This is post one in a ten-post countdown to SABR Day 2011. The series is going through the decades of the 20th Century, backwards from the 1990s. On SABR Day itself, there will be a special feature on the 1890s, which will celebrate the significant link between keeping score and baseball history. This article will be published at 05:00 British time in order to coincide with the start of the day in the time-zone of the Cleveland-based SABR office. To view all the Cobbettes published to date, click here.

1990s

The Enfield Spartans were one of the leading teams in British baseball during the closing years of the 20th Century, supplementing three straight official national titles between 1989 and 1991 with a championship win in a breakaway national league in 1994.  As was well known at the time but is less so now, the team had a fascinating link to Jim Bouton’s seminal baseball diary Ball Four (one of Matt Smith’s Essential Baseball Books). The association is described below.

In Ball Five, a 10-years-later epilogue, Bouton describes how he launched his big league comeback in the mid-1970s with the Portland Mavericks, an independent team that played in the Class A Northwest League:

“The Mavericks were the dirty dozen of baseball, a collection of players nobody else wanted, owned by actor Bing Russell […] In a league stocked with high-priced bonus babies, Mavericks players made only $300 per month and had to double as the ground crew. Revenge being a strong motivator, the Mavs had the best team in the league […] The afternoon before a game we’d drive through the streets of whatever town we were playing in and insult the citizens over a loudspeaker […] No insult was too outrageous. ‘Hey lady, that sure is an ugly baby you got there.’ And so on. Needless to say, that night the stands would be filled with hundreds of irate fans rooting passionately for our defeat.”

While with the Mavs, Bouton met a young southpaw named Rob Nelson (“Nellie” to his friends), who would become his business partner in the hugely successful Big League Chew venture. In fact, it was in the bullpen in Civic Stadium, Portland’s home ground, that the pair dreamed up the idea. (Bouton later described Big League Chew as “the only good idea to ever come out of a bullpen.”)

Fast forward two decades, and we find Nellie on the Enfield pitching staff in a renegade national league that was led by the Spartans and the London Warriors as a breakaway from the British Baseball Federation.

In the first two seasons of this independent league, the Warriors defeated the Spartans in the final, but in 1994 the two rivals met at the semi-finals stage. Nellie was brought in to relieve Enfield starter Iain Lanario in the sixth frame, with London holding a 5-2 lead. Nellie checked the Warriors’ run threat as Enfield’s offensive engine was revved up to seize a 6-5 lead in the eighth. A sacrifice bunt by Nellie in the top of the ninth cashed in Oscar Marcelino’s three-bagger to double the margin he had to work with in the bottom of the inning. The Warriors were able to bring the winning run to bat in the final frame, in the form of the power-hitter Oliver Heidecker. Facing men on first and third but with two outs already registered, Nellie bore down to retire the slugger on “a sharp breaking curveball [that] had him completely fooled for strike three and the end of the game,” in the words of a local scribe.

In the final, Enfield faced the Waltham Forest Angels. This time, Nellie was brought in for Lanario in the third inning with their side trailing 5-3. The reliever had excelled in a similar situation against London in the semi-finals, but this time he was going to have to do it with the left side of his face swollen from a wasp sting. (The journalist covering the game was kind enough to resist a reference to Nellie the Elephant Man.) Overcoming the effects of the insect’s injection, Nellie shut down the Angels’ offence for the remainder of the contest, and the Spartans rallied for an 8-5 victory.

In the Spartans’ roster (pictured to the right) for the 1995 season, which was the team’s first year back playing under the British Baseball Federation’s jurisdiction, Nellie is listed along with his entrepreneurial team-mate from Portland. Unfortunately, the Ball Four author was never able to make the trip across the Atlantic.

If you have an interesting history snippet to share that has a link to Britain then please send a message to Joe Gray through the Get in contact page. To see all of the work of Project Cobb, which is a Chartered Community of SABR (the Society for American Baseball Research), click here.