[chucksabr]

Baseball League, Baseball Alliance
Merge in Historic Agreement

In an arrangement that is sure to spur tremendous growth for base ball throughout the Kingdom, The Baseball Alliance will set aside its waning independence and allow itself to be absorbed into the Baseball League, which will now serve as the governing body for all top level professional base ball in Britain.

The agreement comes amid some controversy, as the Midlands League and Lancashire League both claim to have been promised the first opportunity to merge with the powerful Baseball League. However, they will have to bide their time while the Alliance, which had had designs on usurping the primacy of the League, decided in the end that is better to serve a master profitably than to starve on your own.

The newly extended league will now host twenty-eight clubs, to be split into two divisions. The First Division will encompass the sixteen clubs that would have made up the League this year, whilst the Second Division will make up the collection of twelve clubs that would have been the Alliance.

The League also announced that it will follow through on a plan that’s been in motion for a year to move to weekday base ball, although as expected, they will leave the Sabbath be so as not to disturb man’s ordained communion with the Lord. The season for First Division clubs will be ninety games long, which will fit neatly into a fifteen week period starting in late May and ending in mid September. This will serve both player and patron well as 1891 was one of the chilliest English summers in memory. Games will start neatly at four o’clock throughout the week for every club save Saturday, on which games will start at two o’clock as nearly all iron, textile and shipbuilding workers now receive the half-holiday that was implemented a few years ago.

On the contrary, the Second Division will maintain their schedule at the weekends for another season, while undertaking plans to start on a weekday schedule themselves for the 1893 season.

The league will also employ an automatic promotion and relegation scheme which will involve clubs from each division playing a series of test matches against their appropriately placed counterparts in the other division to determine which clubs will advance or retreat between the divisions. The scheme was devised as an attempt to forgo the potential political intrigue that has manifested itself in prior seasons due to favouritism of certain chairmen and clubs because of their relationships with men of authority. In this new scheme, the only determinant will be the merits of play on the pitch itself, a far more rational method with which to approach the question.

One other scheme the League will experiment with, should the need arise, is the playing of test matches to break season-long draws, to avoid what was considered within certain clubs the scourge of shared championships that had characterized previous seasons in 1888 and 1889, and had left those at the top wholly dissatisfied with the taste. The test match to break the draw, if needed, will occur the Monday following the last match of the season. We can’t say we ourselves are happy with this Americanisation of our unique base ball product. But the League have spoken, and it shall be so.