KNBSB changes stance regarding ELB

When the European Association of Professional Baseball (EAPB) announced the newly erected Euro League Baseball, the CEB announced that it would not recognize the new competiton.

In the slipstream of the CEB, the Dutch Federation, the KNBSB, also announced that it would not allow Dutch clubs, playing in the Hoofdklasse, to participate in the ELB during the running Hoofdklasse competition. In fact the KNBSB was the only federation that opposed against its teams participating in the ELB. The German and the Czech federations for example, were very positive about it.

Later this stance was softened a bit as L&D Amsterdam asked permission for individual players to participate in team Amsterdam Baseball. The federation permitted individual players to participate as long as they were not members of the national baseball team, team Kingdom of the Netherlands. Next to the players of team Kingdom of the Netherlands, the KNBSB did not allow the officials of the federation to participate in the ELB by means of the threat of a ban as representative of the KNBSB.

Two weeks ago, the CEB in person of chairman of Jan Esselman announced that players of L&D Amsterdam would risk their right of participating in the upcoming European Cup if they would play in ELB games. L&D Amsterdam Pirates then decided to withdraw from team Amsterdam Baseball because the club didn’t want to risk a ban on playing in the European Cup.

Now the CEB has taken this stance and changed its own competition rules 26e.1 – 26e.3 of the and added 26e.4 all of a sudden, the KNBSB came out with a press release today, that the federation has withdrawn the permission to the aforementioned players to participate in the ELB. The KNBSB is now waiting for the results of the general meeting of the CEB that will take place on May 28 in which a decision on the issue will be made.

The sudden change of attitude of the KNBSB is rather strange, since the aforementioned players would not play in the ELB before the upcoming European Cup anymore. So this press release about their new stance is unnecessary and it rather looks like that the KNBSB is bothered by mood swings.

Thanks to this move it will be impossible for Amsterdam Baseball to play in the ELB with the players of L&D Amsterdam Pirates. It looks like that the conservative forces within the KNBSB, who are against the ELB, have won today.