Town Team Baseball

Town Team Baseball is a variety of amateur baseball played in the United States. In Town Team baseball, sometimes also called townball, the teams represent either a given city or town, or a commercial enterprise which sponsors the team. Usually a statewide governing body sets uniform rules for two or more classes, including proximity (how close the player must live to the town for which he plays) and other eligibility rules, pay or stipends for players and coaches, boundaries, and rules to prevent players from switching teams without reason. Such governing bodies may also coordinate annual statewide playoffs, facilitate communication between teams and leagues, and help to arrange for training and placement of umpires.

The history of Town Team Baseball varies from state to state. In addition to the states included below, Townball was played in Iowa, Kansas, and Wisconsin.

Townball has been played in Minnesota since the 1920s. Townball enjoyed its peak of popularity in the 1940s and 1950s, with as many as 799 teams participating in the 1950 season. The first town baseball team in Minnesota is believed to have been Nininger's, in 1857. Although many towns in Minnesota have fielded baseball teams continuously since the 1880s, townball as we know it really came into existence in 1924 with the organization of the State Tournament, masterminded by the Saint Paul Pioneer Press and Saint Paul Dispatch writers Roy Dunlap and Lou McKenna. One year later, the AM-ABL was formed as a governing body for Townball in Minnesota. This organization still exists as the Minnesota Baseball Association.

Numbers of teams and leagues operating in Minnesota peaked between the end of World War II (1945) and the arrival of Minnesota's new Major League Baseball team, the Minnesota Twins, in 1961. Since the minimum number of players required to field a team for a single game with no substitutions is nine, then at least 7191 (and in actuality a much larger number) individuals participated in Minnesota townball in the peak year, 1950.

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