Questions
While we tend—understandably, given our profession—towards verbosity, we are sufficiently aware of human normalcy to expect that most readers will be quite confused on their first encounter with our site. Below, we provide answers to those questions we expect to be most frequent among you.
Where am I?
You are perusing the online home of the Liga Nacional Puertorriqueña, the national baseball league of the República Arquipelágica de Puerto Rico, a country that shook off the shackles of colonial domination in 1871 and embarked on a decades-long mission to become the world’s preeminent baseball power.
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 their computers 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 extensive tapestry at whose center it lies.
Wait, what?
Picture a universe where Segundo Ruiz Belvis didn’t suddenly die in Chile in 1867 while trying to drum up support for Puerto Rican independence, and where the Lares revolutionaries were able to secure armaments from Ramón Emeterio Betances that, in this much worse reality, were impounded by the Dominican Republic.
As a result, instead of eating lunch when they should have been planning military expeditions, they 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. A tiny island gaining its independence with a few lucky cannonballs touched off decades of turmoil that ended in, for example, a much earlier (and unified) independent Ireland, and a new multiethnic 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 once and for all forced the yoke of the world’s great powers from their necks.
Meanwhile, due to the Republic of Puerto Rico enshrining positive labor rights, baseball players enjoyed a much greater degree of liberty. By the mid-1920s, the LNP had mostly unrestricted free agency. International prospects follow the same procedures as boricua players and have the same rights, and periodic proposals to begin a draft invariably fail.
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 descriptions of individual LNP teams at, well, teams, while other 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 is for you. It includes everything from the 19th-century almanac, 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.
Okay, you got me. How can I participate?
Short answer: that’s up to you. You can read up on LNP history, watch (or listen to) its present, and—if you want—become part of its future.
• We try to livestream a game once a week, on Fridays, at 7:05 PM EDT. Our broadcast team posts these games to YouTube, usually within 24-48 hours, and occasionally records and posts other games that seem like good times.
• You can also join the Discord server through that link up above, if you want to follow along with a given team’s games, or just chop it up with other LNP fans.
• If you’re here, that hopefully means we’ve been writing about the LNP on 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
• design players
• more, in the future!
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 all attempts at liberating Puerto Rico from the colonial domination of the Spaniards (and, later, the United States) ended in messes of incompetence, betrayal, and retrenchment by the oppressor. 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.
As 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 repeatedly setting records for single-season wins, but it was the year after that he began writing about it in longer formats.
By then, it became clear that the LNP could not exist without a free Puerto Rico. Even then, it took some inexpert fiddling with OOTP settings for the idea of a “universe where things go right“ to take a more definite shape.
After years of learning Excel, basic CSS, and graphic design, the rest is alternate history.