The Road to the World Baseball Association

[BallFan]

New York Imperials

(Logo by CephasJames)

The most decorated team in TBL, with 53 playoff appearances and 20 world titles, located in the largest market in TBL and with a list of legends in their record books so long that some Imperials fans have suggested that the Hall of Fame open a wing simply devoted the Imps. Currently playing in the NC East. Play in Imperials Stadium in the Bronx, with affiliates in Scranton and Trenton.

Brooklyn Bums

(Logo by Cephasjames)

Although probably forever doomed to be in the Imperials shadow, the OC East's Bums have quite the history, with 8 Big Series titles, although none from 1971. They play in the Brooklyn Dome, aka the "BumDome". They have affiliates in Central Islip and Cooperstown.

[BallFan]

Phoenix Flame

Logo by TruthSerum

The Phoenix Flame are one of the newest teams in the league, formed in 1995. They've never made the playoffs, but no doubt have brighter days ahead of them. The play in Bank One Ballpark and have affiliates in Tucson and Visalia.

San Diego Sailors

(Logo by Knuckler)
Formed in 1950, the Sailors have usually been an afterthought in the OC West. Only 8 times have they made the playoffs, and never have they made the Big Series. This makes them the oldest franchise in TBL never to win a Big Series. They play in Jack Murphy Stadium, and have affiliates in Lake Elsinore and Stockton.

[BallFan]

THE BUFFALO UPSTATESMEN

(Logo by Reds1)

The Buffalo Upstatesmen are one of the oldest teams in The Baseball League, but they rarely have been successful. Oh, they have often been good, but they rarely have been great, especially in the expansion era of 1950 onwards. Only once have the Upstatesmen won the Big Series (1949, their last appearance in TBL's championship event), and their playoff appearances since have been been rare, perhaps once or twice a decade at best. However, they have been in the wilderness since 1997 (when they came in second with a 82-80 record, missing the playoffs), never finishing higher than 4th place in the OC East. After the 2004 season, where the Upstatesmen had their 3rd straight 71-91 season, a reckoning was made. Upstatesmen Owner Steve Brooks fired all coaching and scouting personnel from the organization and hired young wunderkind Jim Goodluck as General Manager.

[BallFan]

TRUE WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP ON THE WAY

The 16 largest summer baseball leagues in the world- ranging from the titans of The Baseball League and Japanese Pro Baseball to small leagues in even the most unexpected of places- have agreed to play a 16-team tournament under the auspices of the World Baseball Association. It is expected that the teams will be seeded based on the level of play of their league, so TBL would face whatever league is decided to be the lowest league in the world, likely the mysterious "Glorious League of the People's Republic of Korea", set up as an amateur affair in the 1980s by Kim Il-Sung as a way to demonstrate to the populace that his hermit kingdom had everything the "Southern Traitors" had, including a baseball league. Some have wondered whether the league even exists, although some scattered reports say that it does, played in front of military and party elite who are amused by the foreign game, although not necessarily interested.

The newly-founded Independent League, formed as a way to bring baseball to cities that have yet to receive a ballteam even after the most recent expansion that brought San Jose and (controversially) Tokyo into the Baseball League, has also been confirmed to take part, as well as leagues in Mexico, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, South Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan, England, Mainland China, the Czech Republic, France and Germany.

Had the tournament taken place in 2004, it would have seen the New York Imperials, Mexico City Palacios (not to be confused with TBL's Mexico City Foros), Tokyo Ronin (not to be confused with the newly founded Tokyo Samurai), Daegu Apples, Pingtung Dragons, KCNA Workers, Grosseto Wyverns, Utrecht Red Knights, Bristol Batsmen, Mannheim Mean Machine, Madrid Spaniards, Savigny Roosters, Chocen Vultures, Manila Aardvarks, Shanghai Harpoons and the Independent League winner take part.

"It should be a grand opportunity to expand the game and provide competition between teams and players that otherwise may be unknown to each other," said WBA Commissioner Mitch Scrawlings, who was elected by a vote by a "congress" of commissioners, general managers and owners from the 16 organizations, "It will also provide the players a chance to travel the world as they play the world's greatest game."

Still to be determined is the format the 16-team tournament will take, although it is presumed that the round of 16 will be a best-of-3 affair, followed by a best-of-5 "Elite Eight" followed by best-of-7 series in the semifinals and finals.

[BallFan]

As 2005's opening day dawned, the media was merciless on their predictions for the Buffalo Upstatesmen. The average prediction for them was that they would finish 67-95, 31 games back of Washington in the OC East. Only LF Ken Thomas- who had hit 35 home runs in 103 games the year before- was ranked as a player to keep a close eye on. The other stars of the Upstatesmen, such as big free-agent pitcher Jorge Andujo (past his prime at 37 but still a legitimate number 1), 493-HR hitting 1B Don Moon (dubbed the "5-million dollar Pinch-Hitter" upon his signing, since the Upstatesmen had also signed Tomas Lopez, another 1B) and Antonio Ledezma (out the beginning of the season after a cheekbone injury in Spring Training), were borderline jokes than they were stars.

However, there were some bright spots. Their relief staff was solid, Thomas was a legitimate slugger, and some were saying that the starting pitching staff was better than the mainstream was saying. However, expectations were legitimately low.

[BallFan]

April 1, 2005: UPSTATESMEN EMBARASSED IN OPENER, 5-2
Don Moon hits 494th HR for lone BUF score


The Buffalo Upstatesmen's opening day game didn't go as planned today, as the Philadelphia Patriots, led by starter Rob Krause, beat Buffalo in a OC East showdown in Philadelphia.

Buffalo's big free-agent acquisitions during the off-season had a mixed day. Jorge Andujo, the 37-year old former Dan Church winner, was roughed up for 4 ER in 4 innings and took the loss. Don Moon, the so-called "5-Million Dollar Pinch-Hitter", hit a 2-run home run in the ninth after coming into the game for Tomas Valdez after Valdez had been replaced with a pinch-runner in the seventh. The 494th homer of Moon's career moved him one closer to Jesus Ramirez's 513 home runs for third most all-time, as well as one closer to becoming only the fourth man to hit 500 or more homers.

[BallFan]

"Pitching. Pitching, pitching, pitching. And drafting," said Jim Goodluck to his advisers, "That is how we will be able to win." Around the table sat the Upstatesmen braintrust. They were not in a good mood.

It was June 15, 2005, and the Upstatesmen were sitting in last of the Original Conference East with a 31-39 record. Star players had been on and off the disabled list all year: Ken Thomas hadn't played a game since April 19, Jorge Andujo had just landed on the disabled list, Tomas Valdez went on the DL while holding a .332 BA and wasn't due back for another two weeks, Aruban righty Jarno Soester, inarguably the team's best pitcher that season, had torn a flexor tendon and wouldn't be back for another 10 months.

But today was a day for renewal, the first year player draft. The Upstatesmen held the 10th pick of the draft, as well as picks in the third round onward. And, as GoodLuck had said, the main concern would be starting pitching.

"If you have good starting pitchers," he was apt to say, "You can hold back the gates of hell."

[BallFan]

It wasn't long before it was time to pick.

"Bobby?" said Goodluck.

Bobby Mitchell was the Scouting Director for the Buffalo Upstatesmen, a 60-year-old baseball man who had played in the Milwaukee Organization in the 60s and 70s. He'd done scouting on two continents, and he was amongst the first hires by the new regime in Buffalo.

"I suggest Scotty Williams. From California, went to Long Beach. Had good stats 20-potential stuff."

"What about Amaya?" said another scout, referring to Raul Amaya, a Cincinnati high-schooler who had moved to the states from Mexico as a youth.

Goodluck responded: "I'd prefer a college guy. Could end up in the big club faster."

The GM pressed the intercom to TBL headquarters:

"With the tenth pick of the 2005 Draft, the Buffalo Upstatesmen select Scotty Williams, Left-Handed Pitcher, Long Beach State."

[BallFan]

In the third round, the Upstatesmen took Kevin Sackett, a High-School catcher from Tennessee who was extremely fast for a catcher and a reasonably good projection for hitting.

In the fourth round, they selected Robby Williams (no relation to Scotty), a lefty from Stanford who was a starter who could easily be turned into a reliever.

The fifth round saw Lucio Vallejo from Pepperdine drafted. He was another lefty pitcher.

Round 6: Juan Perez, a centerfielder who Mitchell projected to make good contact with the ball if things went well.

Round 7: Whitney Rollins, a closer from Oregon State.

And so on, and so forth. They knew that it was likely that after the first few picks they were just drafting minor leaguers forever, but, at the end of the day, after 14 rounds, the Upstatesmen could only hope that maybe they had found the next big star.

[BallFan]

As June came near an end and the Upstatesmen kept losing, many of the players demanded to be traded. This, along with the fact that the team's owner wanted to cut down on the massive red ink that some of the contracts were bringing, led Goodluck to swallow his pride and declare the season a near-total loss.

Don Moon went to San Jose (along with horrid starting pitcher Leo Hill) for three players, most notably catcher Juan Juarez, who became the Upstatesmen's starter against left-handers. The fans were not happy about the loss of Moon, even if he was only playing once every few days.

Ebbe De Moor, a long reliever, went to Washington for starter Chad Hess. Hess wasn't that good- a 2-and-a-half star player according to Bob Mitchell- but he was cheap and he would be able to eat some innings.

Anthony "Tubby" Perrin also was sent packing, as the reliever went to Philly for the disappointing (but very cheap) import Naonobu Nakada.

Meanwhile, the WBA playoffs were beginning to take shape as some of the smaller leagues around the world finished their regular seasons.

In the Britain League, the London Metropolitans defeated the Cambridge Baseballers 4-3 in that league's championship game, ensuring that London would be filling the 14-seed in the WBA playoffs. They began to watch the Liga Mexicana intently to find out who they would face later in the year.

In the France Baseball Association, the Montpellier Cardinals swept Paris in the best-of-3 Series of France to claim the 15-seed. Interestingly, the Cardinals had gone merely .500 during the regular season but had been able to get hot at the right time. Although they knew they would stand little chance against whatever team won the Japanese Pro Baseball title, they celebrated as if they had just been named champions of the world.

In China, the Beijing Olympians won their league's title by upsetting Tianjin in the league's title game. With that, they secured the 12 seed in the playoffs. Their eyes turned across the strait to the United Taiwanese League, waiting to find out who would represent Formosa against them...

[BallFan]

"It's going to deep left, Gallo is back, and... yep, he'll get it. And so that'll end the 2005 season for the Upstatesmen as they hold off Houston for a 13-11 win. Ugh, thank god this year is over."

The last part wasn't supposed to have been broadcast, but most Upstatesmen fans agreed with the assessment. 2005 had been a disaster. The players kept getting hurt, the starting pitching was atrocious, the team finished 68-94, and overall everyone just wanted it to end. Goodluck, for his part, had already begun planning possible moves for the coming off-season. It would be almost impossible to beat the rest of the league at the free agent game, so the first thing he was planning on doing was making sure players would stick around before hitting the market. Maybe then there could be some money to find diamonds in the rough. If any big names were going to be acquired, they would have to exist not just as a way to help the team win, but also as possible bargaining chips.

Of course, with the new WBA playoffs, he was going to have more time to think over all of that. At least there would be those WBA games on TV to watch as he tried to figure out what the heck to do to turn the Upstatesmen around.

[BallFan]

(First off, is anybody reading this? Okay, I'm trying to figure out how you set up the playoffs so that the better seed always gets HFA? Because the way I set it up this time the TBL team- which obviously was the better seed- didn't have HFA in rounds 1 and 2, and a similar thing happened to the JPB team that was the best seed in it's side of the bracket... I'll post a photo of how they looked, let me know if anybody is reading this.)

[BallFan]

The first WBA playoffs had been a rousing success so far, bringing in 16 league champions to play against each other.

The first round, however, was hardly as exciting, as all of the series were sweeps.

In the 6-11 match-up between the Rotterdam Schooners (winners of the Dutch Baseball League) and Manila Aardvarks (winners of the Filipino Circuit), the Schooners swept away Aardvarks, winning game 1 12-4 and then defeating Manila 5-3 in Game 2 to advance.

The 3-14 face-off between the Mexico City Palacios of the Liga Mexicana and the London Metropolitans of the Britain League was a pitching exhibition, as the Palacios dismantled the heavily out-of-their league Metropolitans 5-0, 6-0 to advance.

The Independent League's Modesto Mottos took on the Spanish Baseball Association's Sant Boi Padres in a 7-10 matchup, and the Spaniards put up a surprisingly good fight. Game one went into extra innings before Modesto was able to walk off in the 11th thanks to a home run by Raul Oliveira, a former TBL journeyman. A 6-3 win in Game 2 was similarly hard-fought.

The 2-15 matchup between the Nagoya Castles of Japan and the Montpellier Cardinals of France was, as expected, a total miss-match. While the Cardinals were able to hold the Castles to only a 3-0 win in Game 1 thanks to the talents of a Dominican import called Mario Cruz, who threw 7 innings of 5-hit ball (this drew some extreme interest in the Buffalo front office and all swore to contact him as soon as the free agency periods began), the Castles were able to roundly demolish the Cardinals in Game 2, 13-0, as Katsuhito Kojima struck out 12 hapless Frenchmen and Yohachi Fujita went deep twice.

The 5-12 matchup between Taiwan's Taoyuan Seahawks and China's Beijing Olympians was full of political chatter in the media, and a surprisingly tough showing by the Chinese. Although Taoyuan swept, it was by the scores of 5-4 and 9-6, not the expected blowouts.

The 4-13 matchup pitted Korea's Suwon Spiders against the Czech Republic's Blansko Blackhawks. It wasn't even close, as the Spiders beat the Blackhawks 8-0 and 16-3.

The 8-9 matchup between Italy's San Marino Hawks and Germany's Berlin Unity had been expected to be the closest of the first round, so when San Marino won it 4-3 and then a laugher 10-3, some were rather disappointed.

The 1-16 matchup between the Los Angeles Detectives and the North Korean champion, the "Korean People's Navy Liberators", was only interesting in how bad the North Koreans played, further cementing the North Korean "league" as a joke created more for propaganda purposes than for actual competition. Game one was a 12-2 drubbing by LA, but game 2 was a outright 26-5 massacre that saw both Cal Darby and Alec Carr hit 2 home runs, and Sandy Pennington strike out 12 batters over 7 innings. Carr had 6 RBIs in the game.
The North Korea media reported only the stats and scores for KPN team, giving the impression that the KPN had won and leaving the North Korean public confused when they didn't receive any updates on the team's games in future rounds.


And so, the first round was over.

[BallFan]

The second round was more competitive, and featured the first upset of the tournament.

The upset came in the 3-6 matchup between Mexico City and Rotterdam. Game one, for example, featured an epic meltdown by the Liga Mexicana champions and their pitchers, as the Dutch hit 6 home runs in a shocking 16-5 win. Order seemed to be restored in the second game when the Palacios won 13-3, and many expected that it was only a matter of time before the Mexicans would win two more and wrap up the series. It turned out that they had the wrong team, however: the Schooners won Game 3 3-2 and then Game 4 6-2. It was a shocking development. The Dutch League has been estimated to be- at best, somewhere between A and AA level, but the Liga Mexicana was at least AAA level. Across the world, angry people ripped up their brackets as they saw their office pool fortunes disappear.

In the 2-7 matchup between Modesto and Nagoya, the Castles swept 3-0. However, the Indy-leaguers put up quite a fight. The final scores of each game were 6-5, 3-1 and then finally a 6-5 clincher for Nagoya in 10 innings.

The 4-5 matchup between Suwon and Taoyuan was, as expected, the closest of the round 2 series, going the full 5 games before Suwon came out on top in Game 5 as Won-Joon Sol singled home the walk-off run to win 2-1.

The 1-8 matchup between LA and San Marino was, not surprisingly, a sweep, as LA won 4-0, 5-2 and then finally a 22-4 bodyslam to win. However, Alec Carr was hurt in Game 1 of the series when he bruised a wrist-bone after getting hit-by-pitch, knocking him out for 2-3 weeks. He could, theoretically, come back during the WBA final series.

And that was round 2...

[BallFan]

As October turned to November, the Best-of-7 semifinals came into being.

In a 2-6 matchup, the Nagoya Castles and Rotterdam Schooners faced off. The Dutch once again showed much fight, losing only by 1 in the 8-7 first game. But a 4-0 loss in the Game 2 sent the series back to the Netherlands with the Japanese up 2-0. In the must-win Game 3, however, the Schooner again shocked the world, winning 11-6 behind the bat of Dorian Williamson, an American import who had once, back in the late 90s, been a high-power but low-average catcher for the Monterrey Deportes. Williamson hit two home runs and had 5 RBIs in Game 3. Nagoya snapped back to their senses, though, and defeated the Cinderella Schooners in Game 4 8-2 and then won a 10-inning affair in game 5 by the score of 6-5 to win a ticket to the WBA Finals.

In the 1-4 matchup between the Detectives and the Spiders, the Detectives swept in 4, befitting them being the champions of baseball's greatest league. The Spiders put up quite some fight- forcing extras in games 2 and 3, but there was nothing they could do to ensnare the LA Detective.

[BallFan]

And so, before the World Baseball Association Finals, here's a run down of our two teams:

The Los Angeles Detectives
Founded in: 1901 (as Newark Bricklayers), 1950 (move to Los Angeles)
Home Stadium: Chavez Ravine
Manager: Randy King
Payroll: $111,017,323
TBL Titles: 3 (1959, 1991, 2005)
2005 Record: 103-59 (first in New Conference West)
Road to WBA Finals: Defeated Toronto 3-0 in NC Division Series, Detroit 4-0 in NC Conference Series, Defeated Boston 4-2 in Big Series to clinch TBL title and WBA Berth. Defeated Korean People's Navy Liberators 2-0 in Round of 16, San Marino Hawks 3-0 in Round of 8, Suwon Spiders 4-0 in Semi-Finals
Star Players: CF Antonio Santos, SP Josh Carpenter, SS Cal Darby, LF/DH Alec Carr (out for first few games of series)

[BallFan]

NAGOYA CASTLES
Founded in: 1950
Home Stadium: Nagoya Dome
Manager: Jimmy Caldwell (an American)
Payroll: $10,371,189
JPB Titles: 18 (1953, 1954, 1956-61, 1971, 1973, 1975, 1976, 1979, 1982-85, 2005)
2005 Record: 83-57, First in the Japan League.
Road to WBA Finals: Won Semifinals over Nishinomiya 3-2, defeated Chiba 4-2 in Championship Series of Japan to win JPB title and WBA spot. Went 2-0 over Montpellier, 3-0 over Modesto, 4-1 over Rotterdam.
Star Players: 1B Yohachi Fujita, SP Mamoru "Sourface" Otsuka, CF Kunio Mori