Entries - Entry Category: Baseball - Starting with N

The Class D Northeast Arkansas League was established in July 1909 after the Arkansas State League folded. Two of its franchises, Newport (Jackson County) and Jonesboro (Craighead County), joined baseball clubs from Marianna (Lee County) and Paragould (Greene County) to form the league. It was sanctioned by the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues (NAPBL), the administrative agency of minor league baseball from 1901 to the present. After a successful inaugural season, violence and fiscal woes marred the 1910 and 1911 seasons. At the conclusion of the 1910 season, the Caruthersville, Missouri, and Paragould franchises were separated by only a half game in the standings. The league championship rested on the outcome of a five-game series between the two teams. …

The Northwest Arkansas Naturals, an affiliate of the Kansas City Royals major league baseball team, are a minor league team based in Springdale (Washington and Benton counties). The team, which is in the Texas League and plays its games in Arvest Ballpark in Springdale, relocated from Wichita, Kansas, where it had been known as the Wichita Wranglers. Beginning as the Northwest Arkansas Naturals in 2008, the team emerged as a twenty-first-century challenger to the long-time primacy of the Arkansas Travelers in the state’s minor league baseball hierarchy. While there had been a group seeking to bring a minor league team to the Springdale area in the first decade of the twenty-first century, its efforts were almost stymied at the last …