Small, old and very good at tournaments
The SVBL is a men's hardball league for players 33 and over, with some exceptions, established in 1996 and playing almost all of its baseball at Neilson Park in Scarborough. It runs four teams -- the Dodgers, Blue Jays, Marlins and Phillies -- through a fifteen-game regular season plus playoffs, on Saturdays, nine innings a side.
Four teams and fifteen games is about as small as a league gets and still be a league. What it does with that is remarkable: it sends all-star sides to national and provincial tournaments in several age groups under the name Scarborough Maroons, and it has won seventeen of them since 2011.
So this is a small Saturday competition in one park that also happens to be one of the most successful oldtimers programmes in Canada.
Both halves of that deserve recording, and neither is legible outside the platform the league rents. A High Cheese league page keeps the schedule, the standings and every roster at an address the league owns, so a fifteen-game season and a national title sit in the same record.
Scarborough Vintage Baseball League in detail
- Saturdays at Neilson Park, eleven o'clock through six, fifteen games a season.
- A standings page for four teams over fifteen games.
- Results are posted against the fixtures as soon as they are played.
- Four clubs — Dodgers, Blue Jays, Marlins and Phillies.
- A statistics section runs alongside the schedule and standings.
- A contact form and a location: Scarborough, Ontario.
- A contact form, and no published fee, deadline or route onto a roster.
- Neilson Park, Scarborough — and effectively nowhere else.
- Thirty-three and over, with some exceptions, and nine innings every Saturday.
- The championship table is the news, and it is updated by year.
- No gallery is published.
- No sponsor is named.
- Seventeen national and provincial titles since 2011, from Calgary to Charlottetown.
- Established 1996, with a past champions section and a national record going back to 2011.
- Nobody is named.
- Age, day, ground, season length and game length are all answered; the fee is not.
- No documents are published.
- Fifteen Saturdays plus playoffs, running into late August.
- Nothing is for sale.
- No crew or assignor is named.
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