Affiliated Leagues

In a world emptier of the exact kind of whimsical rule-defying in which their sport revels, baseball players would enter the professional phase of their careers in perfect possession of their peak physical and mental talents, and teams would churn through their entire rosters every year to seek new talent on the winter market.

Fortunately for the families of every veteran pitcher and hitter, their eventual successors need places where they can hone their craft without affecting their club’s opportunities to win the very titles that lead to attracting top prospects.

In the Liga Nacional Puertorriqueña’s system, affiliated leagues are divided into four separate but equally important ranks. Each team is required to maintain affiliation with one team, and no more, at each level.

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Class I

Far-flung across the free nations of the world, these affiliates fulfill a number of odd but necessary functions in organizational structure. Notoriously, Class I teams serve as long-term storage for depth players who, because of age or ability, are typically regarded as supernumerary depth for injury-beleaguered rosters. These players, typically at least somewhat experienced with major-league play, are then able to teach prospects on the way up about sundry aspects of life in the Liga Nacional Puertorriqueña.

Crown of the Four Flowers

Founded: 1890.
Teams: 24.

Some baseball leagues celebrate the liberation of a people; others formalize a heretofore-regional set of rules; many simply enshrine the existing bonds of fun and friendship between amateurs. The Twentysides—which would become the Crown of the Four Flowers in the new century—were founded because one foundry owner was too stubborn to go without the game that had on first sight become his obsession.

League of the Free Frontier

Founded: 1887.
Teams: 24.

If anyone should doubt that baseball is the liberatory sport of the world, let them come to la Frontera, where decades of nineteenth-century solidarity between players who spoke English, Spanish, German, Czech or Greek—among others—proved fertile soil for the eventual revolution that, by creating a proudly multiethnic buffer state, permanently stymied the imperial ambitions of the United States towards its southern neighbors.

Royal Canadian Baseball League

Founded: 1892.
Teams: 20.

Beyond being the oldest professional baseball league in North America to originate outside of the United States (and the only one on the continent to enjoy royal patronage), the Royal Canadian is most famous to fans of the Liga Nacional Puertorriqueña for its transformational role in the first decade of the twentieth century, when it became the source of many of the world’s most skilled—and, often, funniest—players.

Western & Plains League

Founded: 1901.
Teams: 10.

While the Western provinces once lacked the urbanization that defined eastern Canada and linked it to the rest of the baseball world, there was no reason for them to go without the same entertainments as their compatriots. Amid the growing popularity of the sport, the Westerners’ typical ingenuity and practicality thus midwifed their own tightly-knit circuit, defined by its own traditions and uniquely resistant to outside influence.

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Class II

Many are the once-refulgent careers which have ended in the relative obscurity of the Class II leagues, and with good reason. It is at this stage that top-level prospects, bolstered through extensive practice and dedicated coaching, tend to finally encounter each other at a similar level of development. For a few fortunates, this crucibilistic juncture is further encouragement to draw on their reserves of strength and forge their path forward.

Baseball League of New England

Founded: 1903.
Teams: 24.

Organized baseball, like every other economic sector of the United States, suffered mightily from the defeats in the Caribbean. Reeling from the blow to their inchoate imperial prestige, the financial classes retreated from what they saw as frivolities. As more and bigger cities across the Northeast fumed over losing their teams, new leagues sprang up willing to resurrect moribund franchises—if they broke with some of the covenants previously established in the system.

Europäischer Baseballverband

European Baseball Federation

Founded: 1907.
Teams: 14.

Baseball’s journey towards popularity in Central Europe began at the end of the nineteenth century, when local magnates noticed that the sport had become a cultural shorthand for many of the liberation movements in the region. Though they seized the opportunity to channel revolutionary desires into an unfamiliar pastime, they would come to regret what at first appeared an exceptional stratagem.

League of the Great Lakes

Founded: 1904.
Teams: 30.

Despite the industrial might of the Great Lakes cities, they also saw their baseball teams slowly disappear when La Repulsión came for the pocketbooks of the financial and ownership classes of the United States. Given their proximity to Canada and New England, whose leagues would grow in influence as existing baseball circuits receded, it was only a matter of time until the American industrial spine also began to defy long-established racist practices.

日本野球協会 / Nihon Yakyū Kyōkai

Japanese Baseball Association

Founded: 1909.
Teams: 16.

Although Japan was by no means the last frontier that Latin-style baseball would conquer, the appearance of teams in the recently-minted great power of the East was the most obvious sign yet of the sport’s global dominance. By attracting dozens of veteran players with superior wages and lower pressure, the NYK ensured its quality of play would be comparable to every major league from the first pitch thrown at its stadia.

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Class III & IV

Known as las veraniegas,¹ these leagues were born from preoccupations unforeseeable before La Repulsión² forced the Liga Nacional Puertorriqueña to assemble talent from abroad. To Puerto Rican fans, Class III and IV leagues emphasize the innate boricuidad of the National Endeavor. Scouts and general managers consider them secure bailiwicks to keep budding stars in line. For the players themselves, who in these leagues are barely out of school at their oldest, they’re mostly a good deal of fun.

Liga Veraniega de Principiantes

Apprentice Summer League

Founded: 1904.
Teams: 78.

Before professional baseball was the dream of young boys for whom war would one day be a distant memory, it spent two generations as a medium of solace for many of their fathers, uncles, and older brothers, who regained their humanity through their time on the diamond. For their less-wounded successors, that same fellow-feeling first takes shape in the regional leagues of the LVP.

Liga Veraniega de Novatos

Rookie Summer League

Founded: ?
Teams: 78.

When the dream of playing professional baseball spread to young boys for whom war would one day be a distant memory, the LNP heavily invested in developing regional leagues that would help them achieve it.