Refused at the door
chicagocentralmsbl.com resolves. A server answers. And then every browser, every crawler and every phone in the country declines to proceed, because the certificate presented cannot be verified.
A player who clicks through from a search result does not see a baseball league. He sees a full-page warning telling him the connection is not private and asking whether he wants to proceed at his own risk. Most people, correctly, do not.
An expired certificate is the cheapest possible way to become invisible. The site is intact behind it -- schedule, standings, whatever the league built -- and none of it can be reached by anyone who is not prepared to override a security warning.
This is the first of several leagues in these records in exactly this position. A High Cheese league page is served from infrastructure somebody else keeps current, at an address the league owns, so a certificate renewal is never the thing standing between a league and its next player.
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