Disorganized Baseball: The Provincial League from LaRoque to Les Expos

Hans B. Neumann is a history lecturer at Scarborough College, University
of Toronto.

Merritt Clifton has written an entertaining little pamphlet on baseball, detailing the history of the Quebec Provincial League from its antecedents in the late nineteenth century, through its formal founding in 1934, until its demise in 1970 (ironically, a year after the Expos arrived in Montreal).

For the Canadian baseball fan, the pamphlet is a goldmine of well-researched information and statistics dealing with the mostly locally recruited players as well as anecdotes concerning them. Clifton highlights the role of the League in the 1940s and 1950s of funnelling talented black and Latino players to the major leagues, players such as Ruben and Preston Gomez or Vic Powers.

The slim volume is organized into a narrative section treating the history of the League (12 pages), a four-page biographical section of four leading players (Dussault, Garcia, Duany, and Gladu) of the strongest club in the League during the 1940s and 1950s, the Sherbrooke Athletics, and a one-page reprint from the Sporting News bearing on the subject. The remainder of the pamphlet details information and statistics on the teams and players of the League (tables #4-6 listing stats on leading players are especially informative).

This pamphlet can be highly recommended not only for older Canadian baseball fans wishing to refresh their memories but also for younger ones who may still think baseball only came to Canada in 1969 with the Expos.