Since Italian baseball has a problem to come to a twelve-team league, like the FIBS (Italian Baseball and Softball Federation) would like, the FIBS has now made four proposals for a new format of the Italian baseball championship.
According to the local newspaper Corriere Romagna, the two most likely plans to be accepted are dealing with merging the Serie A1 and Serie A2 into one league. Last year the Serie A1 contained six teams, the Serie A2 existed of nineteen teams divided over four divisions.
A merger could mean that Rimini would return to the highest Italian level. Like an Italian baseball fan wrote on Facebook: Baseball without Rimini is like Formula 1 without Ferrari or a Rallye without Lancia.
Apparently, the FIBS has looked to Belgium, where the Baseball Gold League will merge with the Eerste Klasse to one new Top League that will contain twelve teams. One can only wonder how a new Serie A1 league can contain nineteen teams. Perhaps some shifting will be done.
For now, nothing is engraved in stone yet as nothing official has been published yet. But it is clear that a merger between the two aforementioned leagues is at hand. How it will al be filled out exactly remains up in the air for the time being.
A big thank you goes out to Massimo Moretti for translating the article from the Corriere Romagna for me.
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