At the end of 2020, a new baseball league was announced with a lot of fanfare. This league, the European Super League Baseball, ESLB for short, would land teams in countries where baseball isn’t a big sport at all. With this initiative, the new league wanted to grow the game of baseball. What has become of the league?
With some Tweets, the ESLB announced itself to the baseball world in December 2020. The upstart league was planning to place teams in in England (Bath), France (Paris), Italy, Portugal and Spain. Besides Italy, not the countries where baseball is a big sport.
The intention was to hire a lot of South- and Central American players. One could wonder if teams with hired guns would attract baseball fans. Would fans feel a connection with teams without local players?
According to the then active website, there would be cooperations with the Atlantic League, the Baseball Federation of Andalusia, the Indian Baseball Federation and with the Venezuelan Umpire Camp. But the websites of the clubs never got active.
Then, in August 2021, after the league didn’t show much of activity, the WBSC, in the person of corrupt president Fraccari, sent out an email in which it announced that the ESLB would be illegal as it wasn’t sanctioned by the WBSC. It wouldn’t be the first time that Fraccari tried to block a good initiative of growing the sport of baseball. Back in 2016, a similar initiative was started in Europe. This time the KNBSB and the CEB (predecessor of the WBSC Europe) did everything in their might to block this league, only because these two vile governing bodies of baseball didn’t want to lose influence.
After six years, the ESLB still doesn’t show much signs of life. There is still a website but it doesn’t contain any information. The Tweets with which the league announced its creation are deleted. One of the teams, the Knights, supposed to play in Great Britain, still has an active Facebook page but since 2022 no new items have been posted there.
After a bit of googling, yours truly bumped into an Instagram account on which an ESLB Supercup competition is announced for 2026/2027. But since that Supercup was announced in 2021, 2022, and 2024 as well, without anything happening, I think this these are the final convulsions of a league that wasn’t meant to be.
It looks like Fraccari and his cronies did their destructive work well. And even though I think this league didn’t have much of a chance, even without the sabotage of the WBSC, it is a shame that an initiative to grow the game of baseball never gained ground.
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