Written by Brendan H.
Woefully disorganized, the LBL’s Brooklyn squad was hastily chartered just prior to the formation of the league. With the local talent mostly claimed by their peers in Manhattan, Brooklyn was forced to build a team mostly from whatever players were left over.
Upon first seeing the team—an amalgamation of spare parts, hangers-on, and generally past-their-expiration date players of yesteryear—take the field, normally easy-going manager Henry Sluggs complained, “These men have the all the fight in ‘em of a beached whale.” To his lasting chagrin, the name stuck.
The Brooklyn club is owned by William Elwart Barclay, an eccentric, formerly renowned inventor. To stake the team, Mr. Barclay invested the remnants of the proceeds from a patent portfolio greatly diminished by both time and the genius of other men. Born of a fiduciary duty for the financial well-being of Mr. Barclay, the club’s operations are run by his accountant, Landon Kerr—a man with limited life experience and even less baseball acumen.
The Whales play near an industrial area along the waterfront in Brooklyn at the eponymous Field of the Whales. The site for the stadium was chosen, much like the team that calls it home, mostly because it was available. Squeezed between docks and warehouses, the park, like its namesake, is a charming, misshapen reflection of its surroundings. Loathed by opposing teams for its strange dimensions, The Field has a tiny right field, with a home run line painted along the wall of a neighboring warehouse 280 feet down the right field line, and a spacious, albeit crooked, center field that “features” a sharply angled center field fence—mockingly referred to by the local rooters as “The Fin”—440 feet from home that abuts the neighboring wharf’s crane.
If the Whales are to have any initial success in the LBL, it will be thanks to the efforts of Artemis Wool, a wily 28 year old catcher with a keen sense of judging balls and strikes, and Mick Samuelson, a 24 year old right fielder with an impressive ability to put bat-on-ball, and a series of well-timed maladies befalling their opponents.
