The best league history anywhere in this directory
Most leagues publish a column of champions. This one writes them up.
The 1988 inaugural season went to the Orioles, who knocked off a stubborn Indians side in the American League Championship game on a clutch late-inning home run by Phil Federico, then ousted the Cardinals in the World Series -- after which their team leader Dean Asimos waited fifteen years for a second title in 2003.
Then 1989, which is a story about a promise. In Arizona for the first annual World Series tournament in 1988, Rob Goldstein of the Yankees and Pat Carroll of the Indians -- scoffed at by some of the other tournament players -- vowed to put together the next year's league championship team. They assembled eight men from their hometown of South San Francisco, childhood friends since the 1960s, and built a Red Sox side around a five-player core that over the following eight years took six division titles, four pennants and three World Series championships, becoming the first AAA team to win three.
The champions are organised by the division's changing names -- AAA, then 28+, 25+, 21+; PCL, then 38+, 35+, 30+; a 40+ division; a 45+ and 50+ -- which is itself a history of how the league re-cut its brackets over thirty-seven years.
Writing like that belongs beside the seasons it describes. A High Cheese league page keeps every year at its own address with the standings, the roster and the final on it, so a 1989 Red Sox story sits on top of the 17-3 record that produced it.
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.
- Facilities are the league's first stated promise; no ground is named.
- 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.
- 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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