Quote:
Originally Posted by CH1MA3RA
Tentative Structure for 1955... detours in the timeline weave...
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At least half of the teams from Frank Shaughnessey's 1952 proposal - to expand the majors by including the four largest cities each from the AA & IL - would still be in play for expansion or promotion:
AA
Indianapolis
Kansas City - depends whether your A's relocate; if not then Oakland - with no current team in your world - is available
Milwaukee - depends whether your Braves relocate; if not then Atlanta (Southern Assocation through '61, Int'l Lg '62-'65) is available
Minneapolis - will already have an MLB team by '60
IL
Baltimore - already has a team in your '55 structure
Buffalo
Montreal
Toronto
Of course, with Indy & Buff never having rec'd (IRL) an MLB franchise to date, it might make more sense to look instead towards Dallas & Houston.
Quote:
Originally Posted by CH1MA3RA
There will likely be an agreement reached between the3 leagues to merge the AL & NL into a new larger "Eastern Conference", with the American and National monikers retained as their sub-leagues. Turning the Western League into a "Western Conference". Once this agreement is made, teams from the AL/NL could be more likely to relocate west since the Western League was staunchly against it prior to this agreement.
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I'm sure you're already considering something like this, but in that scenario, I'd think that a) you'd want the new Eastern Conference and resulting Western Conference to have somewhere in the neighborhood of the same teams in each. IOW, not an EC with 16 teams and a WC with 8. So you'd probably want to start - much as the NFL did with it's 1970 realignment - by moving a few teams from the NL/AL to the WL. In the NFL's case, its split into AFC & NFC wasn't geographical; yours would be. So candidates for moving from the EC to the WC would be Milw, one or both Chicagos, StL and definitely KC. The alternatives that I can think of - either very unbalanced numbers of teams in the two conferences, or a WC heavy on expansions teams - would be both undesirable and unrealistic in my book. One way to help alleviate the former is to have a team move from the east to a ripe western city (as I think you are considering), and then an expansion team replaces the team in the east (like what happened in the '61 AL: Minn & Wash). So maybe something like Brooklyn moving to Dallas to pair with an expansion team in Houston, and and expansion team replacing Brooklyn. Something like that... Just ideas
Anyways, fun stuff! Hope to hear more about it as things progress
