Once a week, ten weeks
The season runs from late May to early August. The league's own reporting describes it as competitive baseball once a week -- which for men with mortgages and children is the entire reason the format works -- and the whole competition gathers at Colby College in Waterville for an annual midseason round robin tournament.
Ten weeks is not long, and a rained-out Saturday in Maine costs a tenth of a season.
A High Cheese schedule puts each game and its ground into every player's phone and moves them in place when the weather takes a weekend, which in a once-a-week league is the difference between a make-up and a lost game.
Pine Tree Baseball League in detail
- Eighteen Maine towns, wood bats, and players from eighteen to over sixty on the same field.
- 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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