Twenty-one names, three numbers
The league publishes complete rosters. Chambersburg carries twenty-one players including three sets of brothers by surname -- two Planks, two Shaufs -- and lists jersey numbers for exactly three of them: 14, 21 and 54, the last belonging to Tyler Shuff, who is also the manager.
That is the ordinary state of an amateur roster: everybody is on it, most of the numbers are missing, and the games-played column reads zero all the way down because nobody has been entering appearances.
Managers are named for each club with a telephone number beside them, which is how a five-team league actually organises itself.
A roster on a High Cheese team page fills its own games-played column from the games as they are scored, so a manager who is already keeping a lineup card does not have to type the same names into a website twice.
Pennsylvania Mid-State MSBL in detail
- Five clubs around Harrisburg playing Sunday doubleheaders, with seventeen years of seasons on the record.
- Doubleheaders every Sunday at one and half past three.
- Two teams tied at 14-4 and a hundred-run gap to the bottom of the table.
- Results feed the standings; the league keeps a scoreboard page for them.
- Twenty statistical categories available, and a games-played column reading zero.
- Each club lists its manager and his phone number; the league lists nobody.
- There is no registration page; a player rings a manager.
- East Hanover Township and the Robert E. Yetter Memorial Field in Lower Allen.
- No rulebook is published; the doubleheader format is the one structural fact.
- A news page, and an alert list players sign up to by text and email.
- A team photograph captioned with every man in it, front row and back.
- A sponsors page exists in the menu and names nobody publicly.
- Playoff brackets are archived for six seasons and no champion is named.
- Seventeen seasons of archives showing a league that has been three shapes.
- Nobody is named above club level.
- Where and when are answered by the fixtures; everything else is not.
- A forms page sits in the menu.
- An eighteen-game season of Sundays, running into August.
- Nothing is for sale.
- No crew or assignor is named.
Compare