“Barry Bonds signed with the Houston Apollos but was not a good fit in the league. Some MLB players have migrated to the ULB, but with varying degrees of success, McNeal relates. Figuring that if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, Selig was awarded an expansion team, the new Milwaukee Brewers, in the ULB in 2001.” In a final act of pure spite, they allowed the new Brewers owner to move the team to Quebec. They forced him out, and he sold the Brewers in 1999. Bud Selig took a lot of heat for teams losing stars to us, and the owners eventually replaced him. “Fans were very unhappy with them, and Fay Vincent’s ULB was an outstanding success, supplied mainly by the fact that, well, we didn’t have a lot of good pitching. “In the first couple of years, we really got the better of the MLB,” McNeal says. In real life, he hit a total of 14 homers in two seasons, one with a Rangers affiliate, the other with an independent league called the Mid-America League.” (The league’s single season and career leader board is an interesting mix of well-known and unknown names.) McNeal adds: “A guy named Kenneth Payne is our current home run champion. Wallace has had a much rougher time, and the real Darryl Brinkley saw his shot at the majors derailed by the 9/11 attacks. Wallace never had major surgery and made the majors with the Houston Apollos before being traded to the San Jose Jedi.” (Sadly, the real B.J. McNeal notes that the ULB’s alternate history also gave a second chance for some real life top prospects: “ Darryl Brinkley reached the majors thanks to us, and had some outstanding seasons with the Boston Colonials. He pitched three seasons in the ULB with three different teams.” Then he would retire, tool around until his wife started asking him to do some chores, and decide to unretire again. He signed up with the San Jose Jedi and went 14-10 with a 3.10 ERA. “We had Nolan Ryan pitch until he was 50. “For the first few seasons, the league was primarily a lot of scrubs,” McNeal says. Fay Vincent is the ULB’s commissioner, and Richard McNeal plays that role, complete with an email signature that says “From the Desk of ULB Commissioner Fay Vincent.” The premise of the ULB is that the 1995 baseball strike presented an opportunity for Fay Vincent, Michael Bloomberg, Vince McMahon of the WWE, Bill Gates, Nike CEO Phil Knight, and others to start a rival league. However, Out of the Park Baseball doesn’t have to contend with the economic realities of the real world, and thus players can create their own fanciful alternate realities, like Union League Baseball (ULB). The Federal League, which shut down in 1915, was the last such attempt in baseball, and in other sports, American football’s USFL and XFL were high profile failures. Sports history is littered with failed attempts to compete with established professional leagues.
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