Two cities and three names
The league gives its own founding with names attached. John Baete started it in Lincoln in 1999 as the Nebraska Adult Baseball Association. After four seasons there it migrated to Omaha in 2004, where it was renamed the Omaha Adult Baseball League under Steve Minchow and Lou Butler. Its stated focus since is high quality baseball at low cost, grown year over year.
There is one small inconsistency worth flagging rather than tidying away: the same page says the league is currently in its twentieth year, which does not square with a 1999 founding. It is the league's own text and we report it as written -- the sort of line that gets typed once and then never updated, which is what happens when a season count lives in a paragraph rather than in a record.
Naming the founder and the two men who took it over is more than most leagues bother with. A High Cheese league page carries every season since as its own record, so the twentieth year and the twenty-eighth are both something the site can count rather than something somebody has to remember to edit.
Omaha Adult Baseball League in detail
- Simple. Honest. Baseball. Twelve teams, fifteen games and two paid umpires a game, in wood bats only.
- Fifteen games from late April to early September, filterable by team.
- Twelve teams seeding a single-elimination tournament, with no table on the public site.
- Box scores are required for entry on the website, and keeping no book costs a team its right to appeal.
- No roster limits at all, everyone present bats, and a short team borrows into the outfield.
- Full scorebooks are kept by both teams and no player's numbers reach the public.
- One free agent form and a login; no name, email or phone is published.
- A free agent sign-up form, and a free agent list managers get access to when their teams need it.
- Games are on city parks and school grounds across the metro, with a 500-foot exclusion zone around them.
- A 2020 rulebook that legislates courtesy runners, decoy tags and who keeps the leftover baseballs.
- No news page or announcements are published.
- No gallery is published.
- Sponsor logos are permitted on jerseys; no sponsor is named.
- Single elimination with a two-game guarantee, played in full with no time limit.
- A board exists, hears protests and appeals, and is not named anywhere.
- What happens to your fees, what you have to wear, and what the league does about a ball that will not stop.
- A 2020 rulebook in seven indexed sections, plus a liability agreement every player signs.
- The season is dated only as late April to early September.
- Three and a half dozen game balls per team, and the winners take the larger share of what is left.
- Two paid umpires at every game, with sole discretion to eject and a review process behind them.
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