Alabama Baseball Leagues

Central Alabama MSBL has been running out of Birmingham since 2008. That is the whole of what we can state: a city, a year, and an MSBL affiliation.

The website on file, caba.online, does not resolve. Not slow, not erroring: the domain fails DNS outright, which is less like a phone going unanswered and more like the number having been given up. Everything a person actually wants to know before showing up, the divisions, the fee, the month it starts, the field, would be invention if we printed it here, so we have not.

Eighteen years is a long time for a league to keep finding nine men every spring, and a lapsed domain registration is a poor reason for it to look closed. If you run this one, send a working link and the divisions, and this paragraph gets replaced by something worth reading.

Huntsville MSBL has been playing since 1992 and carries nine teams on our books. Its listed website no longer keeps a front door of its own: playssbl.org forwards straight into the Southern Senior Baseball League's pages, where the divisions are 25+ and 40+ and the games are spread across most of the school fields in north Alabama.

A redirect like that usually means a merger or a shared administrator, and we are not going to guess which one, because the difference matters a great deal to anybody deciding where to send a registration form. What is clear is that the two operations are being run from the same place, and that a player looking for Huntsville MSBL will end up reading about Southern Senior either way.

Thirty-four years is a real institution, and it deserves better than being reachable only through somebody else's homepage. Organizers: send us where this league actually lives now and we will point the listing at it.

Roy Hobbs baseball in Huntsville runs two leagues, 40+ and 60+, out of Hazel Green. Games land at UAH Charger Park and a rotating cast of area schools: Sparkman, James Clemens, Decatur, Danville, Madison Academy, Austin Junior High, Priceville, Decatur Heritage, and a field called The Rock, which is either a nickname or a warning.

The 60+ division contains a club that has named itself the Antiques and another called the Trash Pandas. Whatever you think adult baseball is for, a sixty-two-year-old walking to the plate under the word Antiques stitched across his chest has understood the assignment better than most. Nobody at that age is playing to be scouted. They are playing because the alternative is not playing.

Registration closes April 1 and the season starts June 1. Reach David Britton at [email protected], or find the league on Facebook. The pitch is straightforward: bring a team or join a roster, and no one will ask what you used to be.

The Southern Senior Baseball League runs out of Harvest and splits into 25+ and 40+. The 25+ side carried eleven teams in its most recent published season; the 40+ side carried four, with a fifth expected. Both play a twenty-game schedule ending in a double-elimination tournament, which is a merciful format in that it lets a team lose once and still believe in itself for another week.

The rhythm differs by age, and the difference is the most honest thing on the league's website. The 25+ division plays twice a week, a Sunday plus a weekday evening. The 40+ division plays a Sunday and one midweek game on a Tuesday or Thursday. Rainouts move to Saturday. Nobody schedules a forty-year-old for back-to-back nights, and nobody has to explain why.

Games are spread across the region's high schools, Austin Junior High through Sparkman, plus UAH's Charger Park. Every player signs an online liability waiver before taking the field, which is the least romantic sentence in amateur baseball and also the one that keeps the league insurable. Philip Ellis is the president, at 256.714.2828 or [email protected].