The New Frontier: Welcome to Championship Baseball

A quick word from our Commissioner, Pete Bradstone.

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Baseball has always been a game of tradition. In the old days, straying from the path of tradition was enough to get a 99-mile-per-hour fastball right in the back. Flashiness, bravado, and sticking out were frowned upon, and exhibiting these traits often killed your career. Tales of failed players like Bryce Harper, Kris Bryant and Carlos Correa are quick to highlight the fact that, even though these guys had all of the talent in the world, they were simply too much for the game to handle.

When we started purchasing teams from the now-defunct AABL, we had one goal in mind for the future of the association we were creating: creating a league that bucked tradition in exchange for a product Americans might actually want to watch. The MLB, before its collapse, was boring. The people in charge were too late to catch on, and the fans weren’t patient enough to let them figure it out after the fact. Our goal at the CBA is to never let this happen to us. It’s to keep on top of the trends, let our players express themselves however they want, and make baseball the powerhouse of a sport its supposed to be.

We might be small, but we’ve got one thing going for us right now that no other sports league can claim: we’ve got baseball. There’s a reason baseball became America’s pastime. The game is a perfect mirror of life itself. You can struggle at times, but after working through those struggles, you’re often rewarded with a streak in which you can do no wrong. For a game that exemplifies life itself, why would making it a little more human be so bad?

Watching the meteoric rise of the MLS over the past few years has taught us all so many lessons when it comes to capturing the hearts of Americans. Not even baseball, a game so intertwined with our nation’s history, could survive ownership that was unwilling to change. The MLS has showed time and time again that change is their strong suit. Whether it be introducing elements of promotion and relegation or efforts to support individualization in their players, allowing them to truly be themselves on and off the field, there’s a lot of inspiration there for us.

The CBA is first and foremost an entertainment property. We’re here to serve you, the fans. We can’t serve you while also being so stubborn and unmoving when it comes to the tradition of the game. And while some aspects of baseball need to be preserved, our approach with this new league is very much one of “let’s do whatever sounds awesome”.

So, we reached out to you. Over the past year, Americans have told us exactly what they like about other sports that baseball has never had before. Features like promotion and relegation, tiered leagues, youth academies – all efforts we’ve worked into our structure here, thanks to your feedback.

Today marks the first day of Spring Training for the CBA. There are a lot of unknowns on the horizon that can really make or break this league. The crumbling of America’s pastime has kept us humble, and we know we’ll need to work hard to prevent that from happening to our newborn league as well. But there are some things that we DO know: We know that we’re going to put the best baseball product on the field every game for our fans. We know that we’ll refuse to be caught up in tradition, and roll with the changes. We know that we’ll have the only professional baseball league that America has to offer. And we know it’ll be a damn good one.

Thanks again for all of your support over the past few years of our setup process. Now it’s finally time to play ball.