[Pommpie]

It has occurred to me a few times over the course of writing that, since this is a fictional story, I'm making several references to history that doesn't actually exist. I started simming in 1975 to give the league a nice history going into the story and I think I've achieved that, but at the same time there's so much that's happened in the past that I've been unable to work in. Some fragments have come out (references to the Civics' glory days are pretty common, and the appearance of 'Rainmaker' Baldwin a couple of chapters ago was a good example), but by and by large things are hidden in my OOTP save game file.

And everybody likes history. Right? Right?

Well, anyway, here it is. I'm planning to break up proper story chapters here and there with glimpses into the past like this: events, players, seasons, the like. Consider them brief interludes that save me from having to write a proper update.

The History of the United League, Chapter One: The Genesis

In 1971, the American Baseball Association was in crisis. The major leagues had not adapted well to the rapid growth of television in their industry: they believed, as they always had to that point in history, that television was their nemesis. A way for otherwise paying fans to stay home and cut themselves out of the game's lifeblood (ticket sales). The spectre of playing baseball in front of half-empty stadia haunted the American Baseball Association bosses, and the 1971 championship between the Houston Rainstorm and the Kansas City Skywarriors was the least successful in league history. Scoring was down, and, worse, the owner of the Rainstorm was looking to sell while the selling was good. It soon became clear that the 1971 champion would raise their banner in a different stadium to start 1972. The league bosses were stuck. For all they knew, they were seeing the death of their game.

Into the void stepped a rather small man from Billings, Montana. Philip Wilder had made his fortune in fertilizer sales: inheriting the business from his father, he had gone one to become a billionaire and a magnate throughout the northwest part of the United States. Wilder was also a fanatical baseball fan. In 1968, he had managed to lure the Washington Capitals and the Staten Island Excelsiors to play a regular season series in his native Billings, and was a constant visitor to major league ballparks. His preferred team was the San Francisco Spikers but he was no sports monogamous: he had probably seen every American Baseball Association team to exist over the last decade and most of the AAA ones. Baseball was his passion.

Wilder was also flamboyant, arrogant, and unpopular. He knew the problems the American Baseball Association faced as well as anybody, and when he got in touch with league president Nathaniel Jenkins he clearly thought himself the saviour of the league. He would purchase the Rainstorm for a then-record price and move them to Billings. A vast 55,000-seat arena would be built, with a fantastic dome to protect the Rainstorm from their namesake. The scheme was ahead of its time, and when Wilder drew himself up to his full five feet, leaned on the table, and told the assortment of staid, conservative governors how incoherently stupid they were and how he would be their salvation, it became clear that no amount of money would get him the Rainstorm.

The Rainstorm's owner was inclined to accept Wilder's generous offer, but the remaining major league owners colluded to pad an offer from a Paradise, New York-based consortium while making it clear that any purchase from Wilder would fail at the board level. By 1974, the Rainstorm were in Paradise and a Billings billionaire was pissed.

His involvement with baseball, however, was far from done. He couldn't bring the ABA to Billings, so he resolved to create a new league for the city itself: a league that would smash the obsolete ABA into smithereens and play baseball the way it was meant to be played. With his deep pockets, Wilder thought he could easily afford to pass by the question of bad ownership by owning all the teams himself: he would build the stadia, run the teams, hire the staff, and essentially run the league as his own personal fiefdom.

The United Baseball Association (UBA) was officially formed on February 23, 1972 in Wilder's home in Billings, Montana. The first board of governors were Wilder, his sons Eugene and Stafford, and an assortment of those already employed in his fertilizer business (including the league's third President Leroy Rosen). There were to be twelve teams in Billings, San Diego, Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle, Vancouver, Sacramento, San Francisco, Las Vegas, and three cities to be named later. All would be completely owned by Wilder, and all would play in privately financed stadia built for the purpose. Each team would play a 162-game schedule, just like the American Baseball Association. In a revolutionary move, they would try to get as many games a week as possible televised nationally: a surefire way to expose the UBA to the ABA's traditional audience.

The ABA reacted with all the legal dexterity that the league was known for. They attacked the UBA under anti-trust law (the ABA had managed to get an anti-trust exemption decades earlier but the UBA lacked such an advantage), filed a lawsuit over the similar name, and in Seattle and San Francisco, where the UBA would directly compete with ABA teams, they managed to get the league tied up in various legal and bureaucratic wranglings that would seemingly take a century to dissolve.

Perhaps even worse, the anticipated television coverage simply did not appear. The American Baseball Association, deciding to take a new approach to the medium, came to terms on generous television contracts both regionally and nationally, and with the ABA on the tube the UBA became redundant. Wilder had planned to finance much of his new league with television and radio revenue, but now there was no television revenue and the radio revenue was limited to small local deals. Studies and surveys revealed that interest among the ticketbuying public was lukewarm at best, and the UBA was perceived as either a joke or as a minor league at best. Not even a billionaire could pour cash at will into such an enterprise.

Philip Wilder did not give up. Giving up was not in his character. But, step by step, the ambitious plans for the league began to contract. The three unawarded franchises were quietly killed, followed by the Las Vegas team (a recent revelation about a top ABA player/manager's gambling habits had made a Las Vegas team marketing suicide). His sole Canadian entry, Vancouver, proved beyond Wilder's means, so he simply threw it over the Georgia Strait to Victoria. A similar maneuver moved the Portland team to Pueblo, Colorado. Still, the money did not stretch far enough unless Wilder wanted to sell off most of his share in his family's fertilizer business, and not even his love of baseball extended far enough to deprive his sons of their inheritance.

In July of that year, a syndicate of coal mine owners quietly approached Wilder about purchasing an interest in the league and putting a team in Trail, British Columbia. Wilder sold them the Seattle franchise for a dollar so long as the new owners assumed responsibility for the construction of the arena. When word of this got out, a real estate heir based in Alberta asked for the San Francisco franchise on the same terms. Wilder demurred about putting a team so far north, until the offer was upped to a million dollars for a franchise that existed only on paper. Thus, the Edmonton Civics were born. Wilder soon had his inital alignment: the Edmonton Civics, Victoria Sting, Trail Smelters, and Billings Billionaires (as they were termed at the time) would play in the North Division, while the San Diego Bingoes, the Los Angeles Stars, Pueblo Anchors, and Sacramento Captains would play in the West Division. Play would begin in 1975.

Ground was soon broken on the ballparks. A few cosmetic changes took place: the Billionaires were renamed the Barnstormers after the billionare owner decided the previous nickname was a little too on the nose. The Captains became the Cranes because Wilder thought a crane logo would look nicer. The league itself was renamed the United League as part of a settlement with the ABA. A far more important change occured in the fertilizer trade. There was a significant downturn in the market, enough to cost Wilder much of his wealth. It was the beginning of a permenant decline in his financial fortunes, but he did not know it at the time: all he knew was that his most expensive, extravagant attempt in Los Angeles (a team lacking an ABA franchise, and a market where Wilder was sure he could make major headway) was simply impractical. Money was becoming tight and Los Angeles would require first-class facilities to attract the desired market. Through 1974, Wilder tried to hold on, but it was simply impossible. Potential ownership stepped forward but they refused to put up the money required to keep the team in Los Angeles. Instead, Wilder sold out the franchise and its partially completed stadium to a new ownership group which promptly moved the team to Boise. The half-completed stadium was left unfinished for over eight years until it was finally sold to the City of Los Angeles in 1983, which used the site as the foundation for a new multi-use entertainment complex.

In spite of his setbacks, Wilder was still a wealthy man and he hoped to draw a calibre of player that could at least be compared to AAA baseball. But his fellow owners were largely small-time operators who had just made massive investments in new stadia: stadia that somehow always managed to be smaller than Wilder had envisioned, or too small to possibly support the large salaries required to attract real talent. Player negotiations went on for a year and a half. From going after major leaguers, the United League teams found themselves going after anybody who'd ever held a baseball in their left hand for their starting rotations and former college players to go into the outfield. Each team managed to get the occasional star, but the trend had been set.

30-year-old Jason Gray was a typical example: a southpaw pitcher who had bounced around the high minors and the major leagues, he agreed to a high-priced one-year deal in Boise to be their staff ace. But when the season had concluded Gray had priced himself out of the market of any United League team and no American Baseball Association planned to sign an insignificant minor leaguer who had shown his willingness to (gasp) sell himself to the highest bidder. Gray tried to find work in foreign baseball, but in 1975 an American going overseas was unheard of. A year after compiling a 17-7 record and a .244 opposing batting average in a league that was in its most competitive season, Jason Gray was out of baseball.

Though Gray had no luck finding work abroad, players abroad found the United League a boon. When the shallow pool of affordable talent became obvious, Philip Wilder decided on one of his typical radical schemes. Though baseball was popular in countries like Japan and South Korea, salaries were low and the professional game was in its infancy. Even a United League paycheque could look attractive to the talented men playing in Asia, and Wilder used his considerable means to get word out about the United League in Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. Professional players who showed any interest were instantly offered a free trip to one of the United League cities and a tryout. It helped that this was 1975 and there was no real international sports media: more than a few thought of the United League as a second major league when they arrived.

In spite of initial reluctance, each team ended up with an Asian or two. Reliever Masaaki Kubo, fresh out of the Japanese league, played in 46 games with Boise and began a successful North American career. 20-year-old centre fielder Tadahisa Nagata played one memorable season in Pueblo, hitting .266 with 12 home runs, and when he returned to Japan he was able to find a successful minor league career. Philip Wilder happily helped himself, with Hyun-jong Chang, Li-hong Chen, Tae-kon Hwang, Hisayusi Ohayashi, Dong-ju Yong, Toyoharu Fukuda, Senzo Honami, and Ji-hyun Muk all playing some role in the Barnstormers' inaugural season. Ohayashi was the best of the bunch: splitting the year between Billings and Edmonton, 23-year-old Ohayashi hit .292 with twelve home runs at the top of both teams' orders and ended up with a Liberty Series ring. Ohayashi split the rest of his career between Mexico and Japan, retiring at age 28 when, after completing the 1980 season as a part-timer in Chiba, he decided that he would never meet the promise of his rookie season and went into business.

Although Billings had the numbers, the Civics ended up with the best foreign players in that first season. Besides acquiring Ohayashi mid-season, the team boasted Kyu-soo Song in its rotation, a hard-throwing righthanded pitcher who amassed 39 starts in 1997, the reliable Hsin Lu who played 14 games before deciding he was homesick and bailing on his contract to return to Taiwan, and the best of all, Norogumi Kawamura. Starting his career in Japan, Kawamura was an eccentric but brilliant player who hit nine home runs and batted only .237 in his rookie year but who walked more than most and stole seventy-seven bases on ninety-seven attempts. Two years later, Kawamura would set a steals record that would stand for decades, record his best season in every category, and walk out on baseball in favour of "personal pursuits". By 1985, Kawamura would be a United League Hall-of-Famer and, more than that, a legend who would feature in stories from old-timers for decades to come.

When the first pitch was thrown during the inaugural match between the Billings Barnstormers and the Victoria Angels, Philip Wilder still had high hopes for his league as a rival to the American Baseball Association. Attendance in Billings was a sellout of over eleven thousand paying fans. Those fans were in for a treat of a game. Left fielder José Torres was a former ABA all-star lured to Victoria by a hefty cheque and, unlike many of his fellows, Torres would not disappoint. The 32-year-old veteran went four-for-four in the United League's debut, but the Angels lost a tight decision 9-7 (Torres would finish the season batting .344 with 34 home runs and the runner-up for most valuable player, but after two years in the United League he would return to the ABA's Long Beach Loons, ending his career in Long Beach at the age of 37).

The momentum, sadly, would not last. The inaugural season of the United League was dominated by pitching, with the league mustering a stingy 3.56 ERA as a unit. Fans were turned off by low-scoring games, and with the major leaguers now being piped into their homes even the fans isolated from an ABA team found themselves able to watch their favourite team. When the Edmonton Civics defeated the Pueblo Anchors 4-0 in the inaugural Liberty Series, a hastily-arranged national television appearance for the final game was outdrawn by professional wrestling. Each team lost money, but the losses were bearable and no owner was willing to bail out just yet. The United League may have been alive, but the question of how large it would grow up to be was still an open one.