New England League
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The New England League was a mid-level league in American minor league baseball that played sporadically in five of the six New England states (Vermont excepted) between 1886 and 1949. After 1901, it existed in the shadow of two Major League Baseball clubs in Boston and alongside stronger, higher-classification leagues. Ultimately it could not survive the region's economic problems (and the impact of televised MLB games) in the mid-20th century.
[edit] History
In 1946, the NEL, the International League and the Canadian-American League - which all included farm teams of the Brooklyn Dodgers - were the first 20th century leagues (except for the "outside 'organized baseball'" Negro Leagues) to permit African-Americans to play. The following season, Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby would integrate the major leagues.
The New England League played its first game in 1886, with clubs in Massachusetts and Maine. Its first champion was the Portland club. The league was inactive in 1889-90, then resumed play from 1891 to 1915 (with the exception of 1900) under the presidency of Tim Murnane, the Boston Globe sportswriter. When the minor leagues were assigned classifications in 1902, the NEL was graded Class B, at that time two levels below major league status, equivalent to Class AA today.
Disruption caused by the outlaw Federal League and the coming of World War I shut the loop down in 1916 and ended the NEL's most long-lived period of operation. The league attempted to revive in 1919 then closed down in early August. Seven years later, the NEL returned in 1926 with eight clubs in the region's mill towns, but the Great Depression devastated the minor leagues, and the NEL was no exception: it disbanded June 22, 1930. A 1933 revival was followed the next season by a name change to the Northeastern League - and another shutdown that would last through the end of World War II.
Finally, in 1946 with the postwar baseball boom, the New England League was restored as an eight-team, Class B circuit. Its most notable member, the Nashua Dodgers, was a Brooklyn farm club where, in 1946, African-American players and future Dodger greats Don Newcombe and Roy Campanella made their debuts as part of the handful of men who broke the baseball color line. The players succeeded on the field and were very complimentary in remarks about their Nashua experience in later years. It should be noted, however, that they faced taunts and racial epithets in visiting ballparks, even though New England was far removed geographically from the supposed locus of racial tension, the Southern United States.
Nashua was the most successful member of the postwar league, winning three consecutive playoff championships from 1946-48. But by the middle of 1949, it became clear that the New England League was not viable. The league began the season with its usual complement of eight teams, but four clubs (Providence, Fall River, Lynn and Manchester) disbanded by mid-July, and the league closed for the final time at season's end. Its final regular-season champ was the Pawtucket Slaters, a farm club of the Boston Braves, but the Portland Pilots, a Phillies affiliate, won the playoffs, thus bookending the championship earned by the Maine city's entry in the NEL's maiden season 63 years earlier.
[edit] References
- Johnson, Lloyd, and Wolff, Miles, editors: The Encyclopedia of Minor League Baseball. Durham, N.C.: Baseball America, 1997.
- Roper, Scott C., and Roper, Stephanie Abbot. "'We're Going to Give All We Have for this Grand Little Town': Baseball Integration and the 1946 Nashua Dodgers." Historical New Hampshire 53:1/2 (Spring/Summer 1998) 3-19.
- Tygiel, Jules. Baseball's Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and his Legacy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
