We reject this notion
The People's Baseball League is an adult, co-ed, recreational, fast-pitch, wooden-bat league in New Orleans, founded in 2016. Its mission is to make baseball available to anyone who wants to play regardless of background, skill level, age, ethnicity and national origins, gender and gender identity, sexuality, class, and religion.
It has a manifesto, and it is the best thing written by any league in this directory. Baseball has been played in the streets and grass and dirt of the Crescent City for at least a hundred and fifty-six years, it says, and is a game meant to be lived and breathed by the people rather than watched. Then the argument: for unknown and insidious reasons it has been accepted as a given that when men reach a certain age -- and women for their entire life -- baseball would become somehow out of reach, that the joy of taking to the field and playing hardball was only for professionals, for youth, for watching only. We reject this notion.
What follows is a description of a Sunday afternoon: pitchers and catchers and fielders and hitters and umpires calling strikes and balls, nine to a side, throwing and catching and swinging and running with sweat and dust and spit, win or lose building camaraderie and shared purpose, out there on the field ready for the next pitch, waiting for the ball to be hit our way.
Ten clubs play it. A High Cheese league page keeps the schedule, the standings and every roster at an address the league owns, so a competition with this much of itself written down owns the record of it.
The People's Baseball League in detail
- Sunday afternoons, two seasons a year, with makeup games arranged by the teams.
- Current standings and an all-time standings table, kept as separate pages.
- Weekly recaps written in the league's own voice, plus broadcasts.
- Ten clubs, named for the wards, streets and monsters of New Orleans.
- Run differential is used in the rules; no individual statistics are published.
- A contact section, a sign-up route and a donate page.
- A sign-up form, a waiver and dues paid together, and a mission that names who is welcome.
- It started at Lemann Playground at three o'clock on a Sunday.
- Version 3.1, amended by majority vote, with each team and the commissioner holding one vote.
- Games are broadcast and archived, and the league runs a podcast called Pitch Sequence.
- A social feed embedded on the about page, currently broken.
- A donate page rather than a sponsors page.
- Six championships on record, three of them to the Rougarou.
- A timeline that starts thousands of years ago and includes a night at Pal's Lounge.
- A commissioner with one vote, and managers with one each.
- Who can play, what kind of baseball, and what happens when a game ties.
- A rulebook published as a page and as a PDF, plus a waiver.
- Two seasons a year, with championships in June and December.
- Nothing is for sale; the league takes donations.
- An umpire-in-chief with the final call, and ejection powers written down.
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