League History

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):  

The 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 a 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. Through the 2000 season, the league retained four and returned one of its original eight GMs, though relocations and realignments had shifted and rechristened some franchises since the league began play in 2002:

 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 Containment

At 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.

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 most recent divisional alignments are a product of further expansion, ushering in four additional franchises cobbled from the pickings of existing SJL clubs in the 2000 expansion draft. The commissioner's office has welcomed further internationalization of the league, with Bill Young's London Rippers joining brother Ron's Caracas Polar Bears to give the league an international flavor of colonizer and colonized, a kind of imperial introspection that mirrors old-time global political alignments. Other upstart clubs include the Ft. Lauderdale Clementes, the first co-GM club run by the dynamic duo of Manny Rosario and George Pearson, the small-town Hagerstown Hobgoblins led by formidable GM Doug Krippendorf, and the New Orleans Hurlers captained by experienced GM Rod Rebuck. As the league has expanded by four clubs, the top two teams in each division now make the playoffs. In the winter of 2002 the Pennsylvania club was sold to organized crime interests in Newark, New Jersey and is now know as the Five Spot. Long-time franchise the Leones de Miami changed hands over the winter of 2003-04 and is now based in Raleigh as the Renegades. The league's current divisional alignments are as follows:

 NORTH                      SOUTH

 Baltimore Hons             Kanab Hotties

 D.C. Robber Barons         Florida Panthers

 Chicago Cockroaches        Kansas City Whirlwind

 Harrisburg Heroes          River City Hardballers

 Moline Greens              St. Louis Sprockets

 Newark Five Spot           Savannah Carpetbaggers

 Hagerstown Hobgoblins      Ft. Lauderdale Clementes

 Aldwych Thanes             Mudville Slugs

The shift to a 162 game schedule, inaugurated in 2000 with the move to Scoresheet, has added suspense and excitement to the divisional battles. The dynasties of Kansas City and Moline remain models for establishing winning traditions in the early history of the league: long-term development starting with young, high-ceiling minor league talent spliced with veterans when the time is right. The fact that the league's newest expansion teams, Hagerstown and Durham, have been steadily building outstanding farm systems that have been recently coupled with the acquisition of prime star talent, has meant a changing of the guard in the latest 2006 standings.

The recent history of the league is a testament to the strong rebuilding efforts of the Durham Knights, who won the 2006 SJL Championship, and the Hagerstown Hobgoblins, who posted the best record in the league in 2006 after years of painstaking rebuilding. Both these teams look to have very promising futures. Meanwhile, more veteran clubs such as the Baltimore Hons, the Newark Five Spot and the Florida Panthers, have made the past season a competitive one. The Mudville Slugs are another of the most recent expansion franchises that have posted solid seasons in back-to-back campaigns. At the same time, no team has been more consistently successful in recent years than the Harrisburg Heroes, who captured their second Shoeless Joe title in 2005, after having won in 2003, separated from consecutive titles by the Savannah Carpetbaggers 2004 championship season. After Caracas won the title in 2002, the team went bankrupt due to a massive money-laundering scheme, and were eventually sold to business magnate Richard Simons, who then moved the club to Las Vegas. The Gamblers and the Aldwych Thanes represent the newest of the SJL franchises, with Aldwych owner Dave Alden taking over the franchise from the mysteriously AWOL London ownership of Bill Young. Previously, Peter Hess had left the ownership of the Bird-In-Hand Hexers in 2004 and was replaced by Michael Gusmano, who moved the club to Dutchess County and renamed them the Robber Barons. At roughly the same time, the KC franchise was left rudderless after Nils Samuels departed at the beginning of the 2005 March supplemental draft. His KC team was quickly taken over by Aaron Goldman. The league has continued to thrive with all of the recent changes, as the new GMs have adopted quickly. Ft. Lauderdale is the first club to have a two-person GM approach, with Paul Tisevich joining Manny Rosario in leading the club for the 2006 season.

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. The recent addition of Mary Beth Melchior as GM of the Kanab Hotties has qualified these patriarchal claims only slightly.