[chucksabr]

The 1890 Baseball League Campaign Starts To-Day!

New Club Sunderland Are Immediate Co-Favorite
With Burnley, Aston Villa

Can Accrington Keep Heads Above Water?

As the opening match of the 1890 season dawns upon us, there are some interesting questions about the potential both on and off field, even as clubs are making scads of cash from their base ball enterprises.

The most interesting move during the between-season period was the decision by the League to bring in the Sunderland club as a replacement for the simply awful Everton club. Each club has taken over the other's place in their respective former associations and seek to prove the relative worth of each association to the other.

One interesting aspect of the Sunderland inclusion is the location of the team on the coast of the North Sea, eighty-five miles straightline from its closest competitor in Burnley, and twice that to Birmingham. It's clear that the League has set its sight on nationalising the scope of their association and indeed of the game of base ball, and we can rightly forecast that will occur in short order, resulting from this single first step.

The more interesting aspect of this move is that which takes place on the pitch. The Sunderland side won the Baseball Alliance race rather handily in '89, and boast without a doubt the best young talent in the British game to-day. No fewer than three of the top four, four of the top ten and six of the top fifteen young prospects ranked by wise base ball men belong to the Sunderlands. The names of William Clark, Laurence John, Jesse Robinson and Sydney Regan at the bat; and William Turner and Cyril Radford on the mound, will soon become among the most whispered and the most shouted names of League Baseballers during the coming years. If the other clubs aren't frightened out of their minds by the prospects of something like a Black Cat Dynasty, they are certainly a demented lot indeed.

As for the coming season, Sunderland may make their mark yet on the ledger of 1890, as Aston Villa did presumptuously last season. But the keenest minds of the game are putting their money on either the Villans or on the Clarets of Burnley to repeat. After all, Brandon Bradley and Percy Mitchell have not retired from the Villans, nor have any of the Three Freds or William Ferreira left the Clarets. Blackburn hope to recover from their slight drop down the table and generate increased turnover with a move to their mammoth new 11,000 seat grounds, Ewood Park, constructed at a cost of £10,000. And don't count out Derby County, who still have three of the greatest baseballers in the kingdom in Vivian Mad Dash Sharp, Theophilus Hurley and young hurler Brendan Phillips.

The biggest off-pitch concerns being expressed regard the solvency of the Accrington club who are widely considered to be deeply in the red, in contrast to literally every other club in both the League and the Alliance. The town of Accrington is being well sold on the idea of terrible base ball and are learning to keep their money in their pockets as a result. The grounds are terrible, the town is apathetic, the play is atrocious, and to make things worse, the word is that the Reds have increased their average ticket from 5d. to 8d., highest in the League, in the hopes of making it back to black. Without both a passable product and a comfortable place in which to enjoy it, it strains credulity that they would succeed in their endeavour in this way.