[ArquimedezPozo]

Alongside the continued dominance of the Bees, Red Birds, and Industriales, few outside Division 4 noticed the first championship of the Baltimore Terrapins. The Terrapins had always been a strange fit for Division 4 - though their market was a small one the fanbase was rabid, and they outdrew most teams in the NABF on an annual basis with some of the best players in the lowest Division. So the surprising thing was not that they won it all in 2018, but that it had taken them that long. But the lone championship hadn’t been enough to earn them promotion, so they remained in D4 for Cycle 5, initially in disappointing style, finishing in 3rd place, 11 games out of first.

Ownership made a change that offseason: the GM of the Boston Bees had abruptly quit, and was actively seeking a Division 4 team. The Terrapins had the resources to get him, and his hiring sparked a flurry of activity. What emerged was a Terrapins team with some critical holdovers from the 2018 team - 2018 Pitcher of the Year Josh Hill, defensive wizard CF Vince Lorek, and star 3B Chris Forester especially - bolstered by new acquisitions. The most important of these were 2B/SP Doug Padgett, a power-hitting star with severe injury concerns who the Pins scooped up for a bargain and who proved invaluable to later success; C Jose Molina, at 28 just coming into his own as a top-tier offensive and defensive catcher; and independent league signing Danny Rsaza, who scouts had spotted in Florida, and who after a few adjustments became a near-elite starter. With this new core, the Terrapins surged back to the Championship, finishing 2020 with an 89-65 record and defeating the St. Louis Browns in 7 games. Padgett won the MVP that year, hitting .318/.366/.619 and leading D4 with 34 homers, despite two multi-week stints on the IL (including a elbow strain that kept him to limited duty during the Championship Series). He added 3 WAR of pitching value to his 5.9 at the plate.

That season launched an unprecedented string of successful seasons. Between 2020 and 2027, the Terrapins would win eight straight Division titles, with a D4 title in 2020, D3 titles in 2022 and 2024, and three straight D2 titles between 2025 and 2027 (which will be covered in the next section). Every move the team made paid off: Rsaza became a workhorse and rotation anchor, averaging about 4 WAR a season as the Pins moved through D4 and D3. In 2023, Baltimore traded for ace Mike Martinez, who was approaching his final arbitration year; Baltimore immediately inked him to a long-term deal and was rewarded with two straight Pitcher of the Year campaigns. Baltimore also acquired LF Steve Mauck from St. Paul at the 2021 deadline. Mauck would almost immediately emerge as the greatest player the Terrapins have ever had, a complete hitter who would win the Most Valuable Player award four times across three Divisions for the club, including his Triple Crown, 59 homer 2024. All-time great starter Jim Betz would add to a devastating rotation in 2023, with his best late-career season also coming in Baltimore’s 2024 106-win run - the first of four straight 105+ win seasons. As Cycle 6 ended, Baltimore seemed unbeatable - and as Cycle 7 would show, they more or less were.

As the Terrapins redefined success, three teams battled for supremacy in Division 1. The El Paso Sun Kings became the first team with four Division 1 titles in 2023, capping a run of three straight D1 West-winning seasons, as they defeated Boston convincingly in four games. El Paso was led by their outstanding young 2B Mike Smart, at the start of an all-time great career spent almost entirely with El Paso. It was the Brooklyn Dodgers who ruled Cycle 5 in the East though, as the club finished first and won 90, then 94, and finally 98 games between 2019 and 2021, finally taking the championship in the 2021 series against El Paso. Brooklyn was a well-balanced club with few holes, though also few stars: 1B Ian Garrison, who won Championship Series MVP honors in 2021, looked to be on the verge of stardom but fell off after that season, with a respectable but not superstar career, while starter Paul Walter also experienced his best stretch during the run.

The Bees finished a disappointing 4th in 2019, but in a bizarre move essentially swapped GMs with Baltimore: as Boston’s former exec went south, Baltimore’s GM - fired abruptly in the move - signed on with Boston. Both moves panned out, as Boston’s fortunes reversed immediately: the Bees finished a close second to Brooklyn in 2020 and 2021 before taking off in 2022. The immediate causes of Boston’s 99 win, Championship 2022 were the continued brilliance of LF John Hansen, who clubbed 32 homers at age 36 and finished third in MVP voting; and two younger stars - RF Mike MacArtney, who had his greatest season at age 26 in 2022, with 6.6 WAR, a league leading 48 doubles and 319 TB, a batting line of .336/.387/.565, and a Gold Glove; and SP Jamie Combs, who now holds Boston’s all-time pitching WAR mark and who won the first of his three Pitcher of the Year Awards in 2022. Backed by established stars such as Geoff Finnell, Hector Rayfield, and C Alex Afan, the Bees won it all in 2022 and 2023, with 101 wins in that second championship season, and took the D1 East the following year for a threepeat.

In Division 3, the Detroit Stars accomplished a similar feat. In 2019, the Stars won the D3 East for the first time since their lone 2008 championship season, but this didn’t prove to be an outlier. Led by LF/SP Nick Goodwin, the Stars repeated their Conference title in each of the next two seasons, beating the resurgent Salt Lake Gulls both times to win promotion to Division 2. Goodwin spent just three years in Detroit, but they were the right ones, as he was a prime factor in both of Detroit’s Championships, hitting .278/.402/.697 with two homers in the 2021 series alone. The Stars were able to win the D2 East in their first season after promotion, though their fortunes began to slide thereafter.

Cycle 5 also saw the beginnings of the worst periods for three of the NABF’s longest-suffering squads: The Havana Sugar Kings, who had advanced to Division 1 after the first cycle but who had a 5th place finish and two last place finishes in Cycle 5, and another last place in D3 in Cycle 6; the Las Vegas 51s, who dropped from D2 to D4 with four last place finishes in six seasons while averaging 90 losses; and the lowly Pittsburgh Crawfords, arguably the worst team in the NABF’s long history, who would have been relegated from Division 4 had a lower division existed. The Crawfords remain, after 30 years, the only team that has never won its Conference, and one of only two teams (along with the San Antonio Missions) that have never left Division 4.

So Cycle 6 ended with three franchises clearly on top of the world: the Baltimore Terrapins, El Paso Sun Kings, and Boston Bees. Beneath them, the Dodgers, the Stars, and others battled for a piece of the pie, as the NABF entered its most divided and imbalanced cycle of play - one in which the Terrapins would nearly break the game itself.

Next: Greatest Individual Seasons, 2019-2024

image note: on the Terrapins image, the blank 2009 data (including playoff appearance) and the duplicated 2021 with the second blank are due to errors in promotion/relegation - hitting 'execute' too early can result in data issues