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FEBRUARY 6, 2017
ROCHESTER, NY

A handsome man sits at a new dining room table covered in exam papers.

The night before, Tom Brady and the poor unfortunate Pats completed such an obscene comeback against the Falcons that, after the mandatory period where even relatively even-keeled ÑFL¹ fans threw words like “rigged” and “scripted” around, it became de rigueur to simply chant two specific numbers whenever it might be funny.

Our protagonist, who did not watch the game but generally dislikes it when good things happen to cop-coded teams, is doing his best to grade the papers in front of him. His eyes, warm and dark as good strong coffee, tell each student’s story in their optic Morse code: sparks of frustration, glows of unexpected successes, the all-too-common gray glaze of disappointment.

He’d be faster, but he is distracted by watching a baseball game—or, rather, a lot of different baseball games, one after the other. You see, the Reyes de Juana Díaz, who have made a joke of their division year after year and whose roster is the envy of their entire league, have developed an unfortunate habit of pissing away 120-win seasons with extremely early playoff exits. Every time he looks up from another section of exams, doing anything possible to avoid the obvious thought that he is twelve hours away from returning to work, he sees them losing another second-round series to some 89-win wildcard.

To put it bluntly, this is driving the grader, whose despairing fingers long ago spoiled his usually perfect coiffure, insane.

Such is the fate of the average Liga Nacional Puertorriqueña fan.

Noah, what the hell was any of that?

First and foremost, it’s a true story. If you’ve never been driven to the end of your rope by a fictional sports team you created, I highly recommend it. Something about knowing how absurd the entire enterprise is, and how little control you have over it,² really puts our usual sports struggles into perspective.

Second, though, it’s the longest-lasting project I’ve ever worked on. The LNP has existed, in some form or another, since 2016, but it really didn’t take off until the pandemic gave me just enough time to share it more with the rest of the world.

Spoiler alert: There’ll be a lot more where this came from, so if I hooked you . . . well, you know what to do.

Hang on. What?

As willing as I usually am to expound at length on this subject, I cannot meaningfully improve on the FAQ:

[The Liga Nacional Puertorriqueña is] the national baseball league of the República Arquipelágica de Puerto Rico, a country that shook off the shackles of colonial domination in 1871 and embarked on a decades-long mission to become the world’s preeminent baseball power.

Picture a universe where Segundo Ruiz Belvis didn’t suddenly die in Chile in 1867 while trying to drum up support for Puerto Rican independence, and where the Lares revolutionaries were able to secure armaments from Ramón Emeterio Betances that, in this much worse reality, were impounded by the Dominican Republic.

As a result, instead of eating lunch when they should have been planning military expeditions, they succeeded in touching off a war of independence that ended with the Insular Republic of Puerto Rico as not only a free nation, but a symbol.

I’ll eventually get into more of what the LNP is, but for now, this is a fairly complete definition.

A more succinct one: Imagine a universe where everything that has gone wrong in ours, both within baseball and outside of it, took the opposite and better tack each time.

Okay. Why now?

This post comes out on June 1st, which (for the non-Rochesterian among you, since for us multi-colored Flora takes a rather circuitous route to full wakefulness) is the first day of Pride Month.³

Obviously, LGBTQ+ people have been part of baseball in this universe for decades, but they are no less present or notable in the history of the Liga Nacional Puertorriqueña and its fellow leagues. Just as we celebrate all other sorts of diversity in the wonderful LNPverse, this, too, is a cause for joy.

At LNP headquarters, often called “La Central,” it is tradition to celebrate this month by offering designs from our Pride collection, which you can access here. Everything from T-shirts and mini prints to stickers and greeting cards is available.

We chose Trans Lifeline because it provides the most direct services of the LGBTQ+ organizations with which Threadless partners, and because everyone from our nine unelected ghouls who swoop in to commit evil to USians who think they’re above being propagandized are coordinating an effort to eliminate trans people from existence, and we at the Liga Nacional Puertorriqueña refuse to let that happen.

Since 2024, for every Pride wearable item we sell during June and July (or for each order that doesn’t include them), we’ve also donated another $5 to Trans Lifeline. Thanks to a little help from our friends, we’ve been able to raise almost $1,000 for TL over the last two years. That’s 40 connections to the hotline.

This year, in an effort to make clear just how seriously we take this, we are not offering any other merchandise for June.⁴ So please, check out what’s on offer. We’re sure you’ll find something you’d like to wear, use, or give to someone else important to you, and your purchase will directly benefit an LGBTQ+ organization in need of support.

Both as a word and as an occasion, “Pride” could fill a volume with its own various meanings, but for us it means this: despite all the bleakness that surrounds us right now, as long as we show up for each other, we are going to win.

Happy Pride, gente.

¡Pa’lante!