Did Baseball Evolve? A Look at Baseball's Early Years
Did Baseball Evolve?
The Great Theo-basebological Debate Continues
Evan Pritchard is a professor of comparitive religions, and a baseball enthusiast and sometimes gets confused between the two subjects. He has made pilgrimmages to Fenway Park, the Himalayas, Tiger Stadium, Bear Butte, Wrigley Field, and to Assisi, Italy. By comparing baseball and religion he means no offense to baseball fans.
When I was a young baseball monk back in 1966, I thought that major league baseball teams were fixed reference points in the cosmic order of things like the earth itself, around which the whole universe revolved. God had created baseball on the sixth day to give him something to watch on TV on his day of rest...and that was it. He had set the All Star Game in the firmament,and parted the NL from the AL and night games from day games, right from the beginning. No monkeying around.
I was a Senators fan, and I was sure that George Washington had been a Senators fan as well. Then my 6th grade teacher, Miss Marilyn Simmons, mentioned in passing that the Twins were an offshoot of the Washington Senators. That meant they were a species of Nats Washingtonius, and I was left flattened. When they played each other, who would I cheer for? (Or against!) She explained that the old Senators had left town and a new team reappeared miraculously to take their place. How could they have left? I felt like an adoptee who’s just been told his real parents live in Minneapolis/St.Paul in a geodesic dome, selling scorecards for a living.
About that same time, 1966, the Milwaukee Braves were moving to Atlanta, leaving Milwaukee-ites without a team to root for, to care for and call their own. It was like watching Venus and Mars switch orbits, as far as I was concerned.
Then in 1969, the KC A’s left KC for Oakland, and a new species of team appeared on the baseball horizon, the Royals. Broadcasters let it slip that the A’s were really from Philadelphia. I didn’t know that! It made it somehow okay for them to go to California.
Then the Seattle Pilots moved to Milwaukee and metamorphized into the Brewers in 1970. It was like watching a chimp evolve into a parrot, very confusing.
God was preparing me for the coming holocaust, the advent of the star Wormwood, the Day of Judgement on the corruption in Washington. Ever since Richard Nixon started throwing out the first ball on Opening Days at RFK Stadium, named after his dead rival, there were talks of moving the team. Would the benevolent spirit of baseball abandon the Nation’s Capitol? Impossible. Then one day in 1971, around the time of the Watergate Break-in, Bob Short sold the Senators for a mess of pottage, ie Texas oil money. The name of the Senators was erased from the firmament, and a new team, The Texas Rangers, arose from the desert of central Texas to become one of the dominant teams in baseball, something the Senators were not.
It was the curse of Roosevelt. He came into office in 1933 just as the Senators won their last pennant. He proclaimed the New Deal and the Nats haven’t been close since. It must be his fault. When the Senators moved to Minnesota, they soon became pennant-winners. Texas ends up in first or second every other year. It’s all part of the curse.
One can’t help but note a series of conspiracies connecting the White House with the Washington baseball team. In 1961, the Washington team was stolen from Griffith Stadium, and were smuggled out to Minneapolis, Minnesota. Within two years, Kennedy was dead (assasinated in Texas) and Johnson became President, a Texas oil man. He immediately named as his Vice President, the top man in Minneapolis, Hubert H. Humphrey. It was obviously Johnson’s intention to get Humphrey into the White House so that the center of power would be moved to Minnesota until Texas was ready to take over. It didn’t work.
Humphrey and Johnson parted ways over conflicting feelings about the Vietnam war, and Humphrey’s Democratic support was splintered. Apparently, Johnson decided it was time that Texas begin to take over. Minnesotans were just too liberal.
Those who are erudite students of poli-sci-mytho-baseballogy know that this power struggle was foreshadowed in the fall of 1963 by the struggle between Minnesota and Boston. The Red Sox was, after all, the President’s team, and Carl Yastzremski had every right to expect to win the home run title. Nonetheless, Minnesota’s Harmon Killebrew ended up with more homers, and the Twins ended up 15 games ahead of the Red Sox in the American League. The idealistic Senators were dead last, and so was Texas. Six weeks later, Kennedy was killed in Dallas, and Texas began its ascent in the standings. Meanwhile the Dallas Cowboys were doing great guns against the Redskins. But that’s another story.
The new Senators were sold to Texas after the 1971 season, about the time that Nixon was secretly undermining Humphrey’s Presidential hopes through Watergate and other actions. After presumably fixing the NL race to have his hometown San Francisco Giants win the pennant in 1971, Nixon was re-elected in ‘72, with VP Agnew of Maryland, who had obvious connections with the Baltimore Orioles, the new site of Opening Day games, and host city to the American League Playoffs every year from 1969 to 1974 (with the exception of 1972 itself, that would have been too suspicious!). Agnew even threw out the first ball...in Baltimore! Nixon resigned in ‘74 (following closely on the heels of his hometown Giants star Willie Mays, who retired in ‘73) and within six years we had a Texas oil man as Vice President. That man, a former second baseman, later became President George Herbert Walker Bush, and his son wound up owning a large part of the Texas Rangers. Among poli-sci-mytho-baseballogists, this is easily recognizable as a foreshadowing of things to come: Some day, maybe years down the road, Texas will host our nation’s Capitol, and the Senators can regain their rightful name in Texas. After 1971, the shift of power to Texas must have seemed so imminent, that no one bothered to replace the D.C. team with a new one. After the big move of the U.S. Senate to Texas, and the elimination of the useless District of Columbia, who would root for a “Senators” team on the Anacostia River in mostly-black Southern Maryland?
Texas, still angry over not being allowed succession from the US, may feel it necessary to gradually move the Nation’s Capitol to Texas. It could happen. No wonder God has been trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored as far as Washington is concerned! However, all these behind the scenes power struggles were just a part of a bigger evolutionary scheme. God knows all, and bides His time. Over the years, since that first discovery that baseball has evolved, I have learned of many such evolutionary twists. Having a son has awakened me to many new realities, including some about baseball. Our trip together to Cooperstown confronted me with questions such as, “Who were the Boston Browns?” “Who were the New York Highlanders?” “The Boston Braves?”
These are questions that have baffled many baseball fans before me. One theory is that aliens from Planet X have picked up whole baseball stadiums and moved them to other places, perhaps indicating that these stadiums were placed there by aliens to begin with. This would explain why RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C., The Vet in Philadelphia, Synergy Field in Cincinnati, and old Riverfront Stadium in Pittsburgh, not to mention the Oakland Coluseum, all look like pods from the same mother ship, and not very convivial to human beings, either. How would they know what we like?
My son and I later discovered (with the help of Paul Dickson’s wonderful book, The New Dickson Baseball Dictionary) that about half of the teams now playing are related to one another through a complex evolutionary process of franchise evolution. During our trip to 14 baseball cities, we created a family tree to help us understand the stages of baseball evolution, but even now, the truth boggles my mind. (see chart)
What usually happens is that when a team leaves their city, they either take their name with them, or start with a new name appropriate to the new city. In the first case, they are replaced by a team bearing a new name. In the second case, they are replaced by a new team with the same name. With the Senators, it was by necessity the second case, since they would have otherwise become the Minnesota Senators (which would have then made it obvious that Minnesota Senator Hubert Humphrey was behind it.)
In either case, whenever this happens, one team splits into two, a kind of franchise mitosis. A good example is the Brooklyn Athletics. (The “Who?” you say?) They moved to Philadelphia in 1876, taking their name with them. I’m sure you’ve heard of them! They were replaced by the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1890 (after several evolutionary attempts). Then the Athletics moved in 1955 to Kansas City, again taking their name with them, and were never replaced in Philadelphia, although there is a memorial to all Philadelphia baseball stars of the past on a wall at The Vet in Philadelphia. Then the Athletics moved to Oakland, California in 1969, and were replaced by the Kansas City Royals. To curse them, God made their heads turn green and yellow like canaries, and at one point made their feet turn white. Then he sent them that earthquake in the middle of a World Series. Don’t mess with evolution!
The Brooklyn Dodgers, the A’s replacements from the 1800’s, had by then already moved to California, as had the New York Giants who were their new cross-town rivals. All of this moving and shuffling around leads to some very interesting and confusing relationships, as you can see.
The New York Metropolitans had appeared in 1883 and changed their name to the New York Giants in 1888. So when the Dodgers appeared in 1890, an instant cross-town rivalry was formed. All three teams ended up in California with the former Brooklyn A’s cross the bay from the former New York Giants who were replaced in 1962 by a new team calling themselves The New York Metropolitans (AKA “Mets” for short) in honor of the original Giants’ name.
Although the Mets and Giants never met in post-season play, (until the 2000 playoffs, after the writing of this article) two of the greatest Giant players of all time, Willie Mays and Casey Stengel, both joined the Mets at the end of their careers. However the A’s played their 1880’s replacements, the Dodgers several times in post-season play, including the 1974 World Series in which the A’s won in five games. The (formerly Brooklyn) A’s had defeated the (fomerly NY) Giants replacements the year before, the Mets, in seven games. The Mets played the (formerly Brooklyn) Dodgers in the 1988 playoffs. The Dodgers won, and went on to play the A’s (also formerly of Brooklyn) and beat them in five games. Call it “family feud,” but all of these teams are descendants of New York!
As most baseball fans know, the Big Red Machine, Cincinnati Reds, played the Red Sox in 1975, and Cincinnati won in seven games in spite of Fisk’s famous foul pole homer. But most don’t know that the two teams are brothers. Both teams split off from the Cincinnati Red Stockings a long time ago. The Cinci team moved to Boston in 1871 and weren’t replaced by the Cincinnati Reds until 1875.
In Franchise terms, the Red Sox date back to the creation of the Red Stockings in 1869, practically the Garden of Eden, in terms of baseball history. However they are not the oldest. The Baltimore Orioles, in franchise terms, date back to baseball Genesis itself, 1865, back to the Civil War. (The Civil War was the forerunner of the Yankees/Braves rivalry, for those who are weak in US history. The “Yankees” won that one too!)
How could the Orioles be the oldest of teams when the franchise of that name was just a minor league club until 1952? To understand it, you have to comprehend the principles of baseball evolution. The Boston Browns were formed in 1865, (about the time of Genesis, Chapter One, according to Mythobaseballogists) out of the rib of the Brooklyn Athletics who were Created by God earlier that year. The Browns were driven from the Garden of Baseball Paradise, Boston, and were sent to the cold barren reaches of Milwaukee, intact, in 1876 (or thereabouts). Then they wandered to St. Louis in 1902, and then to Baltimore in 1952, all without a break in continuity, except for the name change to Orioles after 89 years as “The Browns.” They replaced the missing Baltimore Orioles who had become the New York Highlanders in 1903, forerunner of the Yankees.
Of course, new baseball relationships sprung up in the vacuums left behind each “divorce.” You know how multiple divorces make family trees so complicated; the baseball family is no different. The Braves immediately filled the hole in Boston baseball left by the Browns in 1876. A Boston team appeared in 1871 called The Red Sox, but went through various name changes, and with the creation of the American League in 1903, officially became the Red Sox. In that same year, the Browns moved to St. Louis, (to play a clumsy Ginger Rogers to the Cardinals NL Fred Astaire) and the gap in Milwaukee was not filled until the Boston Braves moved to Milwaukee in 1953. To mythobaseballogists this phenomenon is highly reminiscent of the tribal custom where a widow marries the brother of her deceased husband; Milwaukee lost its beloved Boston Browns, and then remarried the Boston Braves as soon as he became available. The Browns ran up a 54 and 100 tab in St. Louis in 1953 then skipped town and became the Orioles and racked up the same bill in Baltimore in 1954. The AL slot in St. Louis, like that in Philadelphia, and the NL slot in Boston, has never been replaced.
But Milwaukee’s tribulations were not over. The Braves walked out and moved to greener pastures, Atlanta, in 1966. The undaunted Milwaukee replaced their pictures on the mantle with those of the American League Seattle Pilots, who became the AL Milwaukee Brewers in 1970. It was not the first time a bride-to-be changed religions for the sake of love! In 1969, baseball had even changed citizenship and moved the first of two teams to Canada, with the birth of the Montreal Expos in 1969. So as you see, baseball has gone through many transfigurations, long before “contraction” was conceived by Milwaukee as a way of getting back at Minnesota.
There are many anti-evolutionists who choose to ignore these hard facts and rely instead on the religious belief that baseball was created in its present form in the year 3000 BC, along with Adam and Eve and Babe Ruth. It is, like Babe Ruth’s “called shot,” an article of faith. Given the evidence I’ve seen, I’d say diplomatically speaking, that baseball did evolve, but that “the hand of God was in it.”
The Family Tree of Baseball Evolution
Boston Browns 1865 Cincinatti Red Stockings 1869 Brooklyn A’s 1865
Boston Red Sox 1871
Milwaukee Browns 1876 Cincinatti Reds 1875 Phila. A’s 1876
Boston Braves 1876
St. Louis Browns 1902 Brooklyn Dodgers 1890
Milwaukee Braves 1953
Baltimore Orioles 1954 K.C. A’s 1955
LA Dodgers 1958
Atlanta Braves 1966
Seattle Pilots 1969 K.C. Royals 1969
Milwaukee Brewers 1970 Oakland A’s 1969
Seattle Mariners 1977
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
New York Metropolitans1883 Baltimore Orioles 1900 Wash. Senators 1885
New York Giants 1888 NY Highlanders 1903
NY Yankees 1909
San Fran. Giants 1958 Minn. Twins 1961
Wash. Senators 1961
New York Mets 1962
Texas Rangers 1971
Note: These teams were only marginally involved in the evolution of baseball:
Houston Colt .45’s formed 1962 became the Houston Astros in 1965; The St. Louis Cards were formed in 1899 and never moved. The Philadelphia Phillies were formed in 1883 and never moved.
The Great Theo-basebological Debate Continues
Evan Pritchard is a professor of comparitive religions, and a baseball enthusiast and sometimes gets confused between the two subjects. He has made pilgrimmages to Fenway Park, the Himalayas, Tiger Stadium, Bear Butte, Wrigley Field, and to Assisi, Italy. By comparing baseball and religion he means no offense to baseball fans.
When I was a young baseball monk back in 1966, I thought that major league baseball teams were fixed reference points in the cosmic order of things like the earth itself, around which the whole universe revolved. God had created baseball on the sixth day to give him something to watch on TV on his day of rest...and that was it. He had set the All Star Game in the firmament,and parted the NL from the AL and night games from day games, right from the beginning. No monkeying around.
I was a Senators fan, and I was sure that George Washington had been a Senators fan as well. Then my 6th grade teacher, Miss Marilyn Simmons, mentioned in passing that the Twins were an offshoot of the Washington Senators. That meant they were a species of Nats Washingtonius, and I was left flattened. When they played each other, who would I cheer for? (Or against!) She explained that the old Senators had left town and a new team reappeared miraculously to take their place. How could they have left? I felt like an adoptee who’s just been told his real parents live in Minneapolis/St.Paul in a geodesic dome, selling scorecards for a living.
About that same time, 1966, the Milwaukee Braves were moving to Atlanta, leaving Milwaukee-ites without a team to root for, to care for and call their own. It was like watching Venus and Mars switch orbits, as far as I was concerned.
Then in 1969, the KC A’s left KC for Oakland, and a new species of team appeared on the baseball horizon, the Royals. Broadcasters let it slip that the A’s were really from Philadelphia. I didn’t know that! It made it somehow okay for them to go to California.
Then the Seattle Pilots moved to Milwaukee and metamorphized into the Brewers in 1970. It was like watching a chimp evolve into a parrot, very confusing.
God was preparing me for the coming holocaust, the advent of the star Wormwood, the Day of Judgement on the corruption in Washington. Ever since Richard Nixon started throwing out the first ball on Opening Days at RFK Stadium, named after his dead rival, there were talks of moving the team. Would the benevolent spirit of baseball abandon the Nation’s Capitol? Impossible. Then one day in 1971, around the time of the Watergate Break-in, Bob Short sold the Senators for a mess of pottage, ie Texas oil money. The name of the Senators was erased from the firmament, and a new team, The Texas Rangers, arose from the desert of central Texas to become one of the dominant teams in baseball, something the Senators were not.
It was the curse of Roosevelt. He came into office in 1933 just as the Senators won their last pennant. He proclaimed the New Deal and the Nats haven’t been close since. It must be his fault. When the Senators moved to Minnesota, they soon became pennant-winners. Texas ends up in first or second every other year. It’s all part of the curse.
One can’t help but note a series of conspiracies connecting the White House with the Washington baseball team. In 1961, the Washington team was stolen from Griffith Stadium, and were smuggled out to Minneapolis, Minnesota. Within two years, Kennedy was dead (assasinated in Texas) and Johnson became President, a Texas oil man. He immediately named as his Vice President, the top man in Minneapolis, Hubert H. Humphrey. It was obviously Johnson’s intention to get Humphrey into the White House so that the center of power would be moved to Minnesota until Texas was ready to take over. It didn’t work.
Humphrey and Johnson parted ways over conflicting feelings about the Vietnam war, and Humphrey’s Democratic support was splintered. Apparently, Johnson decided it was time that Texas begin to take over. Minnesotans were just too liberal.
Those who are erudite students of poli-sci-mytho-baseballogy know that this power struggle was foreshadowed in the fall of 1963 by the struggle between Minnesota and Boston. The Red Sox was, after all, the President’s team, and Carl Yastzremski had every right to expect to win the home run title. Nonetheless, Minnesota’s Harmon Killebrew ended up with more homers, and the Twins ended up 15 games ahead of the Red Sox in the American League. The idealistic Senators were dead last, and so was Texas. Six weeks later, Kennedy was killed in Dallas, and Texas began its ascent in the standings. Meanwhile the Dallas Cowboys were doing great guns against the Redskins. But that’s another story.
The new Senators were sold to Texas after the 1971 season, about the time that Nixon was secretly undermining Humphrey’s Presidential hopes through Watergate and other actions. After presumably fixing the NL race to have his hometown San Francisco Giants win the pennant in 1971, Nixon was re-elected in ‘72, with VP Agnew of Maryland, who had obvious connections with the Baltimore Orioles, the new site of Opening Day games, and host city to the American League Playoffs every year from 1969 to 1974 (with the exception of 1972 itself, that would have been too suspicious!). Agnew even threw out the first ball...in Baltimore! Nixon resigned in ‘74 (following closely on the heels of his hometown Giants star Willie Mays, who retired in ‘73) and within six years we had a Texas oil man as Vice President. That man, a former second baseman, later became President George Herbert Walker Bush, and his son wound up owning a large part of the Texas Rangers. Among poli-sci-mytho-baseballogists, this is easily recognizable as a foreshadowing of things to come: Some day, maybe years down the road, Texas will host our nation’s Capitol, and the Senators can regain their rightful name in Texas. After 1971, the shift of power to Texas must have seemed so imminent, that no one bothered to replace the D.C. team with a new one. After the big move of the U.S. Senate to Texas, and the elimination of the useless District of Columbia, who would root for a “Senators” team on the Anacostia River in mostly-black Southern Maryland?
Texas, still angry over not being allowed succession from the US, may feel it necessary to gradually move the Nation’s Capitol to Texas. It could happen. No wonder God has been trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored as far as Washington is concerned! However, all these behind the scenes power struggles were just a part of a bigger evolutionary scheme. God knows all, and bides His time. Over the years, since that first discovery that baseball has evolved, I have learned of many such evolutionary twists. Having a son has awakened me to many new realities, including some about baseball. Our trip together to Cooperstown confronted me with questions such as, “Who were the Boston Browns?” “Who were the New York Highlanders?” “The Boston Braves?”
These are questions that have baffled many baseball fans before me. One theory is that aliens from Planet X have picked up whole baseball stadiums and moved them to other places, perhaps indicating that these stadiums were placed there by aliens to begin with. This would explain why RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C., The Vet in Philadelphia, Synergy Field in Cincinnati, and old Riverfront Stadium in Pittsburgh, not to mention the Oakland Coluseum, all look like pods from the same mother ship, and not very convivial to human beings, either. How would they know what we like?
My son and I later discovered (with the help of Paul Dickson’s wonderful book, The New Dickson Baseball Dictionary) that about half of the teams now playing are related to one another through a complex evolutionary process of franchise evolution. During our trip to 14 baseball cities, we created a family tree to help us understand the stages of baseball evolution, but even now, the truth boggles my mind. (see chart)
What usually happens is that when a team leaves their city, they either take their name with them, or start with a new name appropriate to the new city. In the first case, they are replaced by a team bearing a new name. In the second case, they are replaced by a new team with the same name. With the Senators, it was by necessity the second case, since they would have otherwise become the Minnesota Senators (which would have then made it obvious that Minnesota Senator Hubert Humphrey was behind it.)
In either case, whenever this happens, one team splits into two, a kind of franchise mitosis. A good example is the Brooklyn Athletics. (The “Who?” you say?) They moved to Philadelphia in 1876, taking their name with them. I’m sure you’ve heard of them! They were replaced by the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1890 (after several evolutionary attempts). Then the Athletics moved in 1955 to Kansas City, again taking their name with them, and were never replaced in Philadelphia, although there is a memorial to all Philadelphia baseball stars of the past on a wall at The Vet in Philadelphia. Then the Athletics moved to Oakland, California in 1969, and were replaced by the Kansas City Royals. To curse them, God made their heads turn green and yellow like canaries, and at one point made their feet turn white. Then he sent them that earthquake in the middle of a World Series. Don’t mess with evolution!
The Brooklyn Dodgers, the A’s replacements from the 1800’s, had by then already moved to California, as had the New York Giants who were their new cross-town rivals. All of this moving and shuffling around leads to some very interesting and confusing relationships, as you can see.
The New York Metropolitans had appeared in 1883 and changed their name to the New York Giants in 1888. So when the Dodgers appeared in 1890, an instant cross-town rivalry was formed. All three teams ended up in California with the former Brooklyn A’s cross the bay from the former New York Giants who were replaced in 1962 by a new team calling themselves The New York Metropolitans (AKA “Mets” for short) in honor of the original Giants’ name.
Although the Mets and Giants never met in post-season play, (until the 2000 playoffs, after the writing of this article) two of the greatest Giant players of all time, Willie Mays and Casey Stengel, both joined the Mets at the end of their careers. However the A’s played their 1880’s replacements, the Dodgers several times in post-season play, including the 1974 World Series in which the A’s won in five games. The (formerly Brooklyn) A’s had defeated the (fomerly NY) Giants replacements the year before, the Mets, in seven games. The Mets played the (formerly Brooklyn) Dodgers in the 1988 playoffs. The Dodgers won, and went on to play the A’s (also formerly of Brooklyn) and beat them in five games. Call it “family feud,” but all of these teams are descendants of New York!
As most baseball fans know, the Big Red Machine, Cincinnati Reds, played the Red Sox in 1975, and Cincinnati won in seven games in spite of Fisk’s famous foul pole homer. But most don’t know that the two teams are brothers. Both teams split off from the Cincinnati Red Stockings a long time ago. The Cinci team moved to Boston in 1871 and weren’t replaced by the Cincinnati Reds until 1875.
In Franchise terms, the Red Sox date back to the creation of the Red Stockings in 1869, practically the Garden of Eden, in terms of baseball history. However they are not the oldest. The Baltimore Orioles, in franchise terms, date back to baseball Genesis itself, 1865, back to the Civil War. (The Civil War was the forerunner of the Yankees/Braves rivalry, for those who are weak in US history. The “Yankees” won that one too!)
How could the Orioles be the oldest of teams when the franchise of that name was just a minor league club until 1952? To understand it, you have to comprehend the principles of baseball evolution. The Boston Browns were formed in 1865, (about the time of Genesis, Chapter One, according to Mythobaseballogists) out of the rib of the Brooklyn Athletics who were Created by God earlier that year. The Browns were driven from the Garden of Baseball Paradise, Boston, and were sent to the cold barren reaches of Milwaukee, intact, in 1876 (or thereabouts). Then they wandered to St. Louis in 1902, and then to Baltimore in 1952, all without a break in continuity, except for the name change to Orioles after 89 years as “The Browns.” They replaced the missing Baltimore Orioles who had become the New York Highlanders in 1903, forerunner of the Yankees.
Of course, new baseball relationships sprung up in the vacuums left behind each “divorce.” You know how multiple divorces make family trees so complicated; the baseball family is no different. The Braves immediately filled the hole in Boston baseball left by the Browns in 1876. A Boston team appeared in 1871 called The Red Sox, but went through various name changes, and with the creation of the American League in 1903, officially became the Red Sox. In that same year, the Browns moved to St. Louis, (to play a clumsy Ginger Rogers to the Cardinals NL Fred Astaire) and the gap in Milwaukee was not filled until the Boston Braves moved to Milwaukee in 1953. To mythobaseballogists this phenomenon is highly reminiscent of the tribal custom where a widow marries the brother of her deceased husband; Milwaukee lost its beloved Boston Browns, and then remarried the Boston Braves as soon as he became available. The Browns ran up a 54 and 100 tab in St. Louis in 1953 then skipped town and became the Orioles and racked up the same bill in Baltimore in 1954. The AL slot in St. Louis, like that in Philadelphia, and the NL slot in Boston, has never been replaced.
But Milwaukee’s tribulations were not over. The Braves walked out and moved to greener pastures, Atlanta, in 1966. The undaunted Milwaukee replaced their pictures on the mantle with those of the American League Seattle Pilots, who became the AL Milwaukee Brewers in 1970. It was not the first time a bride-to-be changed religions for the sake of love! In 1969, baseball had even changed citizenship and moved the first of two teams to Canada, with the birth of the Montreal Expos in 1969. So as you see, baseball has gone through many transfigurations, long before “contraction” was conceived by Milwaukee as a way of getting back at Minnesota.
There are many anti-evolutionists who choose to ignore these hard facts and rely instead on the religious belief that baseball was created in its present form in the year 3000 BC, along with Adam and Eve and Babe Ruth. It is, like Babe Ruth’s “called shot,” an article of faith. Given the evidence I’ve seen, I’d say diplomatically speaking, that baseball did evolve, but that “the hand of God was in it.”
The Family Tree of Baseball Evolution
Boston Browns 1865 Cincinatti Red Stockings 1869 Brooklyn A’s 1865
Boston Red Sox 1871
Milwaukee Browns 1876 Cincinatti Reds 1875 Phila. A’s 1876
Boston Braves 1876
St. Louis Browns 1902 Brooklyn Dodgers 1890
Milwaukee Braves 1953
Baltimore Orioles 1954 K.C. A’s 1955
LA Dodgers 1958
Atlanta Braves 1966
Seattle Pilots 1969 K.C. Royals 1969
Milwaukee Brewers 1970 Oakland A’s 1969
Seattle Mariners 1977
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
New York Metropolitans1883 Baltimore Orioles 1900 Wash. Senators 1885
New York Giants 1888 NY Highlanders 1903
NY Yankees 1909
San Fran. Giants 1958 Minn. Twins 1961
Wash. Senators 1961
New York Mets 1962
Texas Rangers 1971
Note: These teams were only marginally involved in the evolution of baseball:
Houston Colt .45’s formed 1962 became the Houston Astros in 1965; The St. Louis Cards were formed in 1899 and never moved. The Philadelphia Phillies were formed in 1883 and never moved.
posted by evan pritchard | 3:06 PM
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