Gaceta de la Liga Nacional Puertorriqueña
150 years of baseball, all in one place:
a Puerto Rico free since the Grito de Lares.
Questions
Where am I?
You’ve arrived at the home page of the Liga Nacional Puertorriqueña, the national baseball league of the República Arquipelágica de Puerto Rico, which shook off the shackles of colonial domination in 1871 and promptly became the world’s most dominant power in baseball.
This site is the ongoing work of an indefatigable crew of gaceteros who have, after sundry gainful employments, taken up watch over La Central’s gargantuan archival vaults. In between translating 19th-century classified ads, assembling spreadsheets that make Excel whimper, and shooting the breeze about the weirdest baseball players they’ve ever heard of, they do their best to preserve the history of not only the Liga Nacional Puertorriqueña, but the world around it.
Wait, what?
Imagine, for a second, a universe where Segundo Ruiz Belvis didn’t suddenly die in Chile in 1867, and the revolutionaries in Lares were able to secure armaments from Ramón Emeterio Betances that, in this much worse reality, were impounded by the Dominican Republic.
As a result, rather than sit around eating lunch when they should have been planning military expeditions, the revolutionaries succeeded in touching off a war of independence that ended with the Insular Republic of Puerto Rico as not only a free nation, but a symbol of national liberation. The result of a tiny island gaining its independence with a few lucky cannonballs touched off decades of turmoil that ended in, for example, much earlier (and unified) Irish independence and the creation of a new nation along the Mexican-American border.
In 1898, the United States would attempt to invade Puerto Rico and Cuba, and the result was a shocking war of attrition on both islands as the linked armies of the Insular Republic and the Cuban liberation movement forced, once and for all, the yoke of the great powers of the world from their necks. By the middle of the twentieth century, they had become the nucleus of the Caribbean Confederation, a supranational organization that maintained a unified front against renewed American imperialism in the area.
Meanwhile, in baseball, every anti-player decision made by owners in this reality went the other way. Most notably, by the mid-1920s, the LNP operated with multiple levels of farm teams and mostly unrestricted free agency. Due to the Republic of Puerto Rico enshrining labor rights for ballplayers, the LNP never adopted a draft system, and international amateurs enjoy the same rights as boricua players.
Where can I learn more?
Click around! The staff page is our masthead; our team currently sits at eight permanent members, though we occasionally get to borrow gaceteros on their light days. You can find the Liga Nacional Puertorriqueña’s teams at, well, teams, while the rest of the leagues in the world are under, well, world. The glossary covers various kinds of historical and baseball slang we discuss in our other articles.
If you want to see more in-depth box scores, advanced stats, etc., the reports submenu up top is for you. It includes everything from the 19th-century almanac, with its weird lacunae, to up-to-date box scores. We will also eventually have actual in-depth content on this site, thanks to our gaceteros‘ ongoing efforts to chronicle exactly how weird 19th-century baseball was. You can also join the Discord server through that link up above if you want to follow along with a given team’s games.
Okay, you got me. How can I participate?
One of the best parts of this project is that you can engage with it however you choose. If you want to read up on the LNP’s history, we can set you up nicely; if you prefer to occasionally watch (or listen to) the LNP’s present unfold, we’ve got you covered; and if you wish to become part of the LNP’s future, that’s possible too.
For the audience-minded among you, we try to livestream a game once a week, on Fridays, at 7:05 PM EDT. Our broadcast team posts these games to YouTube within, usually, 24-48 hours, and occasionally records other games that seem like a good time. If you’re here, that hopefully means we’ve been writing about the LNP at the newsletter, too, bombarding you with all sorts of weird stories.
For us, though, the real draw of the LNP is that it’s a collaborative project. Our fans vote on league rules and policies, help decide which teams we cover, and—perhaps most importantly for you—can design players, and in the future, add teams to a special league. As one of our longtime supporters put it, “Do as much or as little as you want.”
Why does this exist?
Oh, you want the peek behind the curtain? Fine. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.
In short: one guy got tired of reading how, in Puerto Rican history, all attempts at liberation from the colonial powers who conquered the island—first the Spaniards and then the United States—ended in messes of incompetence, betrayal, and retrenchment by the dominant authorities. That same guy, having been a baseball fan most of his life, was by then getting tired of the way American baseball fans treated Latine players of a sport whose history is, at this point, basically an homage to the Monroe Doctrine.
Then that guy bought Out of the Park Baseball, learned that he could make a decent logo or edit a little CSS in a pinch, and decided to share the result with the world. In the sense that it was a public-facing gesture of any kind, the Liga Nacional Puertorriqueña was born in February of 2018, when one particular team choked away title after title despite being, to all appearances, the best in the LNP, but it wasn’t until the year after that he began writing about its vicissitudes in longer formats.
By then, it had become clear that something like the LNP could not have existed without a free Puerto Rico. Even then, it took some inexpert fiddling with OOTP settings that inadvertently created a very modern baseball world (free agency, minor leagues, international amateur free agents and the like) for the idea of a “universe where things go right” to take a more definite shape.
The rest, after a lot of improvised graphic design and slapdash CSS, is alternate history.