Promised on the front page
The league states that all games are fully umpired, listing it alongside full insurance as a guarantee of what a team fee buys. Across 46-plus clubs playing 22 games each, that is more than a thousand umpire assignments a season.
Selling officiating as a feature is the right instinct — it is precisely what separates an organised league from the un-organised ones the founders left in 1998. No assignor, crew, rate or route to working games is published. On High Cheese the crew attaches to the fixture, so a promise made on the front page is visible on every game.
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.
- College, minor league and community parks — grass infields, dugouts, fences, mostly lights.
- 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.
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