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.
What’s the baseball like?
Fans of the three true outcomes will find homes in Liga Nacional Puertorriqueña baseball—plenty of teams are happy to sign or develop players whose main talent is their ability, on the rare occasions when they make contact, to hit the ball very, very far—but the sheer number of teams and players in the league, and the resulting competitive unevenness, militates against the dominance of any particular approach.
In general, however, LNP baseball is more smallball-dependent. While there are players for whom the home run or the walk is a particular calling card, most baseball games are won by situational hitting, careful baserunning, and precise fielding. Bunting and sacrifice flies are common drills, and most players aspire to become at least passable at stealing bases. Similarly, most pitchers prefer to operate via groundouts and popups than by strikeouts.
Modern LNP rules are very similar to MLB before the postpandemic attempts to turn it into a video game: all defensive shifts are legal, there is no starting runner in extra innings (and no ties are allowed, either), and relievers may face a single batter before being pulled.
Is there still baseball outside of Puerto Rico?
Of course. The Liga Nacional Puertorriqueña is the most famous league in the Cuarteto—a loose agreement more officially known as the Federación Internacional de Ligas Profesionales (FILPRO) between the major leagues based in Puerto Rico, Cuba, México and Venezuela. This concordat’s exact particulars have proven exceedingly mutable, but generally manifests as a delineation of each league’s sphere of baseball influence.
Beyond that, there is (as of this writing) a United States League, whose teams are mostly based in the Midwest and along the East Coast and which we refuse to cover for historical reasons, and several leagues located everywhere from western Canada to Central Europe.
Do you have international play (e.g., the World Baseball Classic)?
Absolutely. The Copa Mundial, which is celebrated every four years in one of the four major league nations, pits national teams against each other to determine the planetary champion of baseball. A particular innovation of the FILPRO system (see last question) is that countries without sufficient baseball talent to field an entire side may band together to create “catchment areas,” which can comprise several countries over thousands of miles if necessary.
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.”
Do you have merch?
We sure do! Check out our Tiendita (that Threads symbol up above will take you there—get it? A thread for Threadless?) for all sorts of T-shirts, magnets, phone cases, and other stuff you can use to rep the Liga Nacional Puertorriqueña.
We can verify, from multiple reports, that wearing LNP gear gets you flirted with by boricuas.
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.
What do you want to do with this project?
This is becoming less a “peek behind the curtain” and more a “surprise interrogation,” but you’re entitled to an answer.
Beyond teaching denizens of the Internet about the early history of baseball, which was bonkers in all manners great and small, and the history of Puerto Rico, which is given nearly imperceptible shrift in the American curriculum, I consider no project worth doing unless I can use it to do some real good in the moment.
Right now, the entirety of our efforts in that regard are:
• a single campaign to raise funds for Brigada Solidaria del Oeste, an organization based in the west of Puerto Rico that does community-based disaster response
• a yearly campaign during which we sell our Pride designs to raise money for Trans Lifeline
Although I am rarely blessed with a surfeit of time or energy, I never stop seeking new ways to bend the arc of the moral universe just a few nanometers towards justice through talking about baseball. If you have ideas, please drop me a line at lnpgaceta@gmail.com.