Europäischer Baseballverband /
European Baseball Federation
At the dawn of the twentieth century, not a single person on the planet would have expected baseball to expand beyond its existing confines. While its purchase in the Caribbean and the United States seemed inviolable, and the new leagues in Mexico and Venezuela provided proof that there were still worlds left to conquer, the only league to exist outside of the Western Hemisphere was the Crown of the Four Flowers, which had been founded explicitly as a business venture that, as a secondary effect, encouraged trade between Britain and allowed the Insular Republic to covertly support Irish independence movements.
Hence the particular surprise that the first baseball league in Continental Europe not only arose within the first decade of that century, but that it did so organically, without explicit support from the existing system.
Apparently, these designs had begun before La Repulsión. The engineer Robert Whitehead had been so impressed with the game of baseball he witnessed in 1890 that he pushed for the formation of an Austro-Hungarian imperial league. Though the project was thoroughly shot down at the time, Whitehead’s dream became something of a cause célèbre among the modernizers of late 19th-century Europe. It drew together such disparate men as German automobile engineer Wilhelm Maybach, Italian prime minister Giovanni Giolitti, and Hungarian composer Ernst von Dohnányi among others.
Their confraternity, carried on through informal correspondence and capable middlemen, was as simple as it was geographically diffuse: they had all seen the great game played.
By 1907, when the Liga Nacional Puertorriqueña was focusing on broadening opportunities for player development and tightening connections with the rest of the non-American baseball world, fourteen of Central Europe’s most famous cities chose to become the Continent’s first experiment with this increasingly global sport.
Westlicher Kreis
Western Circuit
- Wild card berths: 1908.
- Division titles: None.
- WLK-Fähnchen: 1908.
- Europameisterschaften: 1908.
Also called the Pale Mountains, northeastern Italy’s spur of the Alps was famous for its skiing and sightseeing long before playing host to a baseball team.
- Wild card berths: None.
- Division titles: None.
- WLK-Fähnchen: None.
- Europameisterschaften: None.
For almost a millennium, thanks to Imperial political foresight, Leipzig has been the kind of city where merchants can safely and easily ply their trade.
- Wild card berths: None.
- Division titles: None.
- WLK-Fähnchen: None.
- Europameisterschaften: None.
Just twenty years after suffering a brutal sack, Magdeburg retook its importance when the famous hemispheres demonstrated the theory of atmospheric pressure.
- Wild card berths: None.
- Division titles: 1907.
- WLK-Fähnchen: 1907.
- Europameisterschaften: None.
Why the coopers of Munich dance for the public every seven years has not been determined to general satisfaction, but it is undeniably entertaining.
- Wild card berths: None.
- Division titles: None.
- WLK-Fähnchen: None.
- Europameisterschaften: None.
Citizens of the modern world may take long-distance mail for granted, but Regensburg—the last headquarters, in a line stretching back to 1490, of the Holy Roman Empire’s postmen—knows better.
- Wild card berths: None.
- Division titles: 1908.
- WLK-Fähnchen: None.
- Europameisterschaften: None.
Powered by the combined industrial capacity of the German Empire, engineers like Benz, Daimler and Maybach turned Stuttgart into the cradle of German auto engineering—including one of the first carburetor designs.
- Wild card berths: 1907.
- Division titles: None.
- WLK-Fähnchen: None.
- Europameisterschaften: None.
After centuries of Roman poetry reducible to plodding accounts of famous victories, it was Gaius Valerius Catullus and his fellow neoterics who finally began to express more private affairs of the heart in Latin.
Ostlicher Kreis
Eastern Circuit
- Wild card berths: None.
- Division titles: 1908.
- OLK-Fähnchen: 1908.
- Europameisterschaften: None.
Uniquely in the whole vast affiliated baseball configuration, Bratislava’s Warriors are named after Germán Infante, the first LNP player of Slovak ancestry.
- Wild card berths: 1908.
- Division titles: 1907.
- OLK-Fähnchen: None.
- Europameisterschaften: None.
Whether its originates with Slavic myth or the much more likely legend of Saint George, Ljubljana has used the dragon as its symbol for centuries now.
- Wild card berths: None.
- Division titles: None.
- OLK-Fähnchen: None.
- Europameisterschaften: None.
When Czech-Boricua architect Antonin Nechodoma was asked for advice on what to name the team in his hometown, he knew exactly what to suggest.
- Wild card berths: None.
- Division titles: None.
- OLK-Fähnchen: None.
- Europameisterschaften: None.
Of all places that could have developed the self-propelled torpedo, the multicultural city on the Adriatic sea was one of the least likely candidates.
- Wild card berths: None.
- Division titles: None.
- OLK-Fähnchen: None.
- Europameisterschaften: None.
Perhaps to encourage the development of its highest-potential players—and, one hopes, not to place them under undue pressure—Salzburg’s directors chose to name their team after the city’s most famous prodigy.
- Wild card berths: 1907.
- Division titles: None.
- OLK-Fähnchen: 1907.
- Europameisterschaften: 1907.
Although it had been over a century since Venice had been allowed to celebrate its notorious carnival, it was enough of a cultural touchstone to name the team after the elaborate masks the partygoers wore.
- Wild card berths: None.
- Division titles: None.
- OLK-Fähnchen: None.
- Europameisterschaften: None.
Vienna has a surprisingly deep coffee culture, which is how Austrian trade with Puerto Rico began—after all, the stuff coming from the Caribbean was strong enough to give locals some very detailed nightmares.