NCAA FB conferences split in 2 to add a championship game, mainly for extra cash. Champ game is played at a neutral site except the smaller leagues sometimes allow the best record team to host, Mountain West does that.
Not at all. Beginning in 1969 when the split into East and West division, the Atlanta Braves and the Cincinnati Reds were in the West while the Chicago Cuibs and St. Louis Cardinals were in the East. They could have made it geographical by swapping those two.
If you think that was weird, consider that originally, when the NL decided to expand to 12 teams (they added San Diego and Montreal in 1969) their intended to have no divisions at all. The American League, which had first expanded to 12 teams in part to get Congress not to do bad things to them (long story) was committed to the idea of having two divisions and a playoff round, but the NL wanted to stay with the “everyone in one division” thing because it wasn’t traditional. They believed the public would hate it. The AL, conversely, believed no one was gonna buy tickets to see a team in 12th place. Some people floated the idea of splitting everyone up into three 8-team leagues. It is odd to think of this now, but at the time the AL and NL were VERY independent of one another, with separate presidents and everything, to an extent they are not today (and no major sports league today has any equivalent.)
Anyway, the NL owners were cajoled into going to divisions but then there was a huge fight over how to split them up; in fact, they resisted calling them “East” and “West” like the American League was planning to do. The Mets wanted to be in a division with the Dodgers and Giants, to leverage the rivalry against the old New York teams who, remember, were only twelve years removed from Brooklyn and Manhattan. The Dodgers hated the Padres and didn’t want anything to do with them because they didn’t want to share Southern California with another NL team. The Phillies and Pirates mostly just wanted to be in the same division with each other.
The Cardinals and Cubs’ primary concern was, like the Pennsylvania teams, to be in the same division. So apparently, the Mets, because they continued to put up a huge fuss, were given the concession of being in a division with the Cardinals, then the NL’s premiere team, and Cubs; no one was willing to give them the insanity of being in a division with the Giants and Dodgers. The Cardinals and Cubs, who insisted on being together, swung East, and the Reds and Braves got jobbed.
Oh, Charlie Finley… I wanted to add one thing. Shyster though he was, it was Finley who built the superpower the A’s became. They were a joke franchise when he bought them and existed to basically trade good players to the Yankees. Finley invested a lot of time andmoney in scouting and minor league development, and my God what a team they built; Reggie Jackson, Sal Bando, Catfish Hunter, Vida Blue, Joe Rudi and a dozen others. He was his own GM, and he built that.
Uh uh. Nope. Nope. Nope.
You ain’t leaving it there. Story. Now. Or I report you for trolling.
Read here in particular about the KC Royals and Seattle Pilots.
WEll, sure, okay.
After the 1967 season Charlie Finley moved the A’s from Kansas City, where they had had an absolutely miserable run, to Oakland. (Finley was not the owner who moves the A’s from Philly to KC; he bought the team after that happened.)
It’s quite impossible for me to describe Charlie Finley in terms that have any relation to anything that exists today. Finley was a businessman but maybe half a step short of being an outright grifter. He made his money in group insurance but his practices were quite something; sometimes he would go for a drive with a client, go to the nicest part of town, point at the best mansion and say it was his but that he was out of doors because it was being worked on. Finley tried to buy any number of MLB teams but the owners distrusted him. There really isn’t anyone like him now; today, pretty much all MLB owners are giant corporations or billionares who keep their nose out of the team. Finley was a cheap, weird PR man totally unencumbered by scruples in a time when MLB was a cheaper, less corporate enterprise. He was like George Steinbrenner but in many ways worse.
He ended up getting the A’s kind of by default; as I recall, their owner died. Various buyers had sought the A’s intended to move them but Finley promised to keep them in KC so the city hailed him as a saviour. He immediately became MLB’s wildest, most colordul and most utterly batshit owner. He made a mule the team mascot, named the mule after himself, and brought it to social events and had it walk around the field before games. He pulled in the right field fence to like 260 feet to imitate Yankee Stadium and when MLB made him move it back he painted a line on the field wheere it had been and ordered the announcer to say “That ball would have been a home run in New York” every time a ball went over it. He gave the team its wild green and gold color scheme. He held every conceivable kind of promotion you can imagine. He installed fans to blow dirt off home plate, had a machine to pop up out of the ground and hand new baseball to the ump, started the thing where a car brings relief pitchers to the mound. He did stunt things in game too, like having Bert Campaneris play every position in one game.
Despite his promise to keep the A’s in KC, Finley began more or less immediately to bitch about KC’s stadium and look at moving. Practically every city in America was a candidate at some point. He actually decided to move to Oakland a few years before he did but the league refused to let him move. But after 1967 it was clearly going to happen.
Well, Stuart Symington, senator from Missouri, was pissed. I dunno what his personal problem was, but he started talking about reviewing baseball’s antitrust exemption, so the American LEague decided to cut off that talk, at least from KC, by expanding. And so the Royals were born, along with, to balance it out, the Seattle Pilots.
Of course, lawsuits and whatnot continued, because the Seattle Pilots only lasted on year there before a guy named Bud Selig took them to Milwaukee to become the Brewers (this replacing Selig’s beloved Braves, who had decamped from Milwaukee not long before.) Seattle sued the AL, and that suit dragged on for years and weas finally settled by… expanding again, adding the Seattle Mariners and the Toronto Blue Jays, partly to balance it out but also because there was an excellent chance TORONTO would sue, too.
You see, Toronto expected to get their own team through a move… the Giants. Toronto’s government had been pursuing a baseball team with single minded madness ever since Montreal got one, and big corporations were all in. The money was there, the stadium was there (well, it was a dump, but whaddya gonna do) but no team. Guess who had the lowest attendance in MLB and was looking to sell? The Giants. They were a wreck. MLB approved the sale and move. But the very week that sale was made George Moscone became mayor of SF, and he intended for the Giants to stay. SF sued, got an injunction, and convinced Bob Lurie to buy the team. How they got the existing owner to accept a lower bid I really don’t know.
The Toronto group had signed an agreement, so they were PISSED. Lawyers were summoned for battle. So the AL fixed both problems with the Mariner-Blue Jay expansion of 1977.
Thank you! The Wiki article (which I had already read) was factual and informative. Your explanation was factual and informative, but also entertaining!
Dodgers did not really want to go to LA , they wanted a better stadium in Brooklyn. NYC said they would build a stadium in Queens but Dodgers said no and off they went to LA. the people in LA who made a bid for the team to move were shocked Dodgers agreed to move. Giants went to SF same year so that teams making the trip west could play 2 teams.