Changes in Indy baseball

The independent American Association will have a competition of twelve teams next year.

Last season the league had thirteen clubs but that wasn’t really a problem as the league had an interleague competition with the CanAm League.

But next season, the interleague competition with the CanAm League will not take place and thus the AA will stick with an odd number of teams.

With the help of Southern Independent Baseball, owner of the Grand Prairie AirHogs and Amarillo Thunderheads, the league will shrink from thirteen to twelve clubs. The AirHogs and Thunderheads will form a mixed team that will play half of its home games in Grand Prairie and half in Amarillo. This is a concept that has been practiced in the Minor Leagues in the 1920s, 1930s and so on. In fact there is a team in the Japanese NPB that splits its home games over two cities. The Orix Buffaloes is a merger club between the Orix Blue Wave from Kobe and the Kintetsu Buffaloes from Osaka. Half of the home games is played in Kobe Sports Park Baseball Stadium and the other half is played in the Osaka Dome.

Anyhow, except for the merger of two teams, nothing else will change in the American Association. There will be still three leagues and the winners of each league and a wild card winner will advance to the play offs.

In the CanAm League, all six teams that were part of the league in 2015,will return: The current champions Trois-Riviere Aigles, Ottawa Champions, the Sussex County Miners, the Rockland Boulders, the New Jersey Jackals and the Quebec Capitales.

As written above, there will not be any interleague play between CanAm League teams and American Association teams.

Instead the clubs will face an all star team of the Japanese independent Shikoku Island League, just like last season. But next to this team, the teams will play the Cuban national team as well. Each foreign team will play one three- or four-game series between June 9 and June 30 against every Can-Am League club.