Baseball therapy
The Pine Tree League is a wood bat league running from late May to early August across central and southern Maine, with roots the league says stretch back past the 1960s and a feel to match -- towns fielding their own teams of grown men, the way they used to. Eighteen clubs carry the map: Bangor, Bethel, Central Maine, Gorham, the Hippach Hounds, Kennebec, Lincoln County, the Mid-Coast, Mid-Maine, Monmouth, Paris, Pen Bay, Rumford, Sabattus, Topsham, Turner, Twin City and Winthrop.
Its own reproduced reporting explains the appeal better than any league page could. Ben Muniz, 33, who thought he was finished at five foot eleven with two bad shoulders: "It's a chance to be a kid again. As we get older we have more responsibilities. Mortgage, family, all that stuff, and we make so many decisions for other people. This is for us. We get to go out there, and I call it baseball therapy."
What the league does not have is anywhere for eighteen teams to keep a record. It runs on a free web page and a Facebook feed. A High Cheese league page gives each of those clubs its own address with the roster, the results and the history on it, which for a league whose whole identity is that towns own their teams is the natural shape.
Pine Tree Baseball League in detail
- Late May to early August, one game a week, plus a midseason round robin at Colby.
- Divisional standings are published for the season.
- Final scores for the season are published, with Facebook carrying them first.
- Eighteen clubs, and some of the best names in American amateur baseball.
- Stat leaders and full statistics are published for the current season.
- A contact page, a team managers list, and Facebook for everything else.
- There is no sign-up form; you find a team manager.
- Seventeen home grounds — high schools, a college, an American Legion post and a town field.
- Official league rules have their own page, and wood is the rule everyone knows.
- The league's best writing is somebody else's — a 2017 newspaper feature it reproduces in full.
- A photo gallery, plus newspaper photographs from a game at Colby.
- No sponsor is named.
- A playoff bracket every August, and a midseason tournament at Colby College.
- Six titles on the record, including back-to-back doubles for Winthrop and Bethel.
- A president who plays second base, and a managers list.
- How old, how good, and whether a fifty-six-year-old can still do this.
- An official rules page and a PTL archive.
- Late May to early August, with a round robin in the middle.
- Nothing is for sale.
- The league keeps an umpires page in its navigation.
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