L&D Amsterdam Pirates replaces Vaessen Pioniers in ELB
Today the Euro League Baseball announced on it’s website that L&D Amsterdam Pirates will replace Vaessen Pioniers in the inaugural (2016) season of the ELB.
Vaessen Pioniers has chosen for the candidate membership.
After several talks between the board of L&D Amsterdam Pirates and EAPB president Wim van den Hurk, the 
Amsterdam based team declared that it was willing to participate in the the upstart league.
L&D Amsterdam is one of the Dutch baseball clubs with a rich history. The club started as a baseball branch of soccer club RAP in 1959. After a merger with other baseball clubs, the club cut ties with the soccer clubin 1974 and lived on under the name Pirates. Until 2000 the club played on a tiny facility at the Jan van Galenstraat in Amsterdam.
In 2000 the club moved to their beautiful new facility not very far from the old one.
Since the establishment of the club, Pirates has won four Dutch championships (1987, 1990, 2008 and 2011). 
One of the founders of the club, Loek Loevendie, also called mr. Pirates or Uncle Loek, is still with the club, though he stopped giving training to the little ones due to his high age. He also stopped with coaching the juveniles, but nevertheless he remains active in the club at the age of 82.
The education of Amsterdam Pirates has produced several hoofdklasse players like, Frank Koot, Peter van Erk, Haitze de Vries, Jan Hijzelendoorn and former San Francisco Giant and Texas Ranger Rikkert Faneyte.
It is not stated why Vaessen Pioneers opted for candidate membership.