A Unified, Broad, Vague Theory of Baseball Team Relocations/Expansions (at least for the purposes of Alt-1915)

 

This post is really intended for an audience of one: me. If you read it and think it interesting, great. But it's mostly so that I can get some thoughts down for the Alt-1915 OOTP league I'm running.  I'm trying to keep it realistic within the parameters I've set for it, and at least broadly historical. So, two of the overall questions to tackle is why the American and National Leagues expanded when they did and relocated teams when the did, and how would those events be altered in the setup I have?

I'm no historian, but I'm reasonably informed on baseball history. I think the two main interrelated issues were that there were an abundance of unserved/underserved places where money could be made playing baseball at a major league level, and that players were chronically underpaid. As a result, every 10 or so years, someone who realized the first part would try to take advantage of the second one--the National League was founded in 1876, but then the American Association in 1882, then the Player's League in 1890, then the American League in 1900, and the Federal League in 1913... Then, of course, there was the Great Depression and World War II, but almost immediately after that the Mexican League began poaching players in the mid/late '40s, and there was the threatened formation of the Continental League in 1960, which led to the first MLB expansion. By 1970 expansion and relocations were starting to take pressure off of the abundance of unserved places problem*, and the end of the reserve clause and institution of free agency later that decade got rid of the chronic underpayment of players (at least to the point that it didn't make sense to challenge MLB by starting a new league staffed with frustrated players). 

It also is striking to me that so much of the expansion were driven from outside MLB, at least until the expansions of the '90s. The Continental League forced the NL to expand to put a team in New York after the Dodgers and Giants departed (and to a lesser extent, to put a team in Houston) in defense. In order for the NL to put a team in New York, they had to agree to let the AL put a team in LA. The Athletics move to Oakland put Kansas City in a litigious mood, which led to a round of AL expansion the very next year to replace them with the Royals. Because they had to expand quickly, they had to put the Royals' expansion sibling, the Pilots, into Seattle before they were ready. Because the Braves moved to Atlanta, Bud Selig was heartbroken and determined to replace them. So he bought the Pilots and moved them to Milwaukee, a move that was possible because Seattle wasn't ready. But that led Seattle to sue MLB and that directly led to the 1977 expansion and the Mariners. And so on.

This got super-long, I'm going to cut here. I'd intended for this to be a series of posts, anyhow. I've cut and pasted a bunch of text into a follow-up post, read it here if you're interested..

*Added, 19 September: Upon reflection, I think that ~15-year cycle remained for at least a bit longer--once all the lawsuits etc. ended with the Mariners' expansion in 1977, the next (and voluntary) expansion was in 1993: 16 years later.