A Real Possibility
Let's assume that baseball gradually migrated south from the United States over the course of several decades following the War of Southern Independence. The first clubs were formed by former Confederate soldiers who had picked up the game while stationed north of the border during and immediately following the war, learned from the American soldiers they were guarding in the POW camps. By the late 1870s, baseball had spread to a new generation of young men who wanted to emulate the "heroes and patriots" who had fought in the war. Baseball spread into the colleges as students organized teams and competed against each other.
Jacksonville was the first city to sponsor a semi-professional team in 1874, nicknaming it the Veterans due to the large number of former soldiers hired to play. Many towns throughout the Confederacy followed the example set by Jacksonville, and competed against each other for recreation and town standing. The first association was formed in Georgia in 1880, comprised of seventeen local teams to form a standard set of rules for the game.
While baseball remained a popular past time, the professional teams sponsored by the larger cities quickly rose to prominence and dominated the teams of the smaller towns who couldn't afford to pay players. In 1887, the Confederate Association of Baseball (CAB) was established by the managers of seven major teams: Jacksonville, Savannah, Charleston, Atlanta, Birmingham, Norfolk, and Mobile. The managers chose an association president from amongst their number and set out to codify the rules of baseball for all teams playing professionally in the Confederacy.
From CAB, the Confederate League arose in 1889. While CAB was the governing body of professional baseball in the Confederacy until 1912, the League was the organization that held the sport together in the early days of professional paid baseball. As the wages of players and the cost of maintaining standardized facilities grew, cities began selling the teams to corporations and private owners. Despite the new corporate sponsorship, however, the nicknames teams had been known by for years stuck despite the new owners' attempts to give the teams new corporate names.
After the turn of the century, baseball's popularity had surpassed that of all other sports aside from horse racing. In 1901, the CAB established a regular season of play between March and June, with a championship game played the last Saturday in June to culminate the season. Professional managers and coaches were hired by the team owners as game attendance grew in the first decade of the new century. Many early coaches were former ballplayers themselves, most notably John "Red" Martinson (1842-1917), who had originally learned the game as a POW camp guard in Kentucky during the war and had played semi-professionally for the Jacksonville Veterans in the 1870s.
In 1912, the CAB formally merged with the Confederate League, becoming one body. By 1927, fourteen teams had joined the Confederate League, the same number that remains to this day. Industry standards on wages were set in 1948, effectively putting players and coaches on a sliding pay scale based on the experience, abilities, and game stats. This cut down on the inflation of wages that crippled the baseball industry in the United States in the 1960s and 70s, and allowed the Confederate League owners to earn a consistent profit year after year.
By the 1960s, the owners of the League realized that they were missing an untapped market, as colored citizens were still barred from attending professional games due to League regulations set in the 1920s. Since the Confederate segregation laws were still in effect at this time, the owners founded the Confederate Negro League in 1964, forming Negro teams in the major cities which contained the largest populations of colored citizens. The Negro League proved popular and profitable, as the Negro players and coaches were paid on a much lower scale than their white counterparts. After the end of the Jim Crow era in 1992, the white owners began to sell the Negro teams to colored co-ops specifically created for that purpose. The last Negro team was sold in 1999, ending white control of the Negro League, which is currently headed by Stanley Lincoln (b.1951), who played for the Birmingham Coloreds from 1970 to 1983 and coached the team from 1985 until the team was sold to a colored co-op headed by Lincoln in 1996 and renamed.
The Confederate League today looks much the same as it did in 1927. Ownership of the teams rarely changes as they generate considerable profit. The League is still governed by the owners and industry rules and regulations are closely guarded by the owners. The current season starts in early March and ends in mid-July, with teams playing three games per week on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday evenings just as they did in 1927. However, the season ends with Davis Series, named in honor of the first President of the Confederacy. The team winning the Series now competes against the winner of the United States' World Series in October.
Confederate League Teams
New Orleans Deltas (named for the delta region of the Mississippi River)
Atlanta Emperors (so called for Georgia's nickname as the Empire State)
Birmingham Steelers (named for the steel industry that arose after the war)
Memphis Forrests (named after Memphis hero Nathan Bedford Forrest)
Richmond Rebels (named after the colloquial for Confederate war heroes)
Nashville Philosophers (so called for Nashville's moniker as the Athens of the South)
San Antonio Ranchers (named after the local cattle industry)
Dallas Rangers (named after the famous Texas law enforcement agency)
Houston Oilers (named after the local oil industry)
Fort Worth Cowboys (named after the local cattle industry and stockades)
Norfolk Burgesses (named after the state legislature)
Savannah Thrashers (named after the state bird of Georgia)
Charleston Planters (named after the historic plantation class of the area)
Jacksonville Veterans (named after the war veterans who founded the team)
