Maine Baseball Leagues

Maine Woods Baseball is a 501(c)(7) non-profit running two leagues and nothing below forty-five. MW45 has six teams, the Braves, Pirates, Giants, Cubs, Dodgers and Cardinals. MW60 has four: the White Sox, Athletics, Red Sox and Orioles.

A league with no 18+ division, no 30+, nothing until forty-five, has made a choice about who it is for. There is no ladder to climb here and nobody young enough to make a forty-eight-year-old feel slow. The motto printed on the site is Live The Dream, Play Baseball Forever, which reads as sentimental until you notice the organisation is structured as a social club under the tax code and has separate fee and waiver processes for each league, meaning somebody has done the paperwork to make forever administratively possible.

There is a crossover and waitlist arrangement for players moving between the two. The site credits its designer, Michael Doucette, by name, which is the sort of thing a ten-team league in Farmington, Maine does and a fifty-team league in Atlanta does not.

The Pine Tree Men's Baseball League runs wood bat baseball across central Maine from late May to early August, with players from eighteen to past sixty in the same competition and roots going back beyond the 1960s.

The team names are the best collection in this directory and it is not close: the Gorham Gashouse Gorillas, the Topsham Udder Tuggers, the Mid-Maine River Pigs, the Monmouth Moose, the Twin City Assassins, the Kennebec Sturgeons, the Hippach Hounds, the Mid-Coast Yard Goats, the Rumford Expos, the Bethel Braves and the Bangor Mets. A league that permits the Udder Tuggers to exist has its priorities in order.

It has also carried genuine professional pedigree. Matt Kinney pitched five years in the majors and Devern Hansack won a World Series with Boston in 2007, and both have played in this league. The midseason round robin is held at Colby College. A short season is a Maine reality rather than a choice: late May to early August is what the state gives you.

Southern Maine MSBL has been going since 1991 and its address is another Pointstreak casualty, forwarding to Stack Sports rather than to anything about baseball in Portland.

That makes four leagues in this directory killed by the same acquisition. Fresno, southern Colorado, Kansas City, and now Portland. Four states, four separate communities of players, one platform decision.

Maine already runs on short seasons and small margins, and we carry only three listings for the whole state. Losing the front door of one of them matters more here than it would in Chicago. If you play in this league, tell us where it lives now.