The Return of Independent Baseball
A History of the Rebirth of the Rebel Brand of Professional Baseball
New Rules Inspired the New Leagues
To do it, they were going to use the rules of affiliated baseball against them. In 1991, the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues (NAPBL) signed a new Player Development Contract (PDC) that did two things to help foster independent baseball:
- Freeze the number of franchises at 160
- Establish minimum standards for facilities at each level
The intent was to create competition between cities to build new facilities. Without hope for expansion, a city would have to build a new facility to compete for an affiliation. Existing clubs would be forced to upgrade in order to compete, an expensive proposition in some cases. No longer, for example, would an AA club play at a high-school baseball field, which was the case of the Holyoke Millers in the Eastern League from 1977 to 1982.
But a funny thing happened. The minor-league operators in some places decided not to play along. Rather than play by the new, restrictive rules, they went renegade and formed leagues of their own. After all, they controlled the facilities and didn't have to abide by either the new stadium standards or the territorial restrictions.
The Northern League
After the 1991 PDC was passed, Baseball America publisher Miles Wolff began to field calls from across the Upper Plains states and even some Canadian cities, asking about how they could get a team. Wolff had already been in touch executives that had successfully run independent teams in affiliated leagues in the 1970s and 1980s, folks who saw the opportunity to go it alone entirely, and he felt that this confluence was a sign that independent baseball could be reborn.
The result was the Northern League, named after an affiliated league that had existed by that name for brief periods five different times from 1902 to 1971. The "new" Northern League was an instant success, with the St. Paul Saints becoming the signature franchise and the league's first champion.
It also helped in that several former major leaguers came to play, including Pedro Guerrero, Leon Durham, and Jeff Bittiger, and more importantly, future major-leaguers came to play, including current major-leaguers J.D. Drew, Chris Coste, Kevin Millar, Tim Byrdak and George Sherrill.
This was critical because the prejudice against the independent leagues from day one until the present was that the talent level was decidedly inferior to the affiliated minor leagues. Ever since, the independent teams have reminded folks through their marketing that these are professional ballplayers and that some of them just needed one more chance.
The Frontier League
Less prominent, and less successful, but no less enduring was the Frontier League, which also started up in 1993. It was founded by an executive, Bud Bickel, of the Appalachian League that wanted to extend opportunities to first- or second-year ballplayers (hence the unique-but-simple roster rule: no player older than 27), and to a lesser extent, bring baseball to beyond the boundaries of the Appalachian league into West Virginia and Ohio.
The league played just 52 games as opposed to the Northern League's 72, starting in late June versus late May. Two teams withdrew just two weeks, but the remaining six played out the schedule, and more importantly, the league survived into 1994.
Next: Independent Baseball's Growing Pains
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