History
In 1998, the Atlantic League of Professional Baseball played its inaugural season, with teams in Somerset, Newark, and Atlantic City (NJ), Nashua (NH), Newburgh (NY), and Bridgeport (CT). The creation of the league was the result of the New York Mets' objection to Frank Boulton's proposal to move the former Albany-Colonie Yankees because of its territorial rights to the region. Boulton, a Long Island native, decided to create a new league that would have a higher salary cap for its players and a longer season than most of the other independent baseball organizations. He modeled the Atlantic League after the older Pacific Coast League, with facilities that exceed AAA-level standards. Boulton also emphasized signing players of Major League Baseball experience for all Atlantic League teams, raising the level of play above other independent leagues.
The Long Island Ducks, founded in 2000, continue to be a strong draw in the region, averaging 400,000 fans a season, and have seen the likes of such Major League alumni as Edgardo Alfonzo, Pedro Borbón, Jr., José Offerman, Donovan Osborne, Bill Pulsipher, Armando Ríos, John Rocker, and Mark Whiten. In 2007, Frank Boulton expressed his contentment with the Atlantic League and the Ducks to Baseball America saying, "The Long Island Ducks are the best thing I've ever done in baseball."
Read more about this topic: Atlantic League Of Professional Baseball
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Spain is an overflow of sombreness ... a strong and threatening tide of history meets you at the frontier.”
—Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957)
“This above all makes history useful and desirable: it unfolds before our eyes a glorious record of exemplary actions.”
—Titus Livius (Livy)
“If usually the “present age” is no very long time, still, at our pleasure, or in the service of some such unity of meaning as the history of civilization, or the study of geology, may suggest, we may conceive the present as extending over many centuries, or over a hundred thousand years.”
—Josiah Royce (1855–1916)