Promised, not listed
The league's founding commitment names facilities first: since 1988 it has strived to provide the best in facilities, officials and equipment.
Its clubs are spread across the East Bay, the Peninsula, San Francisco and Marin, and its rulebook carries a field dugout designation rule, so the grounds are numerous and formalised.
Not one is named on the public site.
A High Cheese schedule attaches the ground to each game, so a player in Marin drawn to a Sunday in the East Bay learns it from the fixture rather than from a group message.
San Francisco MSBL in detail
- Don't go soft. Play hardball. Four divisions, 450 players, and two men who have never missed a season since 1988.
- Sixteen games on weekends from April, across four divisions and four sub-regions.
- Standings and a stats login sit together in the navigation.
- Results feed standings and a written history; neither is public.
- Twenty-six clubs, many of them named in the Hall of Fame decades after they folded.
- A stats login, and a written history full of numbers the league clearly keeps.
- A contact page, a board and a president with real authority behind them.
- Tryouts in February, a compulsory workout, and pitchers and catchers must show it at the position.
- A Fairness Doctrine at the front, and four separate rules against clubs gaming the draft.
- Announcements on the front page, with an archive of retired ones.
- No gallery is published.
- A sponsors section sits in the top-level navigation.
- Semi-finals and a championship series, plus tournament teams in Phoenix, Las Vegas, Palm Springs and Florida.
- A written history of every championship since 1988, told as stories rather than a list.
- More than seventy inductees since 1999, with published criteria and a three-quarters vote.
- Ages, season length, tryouts and the pitching rule are all answered; the fee is not.
- Rules and regulations, bylaws filed with the State of California, and a league content archive.
- Tryouts February to March, sixteen games from April, and a World Series in the fall.
- Nothing is for sale; uniforms are governed by numbered rule.
- The best officials the league can provide, and a numbered rule against abusing them.
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