League of the Great Lakes
Before it was possible to be paid for playing baseball, its heartland had already been firmly established as the heavily-urbanized Northeast, especially the industrial corridor that connected the two canonical American metropolites of Chicago and New York. It was here, in this great churning of teams and players, that the rules of the game were standardized, leagues formally structured, and scandals weathered.
By the late nineteenth century, the Liga Nacional Puertorriqueña had begun exporting its faster, harder game to Cuba, Texas, and Canada. With baseball came the liberatory spirit that the Boricua game had celebrated since its inception, and the turn of the century promised only that the march towards justice would quicken in its inexorable pace as the new century dawned.
Enter the international project of the postwar Liga Nacional Puertorriqueña, which through secret entities and informal arrangements would expand the reach of not only the Puerto Rican style of baseball, but its insistence on fielding teams where playing ability, not skin color, determined membership. A surprising number of towns throughout the Great Lakes, now ignored as Western politicians came to dominate United States politics, were willing to sign on to this strange quest, especially as the official major leagues withered.
Western Great Lakes Association
League of Lake Huron (LLH)
- Wild card berths: None.
- Lake Huron banners: None.
- WGLA pennants: None.
- LoGL championships: None.
Whether writing pro-slavery novels or inventing fanciful names for parts of Michigan from nonexistent Indigenous languages, Henry Schoolcraft spent his life being a noxious influence on the United States.
- Wild card berths: None.
- Lake Huron banners: None.
- WGLA pennants: None.
- LoGL championships: None.
Though electronic forms of directing traffic had existed since 1868, it was Bad Axe resident William Potts who first thought to add the amber “caution” light that drivers of all kinds proudly ignore on a regular basis.
- Wild card berths: None.
- Lake Huron banners: None.
- WGLA pennants: None.
- LoGL championships: None.
As it turns out, beet sugar is a very potent pollutant process—to the point the city eventually had to pay residents whose homes were close to the production facility—but remains something of a point of local pride.
- Wild card berths: None.
- Lake Huron banners: None.
- WGLA pennants: None.
- LoGL championships: None.
As a sport, competitive stone skipping draws as much cachet from its ancient pedigree as it loses from every other aspect of its existence—but one of the premier tournaments for it is, in fact, on Mackinac Island.
formerly Detroit Wolverines
- Wild card berths: None.
- Lake Huron banners: 1904, 1905, 1906.
- WGLA pennants: 1904.
- LoGL championships: 1904.
Though Fabian “Joe” Fournier—lumberjack, brawler, and possible source for the legend of Paul Bunyan—certainly worked in Michigan, he was born in Quebec, meaning that this U.S. team is named after a Canadian.
League of Lake Michigan (LLM)
- Wild card berths: 1904.
- Lake Michigan banners: 1905, 1906.
- WGLA pennants: None.
- LoGL championships: None.
For most people, it is sufficiently surprising to learn that pirates existed on the Great Lakes, let alone that there was one notorious enough to be nicknamed “Roaring Dan.”
- Wild card berths: None.
- Lake Michigan banners: None.
- WGLA pennants: None.
- LoGL championships: None.
As one of the most infamous firms of the early twentieth century, U.S. Steel—Gary’s largest employer—burnished its corporate image through sponsoring a rather silly baseball team.
- Wild card berths: None.
- Lake Michigan banners: None.
- WGLA pennants: None.
- LoGL championships: None.
Discerning baseball fans of course note the connection between a town named “Holland” and the importance of tulips to the Dutch, but ironically, the team first got its name in the 1920s.
formerly Milwaukee Brewers
- Wild card berths: None.
- Lake Michigan banners: 1904.
- WGLA pennants: None.
- LoGL championships: None.
German immigration to the United States brought with it an entire galaxy of sausages; among these, bratwurst, which first gained currency in Sheboygan County, holds the twin distinctions of being the most famous and the most linked to baseball.
- Wild card berths: None.
- Lake Michigan banners: None.
- WGLA pennants: None.
- LoGL championships: None.
While naming the team after the specific Montmorency cherries that dominate production in the area would have been more accurate, team sponsors found the lighter-red group to which they belong a more euphonious moniker.
League of Lake Superior (LLS)
- Wild card berths: None.
- Lake Superior banners: None.
- WGLA pennants: None.
- LoGL championships: None.
Once in purple prose portrayed by both its own residents and traitors to the federal government, Duluth grew into a real city almost overnight from iron, lumber, and shipping.
- Wild card berths: 1905, 1906.
- Lake Superior banners: None.
- WGLA pennants: None.
- LoGL championships: None.
The remote, sparsely-settled reaches of the modern Cook County were once prime trading country for the hardy voyageurs, whose incredible endurance benefited from its many safe harbors.
- Wild card berths: None.
- Lake Superior banners: 1904, 1905, 1906.
- WGLA pennants: 1905, 1906.
- LoGL championships: 1906.
Though Marquette eventually settled into a profitable existence shipping iron ore, at first, its plentiful reserves of hematite were smelted on-site before being sent downriver.
- Wild card berths: None.
- Lake Superior banners: None.
- WGLA pennants: None.
- LoGL championships: None.
As part of its ongoing rivalry with its differently-pronounced Canadian neighbor, American fans like to remind them that they have control of the Locks.
- Wild card berths: None.
- Lake Superior banners: None.
- WGLA pennants: None.
- LoGL championships: None.
Though only one example has survived to the modern era—the extraordinarily-durable SS Meteor—the oddly-shaped whaleback was a mainstay of Great Lakes shipping for decades.
Eastern Great Lakes Association
League of Lake Erie (LLE)
formerly Buffalo Bisons
- Wild card berths: 1904.
- Lake Erie banners: 1905.
- EGLA pennants: 1904.
- LoGL championships: None.
Connecticut native Joseph Dart’s invention of the grain elevator ensured Buffalo’s prominence in the heyday of Great Lakes shipping—but baseball demanded a sillier name for the local side.
- Wild card berths: None.
- Lake Erie banners: None.
- EGLA pennants: None.
- LoGL championships: None.
Erie’s team is named after the rank of local naval hero Oliver Hazard Perry, whose decisive victory against the Royal Navy in Lake Erie allowed the United States to regain its lost territory.
- Wild card berths: None.
- Lake Erie banners: None.
- EGLA pennants: None.
- LoGL championships: None.
Slide fasteners, one of the great sartorial comforts of the twentieth century, were first perfected in Meadville—where a flourishing corporation would one day produce their vast majority.
- Wild card berths: 1906.
- Lake Erie banners: 1904.
- EGLA pennants: None.
- LoGL championships: None.
Perhaps Mentor’s abundant rosebushes convinced James Garfield to buy a home in the city, from which he conducted the first successful presidential front porch campaign.
- Wild card berths: 1904.
- Lake Erie banners: None.
- EGLA pennants: None.
- LoGL championships: None.
It is not surprising that Norwalk’s team would choose a perfectly charming, if not especially notable, name—especially when their other choice is rather off-putting.
League of Lake Ontario (LLO)
- Wild card berths: 1905.
- Lake Ontario banners: 1904, 1906.
- EGLA pennants: 1905, 1906.
- LoGL championships: 1905.
What might at first seem a typically-grandiose name for a town in Western New York, of all places, is in actuality the unofficial title of the Rudman brothers, who first sponsored the team in their local league.
- Wild card berths: None.
- Lake Ontario banners: None.
- EGLA pennants: None.
- LoGL championships: None.
When the water cure movement spread throughout the Northeast in the middle of the nineteenth century, Oswego became one of its most enduring locations.
- Wild card berths: None.
- Lake Ontario banners: None.
- EGLA pennants: None.
- LoGL championships: None.
Local nurseryman George Ellwanger donated the land where one day crowds would gather to see hundreds of varieties of lilacs, creating one of the first municipal arboreta in the United States.
- Wild card berths: None.
- Lake Ontario banners: None.
- EGLA pennants: None.
- LoGL championships: None.
Before becoming better-known as a university town, Syracuse was more famous for its blessed brine springs, whose product found its way into the local cuisine and the global economy.
- Wild card berths: None.
- Lake Ontario banners: 1905.
- EGLA pennants: None.
- LoGL championships: None.
Uticans still insist that the half-moon, which definitively originates there, is a separate entity from the better-known, smaller, and less chocolate-laden black-and-white cookie.
Canadian Independent Baseball
Uniquely among the leagues affiliated to the Liga Nacional Puertorriqueña, the League of the Great Lakes includes teams that, despite subsidies from the LNP, remained unaffiliated throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.
Known also as “Golden Horseshoe Baseball,” this league was surprisingly competitive with the rest of the Magnilacian contingents.
- Wild card berths: None.
- Golden Horseshoe banners: None.
- EGLA pennants: None.
- LoGL championships: None.
Though Fort Henry was not built in time to participate in the War of 1812, it nonetheless remained one of the most important operational centers for the nineteenth-century Canadian military.
- Wild card berths: None.
- Golden Horseshoe banners: 1906.
- EGLA pennants: None.
- LoGL championships: None.
Between its time as a garrison town for the British Army and—for a scant two years—one of the first sites of military instruction in Ontario, London has long been a military city.
- Wild card berths: None.
- Golden Horseshoe banners: None.
- EGLA pennants: None.
- LoGL championships: None.
At the eastern tip of the Golden Horseshoe, Oshawa’s association with the automotive industry near-guaranteed it an opportunity to join a league that so celebrates heavy industry.
- Wild card berths: None.
- Golden Horseshoe banners: None.
- EGLA pennants: None.
- LoGL championships: None.
Not only did Sarnia host the first commercial oil well in North America, but its primacy meant that skilled engineers and drillers traveled the world from Sarnia to teach their colleagues.
- Wild card berths: None.
- Golden Horseshoe banners: 1905.
- EGLA pennants: None.
- LoGL championships: None.
What, exactly, possesses the local residents to assemble annually and throw frozen chickens on an equally-frozen pond is beyond our ken—but it does make for an excellent team name.