[FlyingMugOfJustice]

The year is 1951. While baseball has taken root as America’s Game, it is far from an equal proposition. If you want to catch a Major League Baseball game, you have to be east of the Mississippi River.

On the other coast, the baseball world is, for the most part, left to its own devices. The vast expanses of the Wild West are full of baseball outlaws. Airline travel is in its early days, not to the point where an American League or National League team could be viable on the West Coast.

It’s in this world that the Pacific Coast League has risen, with teams stretching along the I-5 corridor from San Diego to Seattle. These teams have an independent streak to them, constantly at odds with the MLB rulers who seek to control all aspects of the game, and are rewarded with fiercely loyal fans. Like the teams, the people of the West fancy themselves as outlaws seeking more independence from the fat cats of the East Coast.

It is here, in 1951, that we break from reality. In the real world, the PCL was granted Open Status, a step above AAA, for the 1952 season and beyond. The eight teams were no longer affiliated with Major League organizations, they had control over their own rosters, and they had protections against poaching by Major League teams.

It was widely thought that the next step would be Major League status for the PCL, giving the nation three Major Leagues.

But soon after the promotion to Open Classification, minor-league attendance dropped around the nation, a reflection of Major League games becoming widely available via television broadcasts. The PCL was as much a victim of plunging attendance as the rest.

Disunity and infighting among the PCL teams didn’t help. The PCL dropped back to AAA classification in 1958, the same year the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants moved to California to put the nail in the coffin of the PCL’s Major League dreams.

That’s not the world we’re diving into.

In this alternate universe, the Pacific Coast League makes an organized push in 1951 and is accepted into the Major Leagues for the 1952 season. Under the Major League umbrella there are now three leagues with 24 total franchises, a total the MLB didn’t hit until 1970.

The new Major League teams from the PCL are, from north to south, the Seattle Rainiers, the Portland Beavers, the Sacramento Solons, the Oakland Oaks, the San Francisco Seals, the Hollywood Stars, the Los Angeles Angels, and the San Diego Padres.

The minor leagues undergo major reorganization as well, getting sorted into three separate systems. Each league has seven or eight minor-league teams under them. The American Association is the AAA league for the American League, the International League is AAA for the National League, and the Western League has be elevated to the AAA league for the Pacific Coast League. A handful of minor leagues were left out of the reorganization, and they have banded together to form the Congress of Independent Baseball, with its own championship.

While the eastern side of the country has its minor leagues intermingled, the PCL and its minor-league system have much more of a regional monopoly.

There is no interleague play, and the season is standardized at 154 games for all three major leagues. With milder winters and longer summers, the PCL had been having 180-game seasons.

While a lot has been done to make an even playing field for the PCL, there is still one sign that the west doesn’t garner the same respect. The playoffs have been expanded to an eight-team bracket – three each from the AL and NL, and two from the PCL. There are no league championship series, the teams go straight into the bracket as follows: AL1 vs. NL3, NL1 vs. AL3, PCL1 vs. AL2, and PCL2 vs. NL2.

An agreement has been signed by all three leagues that the PCL will have two teams until it wins a World Series, at which point the playoffs will expand to nine teams – the third-place teams from the leagues that did not win the World Series the year before will have a one-game play-in.

That is where we stand heading into 1952, the first year of the PCL experiment. The Yankees have won three World Series titles in a row.

I am using historic players, but game-engine progression, so we’ll see how this turns out. I have made some judgement calls on team movement, and have everything planned out with a timeline for relocation, expansion, even stadium upgrades. For instance, neither the Dodgers nor the Giants would move to become the third MLB team in a market, but they would still have their stadium disagreements. So would they move to another city? Stay in NY? We will find out when we get there. The somewhat volatile movement of the PCL will tone way down now that it’s a major league, with a few moves still I could still see happening.

There will be a domino effect here. Where the Dodgers and Giants wind up will affect the historic expansion to that area. Will the A’s still jump from Philly to KC to Oakland? With a team already in Seattle, do the Milwaukee Brewers still happen? With more prominent baseball in the West, does expansion still creep up to 30 teams by the current day?

Things are going to get weird.