Origins of Baseball, Growth and Daily News

Following the Giants and Dodgers abandoned New York City and moved to California in 1958, the changes in Major League baseball accelerated. In 1961 the original Washington Senators moved to Minneapolis, took the name "Twins," and an alternative team that became called the "Senators II" started up in Washington. The Senators II lost two out of three games just like the initial Senators had done, and after 10 years of perpetuating the "Washington-first in War, first in Peace 2021 LHP, last in the American League," tradition, they moved to Dallas in 1972 and became the Texas Rangers. Another new American League team started-up in Los Angeles in 1961, took the name Angels, played in Wrigley Field-not the one in Chicago, the one in Los Angeles-and in 1965, seeking to identify with the whole state rather than L.A., changed their name to the California Angels. In 1997, after purchase by Disney, seeking to identify with Disneyland, they changed their name to the "Anaheim Angels." In 2005, after being sold by Disney and seeking to spot with the whole Greater Los Angeles Metro Area, they changed their name to the "Los Angeles Angels at Anaheim." In 1962, the National League expanded to ten teams, adding the Houston Colt .45s (after the gun that won the West) and the New York Mets who, inside their first season, lost 120 games--the twentieth century single season record. Cynical New Yorkers, still mourning the increasing loss of the Giants and Dodgers, claimed that "Mets" was a shortening of the medical term for the sudden and rapid spread of a malignant growth. In baseball, just as in the stock market, every decline is interrupted by occasional spirited rallies, which convince the gullible that will soon be well. After losing 737 games inside their first seven seasons and finishing tenth five times and ninth twice, in 1969 the metastasizing Mets became the Miracle Mets. With Tom Seaver and Jerry Koosman pitching, Ed Kranepool and Bud Harrelson in the infield, Cleon Jones and Tommy Agee in the outfield, they won the National League pennant and beat the Brooks Robinson, Frank Robinson, Boog Powell, Jim Palmer, Dave McNally, Mike Cuellar Baltimore Orioles four games to at least one in the World Series. Notwithstanding the Miracle Met, four damaging 1969 events re-accelerated baseball's decline: First, four new teams were added, the Montreal Expos and San Diego Padres in the National League, the Seattle Pilots and Kansas City Royals in the American League. Expansion from sixteen teams to twenty-four in eight years earned more money, but diluted the method of getting top-level players with the addition of two hundred newcomers to the four hundred Major Leaguers. Even though leagues initiated a draft system under which each of the existing teams supplied a listing of players they certainly were willing to have recinded by the four new teams, all of the two hundred newcomers ended on the new teams alongside players the existing teams were willing to sacrifice. The Pilots and Padres each lost 100 ten games in their first year and it became common for six or eight teams to lose ninety or even a hundred games a season. That lowered the general quality of play, create many one-sided games, and compromised the comparability of sixty years of religiously compiled and studied Major League statistics. Again in 1969, the two Major Leagues were divided into eastern and western divisions of six teams each. To find out the league championships and decide who played in the World Series the leagues began holding five game post season playoffs. Purists protested that that would invalidate the whole 162-game season and that several teams in one single division could have better records than the top team in the other division. In place of a World Series between the two best teams, that may cause two second-rate teams sneaking to the World Series. However, the owners, contemplating the additional revenues from two pre-World Series division championships, plus television rights, all at premium prices, pooh-poohed the protests of the purists. The first couple of years the teams with the most effective records happened to win the playoffs, in 1972, although Pittsburgh had a better season-long record, Cincinnati won the playoffs. In 1973, the Mets limped to the top of the National League's eastern division with the fourth best record in the league. In place of a first rate Cincinnati team, which won seventeen more games compared to Mets, playing a first-rate Oakland team, Oakland played a tarnished anti-climax of a World Series against the team with the ninth best record in baseball. The predictions of the purists had come true.