Around the World
While the Gaceta must for obvious reasons maintain its brightest spotlight firmly trained on the Liga Nacional Puertorriqueña—it is, after all, in the name of the publication—it would be exceedingly crass to leave its readers without at least some idea of what baseball is like in the farther reaches of the globe, especially when so much of the world functions as bright stars in the constellation of Puerto Rican baseball.
Here, our readers can glance at a very different Earth, where the arc of the moral universe bent perhaps a touch more steeply towards justice. We will not speculate on whether the comparative global popularity of baseball is related to that divergence.
América Latina
Major Leagues
Liga Profesional
de Béisbol Cubana
Cuban Professional
Baseball League
Founded: 1878.
Teams: 18.
The second-oldest professional baseball league in Latin America, the LBPC has a history just as vivid, and just as peculiar, as its somewhat older sibling.
Liga Nacional
Mexicana
Mexican National
League
Founded: 1894.
Teams: 24.
Child of a ramshackle league that formed during the Fronterizo Rebellions of the 1890s, the Liga Nacional Mexicana is the third brightest star of the baseball world.
Affiliated Leagues
Liga Veraniega
de Principiantes
Apprentice Summer
League
Class III
Founded: 1904.
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.
América del Norte
Affiliated Leagues
Baseball
League
of New England
Class II
Founded: 1903.
Teams: 24.
As organized baseball struggled financially in the early twentieth century, some leagues—always regional and unimportant, at least initially—dared to defy the color barrier.
League
of the
Free Frontier
Class I
Founded: 1887.
Teams: 24.
While the Fronterizo Rebellions did not, by themselves, stymie the United States’ imperial ambitions, they provided another field of battle for Latin-style baseball to conquer.
League
of the
Great Lakes
Class II
Founded: 1904.
Teams: 30.
Subject to influence from the nearby Canadian and New Englander leagues, it was only a matter of time until the Great Lakes joined in defying the major leagues’ continued racist practices.
Class I
Founded: 1892.
Teams: 20.
The oldest non-American professional baseball league on the continent, the Royal Canadian would soon become a source of some of the world’s most skilled—and, frankly, funniest—players.
Class I
Founded: 1901.
Teams: 10.
Lacking in the urbanization that defined eastern Canada, the Western provinces were eventually forced by the growing popularity of the sport to create their own tightly-knit circuit, uniquely resistant to outside influence.
Europa
Affiliated Leagues
