Formed in the fall of 1991, under the command of Ron Cox, the Shoeless Joe League began play in the spring of the following year, after an initial player draft of players and prospects from eight major-league organizations. In its original incarnation, the league consisted of eight teams in two divisions (listed here by their 1992 order of finish):
NORTH SOUTH Wisconsin Cheeseheads Kansas City Cacti Chicago P-Niners Florida Panthers Harrisburg Containment St. Louis Sprockets Seattle Timbers Miami FlamingosThe following year the league increased to ten teams with the addition of the New York Mastiffs and the Memphis Stags in the North and South, respectively. By 1995, the Timbers had moved to Moline and the league had expanded to fourteen teams, adding the Bird-In-Hand Hexers, the Yoknapatawpha Croppers, the Milwaukee Atoms, and the Ft. Lauderdale Crocodiles.
Such expansion could not long endure, and the league had been trimmed to its present 12-team configuration by the start of the 1996 season. Two years later, the number of teams remained the same, but their distribution had shifted. As it awaited its 2000 season, the league retained four and returned one of its original eight GMs, though relocations and realignments have shifted and rechristened some franchises since the league began play eight years ago:
NORTH SOUTH Baltimore Hons ^ Florida Panthers Bird-In-Hand Hexers Ft. Lauderdale Crocodiles Chicago Cockroaches * Kansas City Whirlwind @ Harrisburg Heroes ~ Leones de Miami + Moline Greens $ St. Louis Sprockets Pennsylvania Plutonium % Savannah Carpetbaggers# * formerly the Miami Flamingos + formerly the Milwaukee Atoms # formerly the Wisconsin Cheeseheads ^ formerly the New York Mastiffs $ formerly the Seattle Timbers % formerly the Memphis Stags and Virginia Planters @ formerly the Cacti ~ formerly the ContainmentAt the close of the 1998 season, the Ft. Lauderdale franchise was sold to political interests in Statesboro, Georgia. In February, 1999, the team was relocated to Caracas and rechristened the Polar Bears. The Polar Bears are the first league franchise outside the U.S. borders, which marks the continuing effort of the Shoeless Joe League to move past the provincial connotations of its name and reach an international profile, a status that will be helped considerably by the addition of a London franchise beginning next season.
Longtime Northern Division powerhouse New York changed ownership at the close of the 1999 season, relocating to Baltimore and adopting the nickname Hons. New G.M. Al Melchior explains, "Baltimore (properly pronounced Bawl-mer) is known mainly for four things: Ripkens, crabcakes, big hair, and Bawlmerese. OK, make that six: John Waters and Barry Levinson, too. Anyway, one of the most commonly used words in Bawlmerese is 'Hon', as in 'How ya doin', hon?' It's a part of the Bawlmer caricature, kind of like the attribution of 'eh' to Canadians. It's a real institution." Despite the distinctive Southern flavor of Hons, no divisional reassignment was likely for the new Bawlmer franchise.
The dangerous Samuels brothers front the giants of the league, the Greens and the Whirlwind, twin juggernauts which have won their respective divisions for five straight years. The league's early powers, Florida and Savannah, have entered rebuilding periods, as have most of the weary blues from waiting teams of the league, tired of watching the same two boys slog it out for league honors each fall.
Given their success, it's not surprising that the five-year rebuilding plans of Moline and Kansas City have caught on as models, especially after Miami's first-year run at the Whirlwind left its roster thin of youngsters and still out of first. SJL organizations have purged their rosters of deadwood: aged part-time players, failed prospects, gimpy pitchers. The March, 1999, draft was one of the most competitive in league history, as the twelve GM's scrambled to secure the best prospects in a talent pool thinned by the banning of amateurs, a policy approved in 1998. With the expansion of league rosters to 50 in 2000, players purged to meet the new salary cap, and retread teams in the draft pool, league GMs had even more trouble finding talent in the March, 2000 draft. "There were some desperate picks late in that draft," noted commissioner Ron Cox.
Sleeper picks come earlier now, as GMs dip down into the low minors to find the next Andruw or Jaime Jones. As late Moline Greens director of scouting and player development Fate Norris observed, "It's a bit harder to pick peaches these days. Now everybody seems to know where the orchards are and what trees to climb."
Although Kansas City and Moline have squared off in each of the last five championship series, the Greens and the Whirlwind no longer feature the best minor-league talent in the league, an honor that belongs to Pennsylvania, Harrisburg, or Caracas, all of whom have drafted shrewdly, lining up draft picks and cash to lay the foundations for strong contending major-league teams in the coming years. Still, front-office personnel in Moline and Kansas City are reportedly working feverishly to close the prospect gap. The youth of core personnel in Kansas City and Moline offers both franchises considerable lag time, even granting the inevitable losses to expansion in the fall.
At the dawn of the Scoresheet era, much is uncertain. No more can predictions be made so cavalierly, as if by computer. Projections count for little in this new alignment. Although Moline and Kansas City still look like the teams to beat in their respective divisions, the 2000 regular season promises to be more uncertain than any SJL season that preceded it (see final standings). Harrisburg particularly looms as a threat in the North. The greater uncertainty about final standings should keep the fans coming out to the ballparks in Chicago, St. Louis, and Caracas. For a while, anyway.
The history of the SJL is chronicled in shortened form here and elsewhere on this site. The obsessions of the league's GMs have been well documented. See, for example, Bennett Wing's Boys and Their Toys, Fort Da Da Da by Dr. John Ray, Jr., and Irving Krankeit's "Don't They Have More Important Stuff to Do?" in The Journal of Sports and Abnormal Psychology 14(3): 183-190. Virginia Bereft's The Busy Signal includes a chapter on the Net addiction of a cadre of insular males. Bereft discusses the SJL at some length and includes an appendix of interviews with wives and partners of several GM's. Although decried by Bereft and others, the Internet has enabled the local psychoses of these men to reach a global audience of psychiatry professionals, an advance in scholarship for which we can all be grateful.
More recently, the Discovery Channel featured a hour-long program on obsessive compulsive disorder and American fandom. Through interviews with several league general managers and their friends, colleagues, and lovers, "The Vicarious Lives of the Justly Obscure" presented a mixed portrait of the baseball passions of this masculine sect.