An Alternate History of MLB

I took over an old historical league file I had from a fast-sim alternative history league I ran for a while. Starting in the late 1920, I simmed pretty much all the way through 2004. I did expand the league several times, as well as induce some moves. For the most part, though, teams were to end up in cities that have them though not all of them are in that particular manner.

The history is interesting and I'll do some chronicling, but here's the alignment. It's currently two leagues with two divisions each of eight teams for a total of 32.

The top two teams in each division advance to the post-season and play in a best-of-seven game Division Championship Series, with the best-of-seven game LCS to follow and a World Series (best of seven) after that.

In 2000, we experimented with making the Wild Cards the two best teams in each league regardless of division, but went back to this format in 2000.

Prior to 1995, we simply had the division champions face off in the League Championship Series and 1962 is when division play officially began.

Expansion occurred in 1947, 1965, 1977 and 1995 each time with four teams being added to the bigs.

Here is the current setup as of the 2005 season:

With the Angels moving to Anaheim, ownership sold the club and the AL and NL agreed to allow a league swap of teams for the first time in modern baseball history, which moved the Dodgers to the NL and the Portland Beavers to the AL.

This was done to ensure that the AL didn't have a monopoly on the Los Angeles area with both the Dodgers and Angels in the same league and gave the moribund Seattle Tigers a regional rival in the hopes it'd ignite their fanbase.

The expansion era franchises are:

Here are the team moves in this particular universe:

Toronto Blue Jays
(Philadelphia Phillies became the Philadelphia Blue Jays in 1958 and moved to Toronto in 1959. A stadium and ownership dispute sent the team packing for Jersey City in 2000 and Hartford from 2001-04. They moved back to Toronto for the 2005 season.)

Tampa Bay Giants
(The New York Giants moved to Minneapolis in 1947 and moved to St. Petersburg, FL in 1993.)

Atlanta Braves
(The Boston Braves moved to Milwaukee in 1947 and to Atlanta in 1965.)

Denver Bears
(The Chicago Whales moved to Denver in 1959 and became the Denver Bears.)

New York Mets
(The Brooklyn Dodgers became the Cleveland Blues in 1923, a vestige of a move from the online league phase of the file. In 1949, the Blues moved back to New York and became the New York Metropolitans and shortened it to the Mets in 1962.)

Los Angeles Dodgers
(The Louisville Black Caps moved to Brooklyn in 1927 to become the Brooklyn Black Caps. In 1932, they adopted the departed Dodgers moniker and in 1995, the Dodgers moved west to Los Angeles after only two playoff appearances since 1970 and their last title coming in 1964 wore down the local faithful who balked at building the team a new stadium, while an investment banker in Los Angeles agreed to build the team a gleaming new ballpark near downtown.

Seattle Tigers
(The Detroit Tigers moved to Seattle in 1965. Detroit rejoined the bigs in 1977 with the expansion Wolverines were granted to the city. The Tigers franchise remain the only original franchise to never win a World Series. They've won five AL pennants in franchise history, in 1917, 1958, 1960, 1962 and 1988.)