I created Deep South Class D Baseball in February, 1999. It was the result of a Saturday afternoon experiment in web page design. The original page was just 4 screens worth of trivia and pictures about the Alabama-Florida League. I chose the league as the subject of the web page almost on a whim: I was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, but moved to Montgomery, Alabama in 1991 because of a job change. While visiting my dad in Florida one summer, I spent an afternoon on the golf course with some of his golfing buddies and him. I’ve always been a baseball fan, and my dad, having retired to the Tampa area, had made friends with a number of fellow retirees who had baseball connections. While waiting to tee off, Dad introduced me was Lou Garcia, a former scout for the Cubs, former major league hurler, Hal Jeffcoat, and a former semi-pro player named Larry Roebbels, Larry loved to tell stories about the hardships and the fun of playing low-level pro baseball in the 1950s. He played mostly for an Alabama semi-pro team called the Dothan Grays, and since I was an Alabama resident, we had something in common to talk about. At the 19th hole, we continued our conversation over some cold beers and Larry and I enjoyed comparing notes about both life in Alabama and baseball. I am a life-long Cleveland Indians fan, and Larry reminded me that Selma, Alabama was an Indians farm team in the late 1950s and early 1960s. When I returned to Montgomery, I’d decided to see what information I could find about the Selma team and Alabama minor league baseball in general. After a couple afternoons spent in the Montgomery Library, searching through old Montgomery Advertisers on microfilm, I came across statistics for the 1959 Alabama-Florida League season.

The Selma team at the time was named the Cloverleafs, a nickname used by Selma pro teams in various leagues in reference to the Cloverleaf Dairy Company, a supporter of baseball in Selma for many years. As I looked through the records, I noticed the name of Max Alvis, Cleveland’s third baseman during much of the 1960s and one of the guys I admired as a youth. After more digging around, I found fellow Indians Larry Brown, Doc Edwards, and Johnny Lipon were all members of that 1959 team. The Cleveland-Selma connection sparked enough interest that I began making regular trips to the library and the Alabama State Archives to read about the Alabama-Florida League, which fascinated me because it was a personal connection between growing up an Indians fan in Cleveland, Ohio, and the life I had come to know as a resident of Montgomery, Alabama.

The web site was never meant to be anything more than small weekend diversion, a way to organize some of the facts I had gathered about the league, but that changed early in 2000, when I received an Email from the son of a former player, asking for more information about the league and his father’s career. I decided to see what I could find, which lead me to new information about the league and more additions to the web site. During the summer, more emails arrived with more requests. I started to receive a few compliments about the web site, and some thank you letters too. One in particular caught my attention. It was from a grandson that had found a picture of his deceased grandfather on the website. It was just a small picture, but it was of huge importance to this young man and his entire family, who had occasionally heard his granddad mention that he once was a minor league ballplayer. Lots of players from that era and level of play figured that nobody would ever care about the career of a Class D player in a small town like Andalusia, or Brewton, or Dothan, so they rarely talked about it except with former teammates. Some folks didn’t learn about their fathers or grandfather’s ball playing days until it was too late to share the experience with them. I found that my site was important to folks who played or had family in the leagues or remember attending the games, so I made a commitment to myself to continue expanding the web page as long as people found it worthwhile. As the site grew, so did the daunting task of producing a well-written, accurate, neatly organized, easily navigated, web site. I wanted to devote as much time to the site as I could, but my spare time was already filled raising a family, playing Cajun Accordion, and a bunch of other hobbies and interests that would catch my attention from time to time. Somehow, I would have to find time for this, and I knew I didn’t have a lot if time to give. Still, I knew this was where I belonged.

I do all the design work, create all of the logos and art work, write all of the text (except where noted), and slap the whole mess together in hopes that something organized and readable comes out. In the seven plus years since I started this web page, I can confidently state that no one but me has ever seen every page on this site. This is due to the fact that the site is always evolving, and with growth, I continue to redesign pages, break links, and leave orphaned pages in the void. I have to admit it’s a struggle to keep up with all the ideas and plans I have for the site, nevertheless; I know that someday all that I’ve collected will somehow get out there somewhere in cyberspace. It may be apparent to some of you who visit the site that I am neither an author, nor an historian. I'm not particularly artistic either. I’m not an expert on baseball, in fact, I rarely watch Major League games anymore. My grammar skills are completely suspect, and thank God for Spell-check (I should actually use it once in a while!). Maybe the fact that I’m just an average Joe makes this web site what it is. Maybe ownership of this site takes someone with Class D talents. I think that I have come to understand the Class D ballplayer: I understand the distant dreams of success, appreciate the unrewarded efforts, accept the slight payoffs, and fight off the constant voice of common sense saying, “why do all of this?”. The answer is simple: It’s the reason that a Class D ball player is willing to ride for hours in a non-air conditioned bus on a sweltering afternoon, put on a dusty, unwashed, uniform and play 9 innings of baseball on a gravelly field in front of few dozen supporters. It’s the thrill of getting a chance to step up to the plate and swing away.