In the last post I mused about Harry Sinclair, the Newark Peppers, and the in-game choice that's looming. I thought through, and I think I established to my own satisfaction anyhow, that the most consistent headcanon has Harry Sinclair as the owner of the Alt-1924 Peppers, and that those Peppers are one of the 2-3 least successful teams in all of MLB over the past decade. Whether there's a scandal like Teapot Dome that's embroiling Sinclair in Alt-1924 is TBD, but if there were one, he'd have to sell. Whether new team owners would move the Peppers is TBD, but it doesn't seem outlandish at this point. The rest of this post will touch on where they might land, and maybe start to work on some of those TBDs.
I think there are basically six realistic cities for an Alt-1924 team to move to: Toronto, Montreal, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Milwaukee, Indianapolis, and Louisville. An Omaha paper musing about a third major league included Columbus and Providence as possibilities, but I don't think either one is realistic here. I plan a whole post on this from the standpoint of the upcoming expansion (which maybe will be for 1928?) so I won't go into detail here, but I'll note that the expansion looms over this choice. At the moment I'm thinking the first four cities will get the expansion teams (and given the choice, would prefer expantion teams to the Peppers), leaving Indianapolis and Louisville open.
These two cities seem pretty closely matched. Indianapolis is a little bigger and will stay bigger over the coming decades. On the other hand, they only had major league baseball sporadically in this timeline: 1878, 1884, 1887-1889, and the 1914 FL campaign. Louisville, on the other hand, had a team in the AA that jumped to the NL and was in continuous operation 1882-1899 before getting nefariously contracted, as well as an NL team 1876-1877. So the history of major league baseball in Louisville is much deeper, if also somewhat further in the past. Louisville also has a new stadium, Parkway Field, that's ready for a major league park. Indianapolis didn't build Bush Stadium (which had various other names in the interim) until 1931. Using the same sort of logic as the last post, there's no particular reason to think that Parkway field didn't go into use in 1923 (or whatever it was), and indeed it's being used by the Alt-1924 minor league Louisville Colonels. Nor is there any reason to think that Bush Stadium was already built, though I suppose a snap decision to build it to host a major league team in 1925 certainly could be made. The AAA ABCs are drawing better than the AAA Colonels, though that's mostly going to be a function of team quality.
In terms of whether these were "major league cities" in the 20s, Louisville had an early NFL team before that league settled down, Indianapolis did not. On the other hand, Indianapolis was almost always represented in the Negro Leagues while Louisville was much more on and off. On the other other hand, that's occurring in the future (and in Alt-1924's case, a future that's different from theirs).
I think all in all, a move to Louisville makes more sense in-game than Indianapolis. But does it make more sense than remaining in Newark? And even if it does, would the scandal that affected Sinclair have happened? I need to think about those some more. For now, I'm going to finish this and post. There's a mid-season update to write!
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