Dominican Professional Baseball League

The Dominican Republic Professional Baseball League (Spanish: Liga de Béisbol Profesional de la República Dominicana) or LIDOM by its acronym in Spanish, is a winter professional baseball league consisting of six teams spread across the Dominican Republic; it is the top baseball league in that country. The league's players include many from Major League Baseball, and the Dominican league's champion plays each year in the Caribbean Series.

Each team plays a fifty-game round-robin schedule that begins at the middle of October and runs to the end of December. The top four teams engage in another round-robin schedule with 18 games per team from the end of December to the end of January; the top two teams in those standings then play a best-of-nine series for the national title. The league's champion advances to the Caribbean Series to play against the representatives from Mexico, Venezuela, and Puerto Rico.^[1]

Teams

Former teams

• Caimanes del Sur (San Cristóbal)
• Delfines del Atlantico (Puerto Plata) (This team did not play and was never officially in the league)
• Pollos del Cibao / Pollos Nacionales / Pollos Béisbol Club (San Francisco de Macorís, from 1999-2002, previously Gigantes del Nordeste, currently Gigantes del Cibao)

History

Baseball was introduced in the Caribbean in 1866 by U.S. sailors loading sugar in the then Spanish colony of Cuba.. Also, it is known that two Cuban students, brothers Ernest and Nemesio Guillo, attended Spring Hill College in Alabama during 1860 and brought baseball to Cuba.^[2] Eight years later, in 1874, the first organized game of baseball was played between Cuban teams. In the years to come it would be Cuba that spread baseball throughout the Caribbean. When the Ten Years' War (1868-1878) in Cuba brought turmoil to the colony, many Cubans fled their country and migrated to the Dominican Republic, bringing baseball with them. In the 1920s the Dominicans began to play against neighboring countries.

Founding teams

In the early 1900s, four Dominican teams formed. These teams still exist today, and form the foundation of Dominican professional baseball:

• Tigres del Licey (1907)
• Estrellas Orientales (1911)
• Sandino, later renamed Las Águilas (1937)
• Leones del Escogido (1921)

Championship history

*Championships won before LIDOM (1951)

See also

• Baseball awards#Dominican Republic

References

External links

• http://www.beisbol.org.do – Dominican Baseball Statistics