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1923 Baseball League Season to be Begun Monday.

Another League baseball season will be begun on Monday afternoon. There can be no doubt that since the war, the League has made great progress. Public interest has increased in such a degree that many clubs last season had gates of 10,000, as compared to 4,000 in 1914. Indeed, the Walsall club averaged over 12,000 at the gate per game, while Manchester United drew almost 9,000 on average. Exeter City and Preston North End averaged gates of more than 8,500 as Second Division clubs, and even Third Division sides such as Watford, Swansea City and Accrington Stanley hosted on average more than 6,000 “fans” per game. These are indeed great times in Great Britain to run a professional baseball club at the highest levels.

The clubs in the three divisions will be remarkable for the unusually small number of changes that have taken place in the teams. Walsall, for instance, will be represented by exactly the same side of Price, Elcock, Bestwick, and Ramsay inside; Sherriff, Thomas, and Lowe outside; and Stanton and Eadie as battery; as that which won the Championship last September and the EOI Cup last October against Sunderland at Roker Park. Many clubs will be in much the same position. Walsall had no urgent need for new men except, perhaps, for a good fielding and batting short stop, but the majority of clubs would have been glad to have strengthened their own clubs with Walsall’s current short stop, or with any decent starting position player if it had been possible. They profess that they will not pay the extravagant trading pieces that are demanded, but, if this be but one reason for the few exchanges made, there is another—namely, that there is a shortage of real talent. The number of clubs competing for players has been increased very considerably during recent years, and the supply is now not large enough to satisfy all requirements. The most notable trade has been that of Bragger, the Walsall bench third base man, for whose services Sunderland has been said to have paid over £5,000. Black Cats will now insert Bragger directly into the line-up, starting at third base and in the second batting position, and hope that Bragger will bring up the country some of the Swifts’ Championship magic. Another “capture” is the singing on by Aston Villa of the South African national, the catcher Fergus Sables, aged 21, from the Transvaal United club. Sables is a catcher, and set up a “record” for South African school ball three winters ago by making sixteen home runs in just 44 games.

The London clubs have secured only a few men, at any rate for the first teams. Fulham have first base man Riach, a Scotsman, from Tottenham, who received in turn the young players Nelson, Broadly and Gorman; Charlton Athletic have Sawyer, a starting pitcher, from Barrow; Queens Park have Harmer, the young short stop, whom they are trying to covert to an early order batsman; and Millwall obtained Skinner, the experienced centre fielder, from West Ham United.

The Championship has been won four times in five season by only one club, Liverpool, in their Halcyon days of 1907 through 1911; Walsall now seek to match that accomplishment in this, the 1923 season. As they have the advantage of beginning their season with last year’s side intact, it is probable that they will at once settle down to effective combination. Although their pitching staff is quite long in the tooth, with three top starters aged 29 or higher, their field starters are all quite young, seven of them in their prime years between ages 24 and 27. They have the perfect combination of experience and youth which should serve them well into several coming seasons, but first things first, and this year’s Championship will be the one and only focus of the squad.

Swifts will have especially fervent competition in Chesterfield, the purveyor of many trades during the past few years deemed questionable enough at the time to effect changes in law preventing the exchange of players between teams with less than 30 days remaining in season. But Spireites, far from being the thin squad led by the great M’lord Bridgeman in years past, have a strong young core Fox, Maudlin, Robertson, Stallone, Blair and Roberts. It remains to be seen only if the pitching and fielding can match the promise of the attack, and lead Chesterfield to glory. Crewe Alexandra, Blackburn, and Bolton round out the list of challengers most likely to appear in October’s EOI Cup tie.

London is in danger of losing all representation in the top tier, as Tottenham Hotspur are widely considered to be among the worst teams in the loop and the “favourite” to move down after the season to the Second Division, where five clubs—the Arsenal, Charlton Athletic, Chelsea, Fulham, and Clapton Orient—from the Capital Region already play, with only the last club given much if any chance to advance forward. Grimsby Town, Blackpool, and Burnley are also seen as favourites for promotion to the First Division. Of the remaining five London clubs in the League, who play in the Third Division, Watford and West Ham United are the favourites among the punters to rise to the Second Division from the Southern Section, with their strongest competitors deemed to be Swansea Town, Gillingham and new League entry Torquay United. The strongest sides in the Northern Section are seen to be Birmingham, Darlington, erstwhile Champion Hull City, and long-time top tier exile Wolverhampton Wanderers, a hard luck club who recently regained admission to the League in 1921 after being out the previous nine seasons, and who have been out of the First Division since 1898.

The troubles that wracked Ireland for the past few years and which culminated in the establishment of the Irish Free State are not expected to affect the flow of baseball talent from either there nor the newly christened Northern Ireland, and most baseballers from that island have flowed from the latter in any case. Traditional ties to the Kingdom have always rendered baseball a more popular sport in the northern counties with some three fourths of all Irish players emanating from that area, and the influx of such had not been hampered by the troubles there anyway. Scotland remains the largest source of foreign baseball talent, and is expected to remain so as the game has been going great guns there for some time now.