Immediately Considered Among Favourites

An exciting chapter is about to be written in the History of the Baseball League, now entering their fourth season in the midlands and north of England. Two additional clubs have joined the ranks, and as such the season has been extended to seventy-eight total matches, retaining the three home/three away regimen that each league club has worked under these first three years. The League are also starting a full month early, on 3 April, which will tempt the fates of meteorology.

In a testament to the growing and spreading acumen the best baseballers in the country display, the talent gap among the top teams in the various leagues is narrowing considerably, leading to speculation that substantial growth will be imminent and sudden. To wit, two of the better teams in the league are expected to be the two new ones springing up from the Baseball Alliance, the Blues of Small Heath and the Salmoners of Darwen. Each club is expected to finish in the higher end of the middle of the pack. Look especially to Darwen to see the likely top-rated pitcher alight in the form of 24 year old Noah Walmsley, who led the Alliance with 11 wins and an earned runs average below three.

Returning champion Burnley returns as strong as ever, with a squad of regulars that will challenge for a fourth consecutive crown. The three Freds seem to be in fine preseason form, and are holding in their ageing quite well by the looks of their March practice session. But annual powers Aston Villa, Burnley and the surging Sunderland Black Cats will also have their say during the season, especially given that they have twelve additional chances to close whatever gap there is between the leaders and themselves.

We continue to mourn the exile of Vivian Mad Dash Sharp, Theophilus Hurley and Brendan Philips to the base ball dungeon of Derby, the erstwhile Cup winners who have fallen into on-pitch disrepute. Despite being considered among the best players in the League, the Derby club chairmen have surrounded these three marvellous talents with nothing more than warm bodies, thus finding it unable to extricate themselves from such a mournful fate to ply their talents elsewhere, given they are under (admittedly lucrative) contract. It is no secret that the three are quite unhappy with this state of affairs, for the simple reason that they have themselves been keeping it no secret.

As for the Baseball Alliance, they, having lost two clubs to the League, now have fourteen clubs and are showing cracks of organisational weakness as a direct competitor for the best baseball talents. The talk is about a possible merging of fixtures with the League, although it is a little unclear how the League might absorb twenty-eight different members, particularly since League officials and clubs stubbornly believe that the Alliance provide an inferior product. This could be a problem as all will recall just a scant few years ago how difficult it was for top-level clubs to obtain games against similarly matched clubs. There may or may not be a match between reality and perception, but the latter does influence motion towards consolidation of both the League and Alliance, not to mention the eventual fates of other top circuits such as the Midlands League and Lancashire League and, to the south, the Southern League.

Last edited by chucksabr; 10-21-2018 at 04:12 PM.
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