It wasn’t long after Buffalo’s season ended when the news broke of the selling of the Bluebirds, immediately, Pittsburgh business man, surprisingly took interest. Owner of his own team, he proposed a trade, his minor league team, the Pittsburgh Professionals, who play in the Pennsylvania-Ohio Baseball Association, for the Buffalo Bluebirds. He wasn’t the only buyer though, a man in Cleveland, and a field owner in the nearby Albany area both also talked about buying the team. But it was already a done deal and the now Pittsburgh Professionals were to play in a renovated Professionals Stadium, the original Professionals however were to move to Allegheny, right across the river from Pittsburgh. Rochester also looked into moving, but with a richer and more stable owner and fanbase, they decided to stay.
 The NEBL and Commissioner May, talked over expansion still after the failure of both Buffalo and Rochester, and decided that, even though it was a failure the year before, the interest in buyers for the Bluebirds, is a sign that more teams could be added. And with that, the news came that on January 13th the Cleveland Carnegies would be brought up from the, formerly mentioned, Pennsylvania-Ohio Baseball Association. Joining them would be the Baltimore Snappers, named after the blue crabs fished off the shore of the Chesapeake Bay. The Carnegies are named after Andrew Carnegie and the headquarters of his steel company being in Cleveland.
 The USBL, after the success of Detroit and Chicago, expanded to Kansas City and Philadelphia. Both being experiment in their own way, KC because it’s the mosts western market yet, and Philadelphia because it’s the first city to have two teams from different leagues. Kansas City would take the name the Cowboys and Philly would opt for a classy name in the Philadelphia Baseball Club. The USBL offseason was a relatively calm compared to past. Race wasn’t as much of an issue. Wagner, the Railers owner, asked once again for the banning of colored folks from the league and also talked to NEBL owners about it. Neither proved successful as Armstrong refused to make anymore public statements at the time and any proposals to NEBL owners fell through. There weren’t many moves in the offseason for either league.
 Finally some teams made changes to their look! These teams are; Cincinnati who established their first true look since relocating, Louisville, who updated past the triangle script, Boston who made some small adjustments, and Brooklyn and Manchester who both made significant changes.



Here are the looks for the Kansas City, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Baltimore.


Next, the Crusaders rebrand to the Gatekeepers, named after the city nickname, the Gateway to the West.And finally the Pittsburgh Professionals, who don’t change their look from the minor league.

C&C Appreciated, 1891 season should be up soon!

Stickman wrote:

RIP Buffalo Bluebirds.  May Buffalo once again get a team someday.  

New looks are nice, particularly Cincinnati and Boston (although Sugarmen is a pretty spectacularly bad name, along the lines of Beaneaters which my Atlanta Braves were callled many, many years ago as a Boston based team).

Buffalo is definitely now one of the bigger markets without a team, however it will be a while for baseball to get the taste of bluebird out of their mouth before they might be considered again.

Here's the 1891 season! 
The 1891 season started with a bang! In the opening game of the season, P John Gibson for the Philadelphia Revolutionaries, set a NEBL record. The first game pitched holding the opposing team without a run, it would later go on to be called a no hitter. This is the first recorded no hitter since the formation of pro baseball. The Revs beat the Stars 10-0. Speaking of the Revs, they started off hot, holding a 12-0 record after the first 2 weeks of play. The would be matched by the expansion team, Baltimore, who were second, holding an equally impressive 11-2 record. Both teams would cool off pretty quick however and the usual's took the lead. The usual's being the Hearts, Sugarmen, and Millers. The ‘Caps fell off, while no relatively far, they still didn’t seem to play nearly as well as the previous season. But as the season went on we saw them only get worse. They would finish under .500, a very disappointing result for the reigning runner ups. Clinching the top seeds were actually Boston and Manchester, Worcester, who struggled with injuries to core players such as Jamie Brady and 2B Nate Morgan. Clinching spots above them were expansion teams, the Carnegies and the Snappers. Cleveland specifically had a strange but great season. What I mean is that it was announced half way through the season they were being sold to a man in Syracuse. Cleveland, apparently was too far away and some smaller teams complained about travel costs and times. This led Commissioner May to “recommend” the Carnegies find a new home for next season. This all resulted in a contending team, who had built a significant fanbase in the matter of two months to be relocated. The other big news that came mid season was the decision to expand the post season to include a play in game to the championship. Meaning the top 4 teams were all included. So the 1 seed would play the 4 seed and the 2 seed would play the 3 seed. This was good news for the Snappers and, maybe the biggest surprise of the season the Colts. Who finished 3rd and 4th respectively. The Colts were led by 3B Larry Lueck, whom they picked up from a minor league team in Vermont in this past offseason. The 20 year old was acclaimed as one of the best hitters in the league. Recording a ridiculous 3.89 average on the season. The basement of the league consisted of some returning and similar faces. New York, Providence Rochester and Brooklyn all finished below .500. But last place was the Professionals. Who proved to be just as bad as last year. They did finish with 18 more wins than last year, which just goes to prove how bad they were last season. Rounding out the rest of the league were the Revs who after the hot start finished 50-50.

The USBL started off pretty unsurprisingly, Louisville and Hamilton jumped to the one and 2 seed, they were followed by the Trappers and Maroons, They were followed by Dayton and Evansville, then the expansion teams, Philly and KC and to round it out we're Cincinnati and St.Louis. This was too normal however. After seeming to be just as good as last year, Chicago and Detroit fell off a cliff. They, within 2 weeks went from looking to contend for the championship to being the worst 2 teams in the league. This was followed by Philadelphia and KC jumping to the top 2 seeds. Both finishing the season with 69 wins. Louisville finished 4th, meaning their streak of 4 straight championships was over. 3rd place was Hamilton. No man's land was occupied by the Railers, Generals, and Gatekeepers. Finally we had the Eagles finishing 8th, which being only 1 season removed from the championship is a big disappointment. The 1889 season is looked upon only as a fluke, now that Dayton's back in the basement. Regarding any news in the USBL, we had the usual race motivated injustices. Railers were joined by Dayton, Louisville, and Cincinnati who all banned people of color from their stadiums. Along with the expansion team, the Cowboys, announcing that next year they’ll join most of the league in banning players of color. It’s unknown what Philly plans on doing but it’s most likely they’ll ban as well, leaving only Chicago and Detroit as the only ones who haven’t. Armstrong made his usual comments and refused to give in to any pressure to have a league wide ban.For Championship predictions, in the USBL I think Philly will outlast KC in a slugfest of a series, Philly is led by 1B Jerry Albritton, a late bloomer who spent his earlier seasons on some bad Stallions teams and most recently the Railers. They also have a pretty good ace on the mound, P Terence Dukes, again, a late bloomer who was picked up in a early season trade with the Generals, whom he signed with after spending his first 4 seasons with the Colts in Hartford.The Cowboys are led by one of the best pitchers in the game right now, P Joel Nelson, a 22 year old rookie, picked up from a minor league team in Birmingham, Alabama. He had the tied 4th best ERA this season, and one of the better batting averages for a pitcher, batting .265 on the season. His sidekick is RF Paul Wilson, who is one of the best home run hitters in the country, knocking an amazing 21 over the back wall this past season.In the NEBL, i have Baltimore upsetting Boston in the first play in game, and the Colts beating the Millers in the second. I think the Colts will go on to win the Championship in a long 7 game series.
C&C Appreciated, comment how your team did!

RightGuard wrote:

Will more cities get a team in each league like Philly?

They might, cities like Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Washington and Cleveland all are along the hypothetical border of the 2 leagues so if the commissioners seek fit they might expand there.

*out of character* I only have Philly right now, but Pittsburgh and Baltimore seem like interesting places to expand to for the USBL.

Hey y'all, I'm back. and got some updates. First and for most I'm 100% continuing this so there's nothing to worry about. But it might change a bit for a little while. What I'm referring to are the write ups. I've been generally busy lately and haven't gotten much of a chance to touch this. I have been also suffering from writers block and a bit of a burnout on this project, leading me to bump some of my other works over on the boards instead of updating this. So in hopes of regaining some motivation for this I'd like to know if y'all are interested in shortening the writeups to a bare minimum. I have some really exciting stuff planned for the future of the project and I don't want to be held back by some writers block. So please comment;

If you are interested in shortened writeups for right now (they would make a return, they were really fun to make),
or
if the longer writeups are worth the wait.

Thanks in advance!

Honestly I prefer shorter write ups to threads than the more elaborate stories, if you think that it is what's best for you at this time then heck yeah go for it!

I look forward to seeing this continue soon!