A specification, not a list
The league publishes standards rather than addresses: it plays across Chicago's northwest suburbs and only chooses top quality fields, usually college, minor league or community parks, some all turf. Every ground has a grass infield, dugouts and a home run fence, and most have lights. Heritage Park is named as its home complex, all turf.
Specifying that every field has a fence and a dugout is a promise about what kind of baseball this is — no cones for foul poles, no sitting on a bench. For a league of 46-plus clubs it is also the hardest promise to keep. No individual ground carries an address or a map. High Cheese ties the ballpark, the address, the map and its surface to the fixture itself, so a standard this high is verifiable by the men driving to it.
Midwest Suburban League in detail
- Founded 1998 by men fed up with disorganised leagues; now 46-plus teams across five levels.
- Twenty-two weekend games per club, across five divisions and forty-six teams.
- A separate archived page for nearly every season from 2000 to 2021.
- Twenty years of standings; no individual result published.
- Forty-six-plus clubs, and five named as national title holders.
- MVP, Gold Glove, Cy Young and home run awards, in every one of five divisions.
- A Batavia PO box, a direct number, and a league hotline.
- A player pool to help team rosters, and a Director of Player Personnel to run it.
- Five levels sorted by ability, not age — all of them wood bat.
- The league's own story, told once and left as its front page.
- Suites, rings, jackets and a professional ballpark — none of it shown.
- A stadium partnership doing the work a sponsor page would.
- Championship series in a professional stadium, rings for the winners, jackets for the runners-up.
- Champions from 1998 onward, and standings archived year by year back to 2000.
- Larry Kolcz as President, Eric Page on player personnel, and an Advisory Committee behind them.
- What standard, what format and what you get are answered in detail. The fee is not.
- Fully insured games, and an award-winning website of its own account.
- A 22-game weekend schedule, plus a weeknight division for men who want Saturdays back.
- Rings, hats and jackets are won rather than sold.
- Every game fully umpired, and not one official named.
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