Major League Baseball
Franchises:
Historical overview of cities,
stadiums, and owners

Main historical phases

The Golden Era

For almost the entire first half of the 20th century, when all seemed right with the world (at least in THIS hemisphere), the geographical distribution of major league baseball teams remained absolutely static. No expansion, no contraction, no relocation. In retrospect, this seems strange because five cities had more than one major league baseball team: New York had three (counting Brooklyn), and Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and St. Louis had two each. It is hard to believe that a medium-size city such as St. Louis could ever have supported two teams, and indeed, the perennially lousy attendance figures of the Browns make one wonder why they didn't relocate many years earlier. These five cities accounted for 11 of the 16 major league franchises, leaving the rest to five other cities. There were solid reasons for this concentration of sports entertainment in the northeast quadrant of the country -- namely, the difficulty of long-distance transportation and the backward economic status of the South -- but this situation could not last forever.

The Fifties

After World War II, it became clear that the nation was changing rapidly, with rapidly growing use of automobiles and passenger airliners. This was also the beginning of a long, historic demographic shift to the south and west, while several older cities in the north were stagnating, and some team owners realized that their home cities could no longer support two teams. The pent-up disequilibrium finally erupted in 1953 when the Boston Braves announced just a few weeks before spring training that they were moving to Milwaukee. Going against prevailing trends, the St. Louis Browns moved EAST and became the Baltimore Orioles in 1954. A year later the Philadelphia Athletics moved to Kansas City. This mass migration culminated in 1958 when the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers loaded up their trucks and headed out to California. For the next four years New York City had only one baseball team: The Yankees!

The Early Sixties

After the five franchise relocations of the 1950s, several other medium-size cities began to demand their own major league franchises. Washington Senators owners Clark Griffith moved his team to Minnesota in 1961, and they became known as the Twins. To compensate the Nation's Capital, a new Senators team was created while a new stadium was being built there. That same year, Los Angeles received an American League franchise known as the Angels. In 1962 two new national league teams were created, the Houston Colt 45s and the New York Mets. Note that two of these five changes were replacements for franchises that left town. For most of the 1960s there were an even 20 major league teams, ten in each league.

The Late Sixties

Given the exhuberant, "go-getter" atmosphere and booming economy of the 1960s, further relocations and expansions were inevitable. In 1965 the Colt 45s changed their name to the Astros as they moved into the space-age Astrodome. In 1966 the Braves moved from Milwaukee to Atlanta, and in 1968 the Athletics -- who were by this time nearly always called the A's -- moved from Kansas City to Oakland at the behest of their flamboyant owner Charlie Finley. (Who had ever heard of Oakland before that?) In 1969 new National League teams were created in San Diego (the Padres) and Montreal (the Expos), the first time the major leagues invaded foreign territory. Also that year, new American League teams were created in Kansas City (the Royals) and Seattle (the Pilots).

The Seventies

The 1970s were a time of economic recession and disillusion in America. The Seattle Pilots went bankrupt after failing to draw sufficient crowds in their debut year of 1969, and after only one year moved to Milwaukee and became the Brewers. In 1972 the (second) Washington Senators team left D.C. and moved to Arlington, Texas (midway between Dallas and Fort Worth) and became the Rangers. Striving to rectify the embarrassment of losing their franchise so quickly in 1970, Seattle built the rain-proof Kingdome to house the new Mariners team in 1977. Also that year, Toronto became the second Canadian city to get a major league baseball team, as the Blue Jays were hatched.

The Nineties

From the late 1970s until the early 1990s baseball generally stagnated, both in terms of number of franchises and overall popularity. With all the financial woe caused by the previous frantic moving from hither to yon, a tacit moratorium was placed on relocations, thus leaving Washington, D.C. out in the cold while the nearby Baltimore Orioles prospered. The sports-crazy city of Denver had long wished for a baseball team, and in 1993 their dreams came true when the Colorado Rockies began playing. Miami got a franchise as well, the Florida Marlins. In both cases the new teams played in football stadiums that were converted to baseball use. Finally, in 1998 the Arizona Diamondbacks began playing in Phoenix and the Tampa Bay Devil Rays (now just the "Rays") began playing in St. Petersburg. The fact that all these teams are identified by state or region, as opposed to the city where they actually play, is a symptom of the growing trend toward public financing of stadiums, which usually necessitates some kind of regional sales or luxury tax. In order to maintain a balanced schedule within each league, with no "left-out" teams, the Milwaukee Brewers switched to the National League in 1998, when the Diamondbacks and Devil Rays began playing. Because of the Brewers, now the NL Central Division has SIX teams, more than any other.

Franchise owners

Few subjects in the world of sports business are murkier than the question of who really owns the team? Everyone knows the names of George Steinbrenner and Ted Turner (who seems to be less active with the Braves since the infamous AOL-Time Warner merger), but for other baseball franchises it is very hard to get solid information. Of course, baseball's exemption from anti-trust statutes insulates teams from normal accounting scrutiny, which is one major reason why cities routinely get blackmailed into bogus stadium subsidies, because it is hard to challenge the franchise owners' claims that they are losing money. Anyway, this table represents a first stab at nailing down the ownership status of each team. It probably contains a few errors, and will be revised and updated in the future. It may be useful to note that Commissioner Selig had a financial interest in the Milwaukee Brewers, which he formally transferred to his daughter when he became the permanent commissioner a few years ago. The Seligs sold the franchise in early 2005.

One must not forget that major league baseball is a business enterprise, and in a capitalist system such as ours, franchise owners are entitled to seek higher profits if they so desire. The difference between normal businesses and baseball franchises is that much, if not most, of the team's total value consists of "goodwill," which is the accountant's term for the nebulous but very real factor that generates ticket sales. Time and time again in baseball history, short-sighted and/or tight-fisted owners have shot themselves in the foot by the mistaken application of business principles to sports. Their myopic focus on the bottom line not only detracts from the quality of the entertainment they provide, it erodes their long-term profitability.

The Federal League, 1914-1915

The Federal League was a bold venture in the days when baseball's future (and the nation's) seemed limitless. Several entrepreneurs took advantage of resentment toward the restrictions on players imposed by the reserve clause, and many American League and National League players signed up with the new league. In two cases, Pittsburgh and Brooklyn, stadiums had recently become available after major league teams vacated them in favor of newer facilities. (These were the boom years of stadium construction, after all.) In another case, Baltimore, a stadium had become vacant when the Orioles relocated to New York (and changed their name to the Highlanders) in 1903. Half of the eight franchises were located in cities that already had major league teams, and the established leagues viewed the upstarts as a dire threat to their existence. The Indianapolis franchise moved to Newark in 1915.

Failing to draw big enough crowds in a saturated sports market, the Federal League folded after two seasons. Nevertheless, it did leave an enduring legacy: the Chicago Whales owner Mr. Weeghman purchased the Cubs as part of the deal with the two established major leagues, and he moved his new team into the Whales' Weeghman Park, which eventually became known as Wrigley Field, one of the last true shrines to the national pastime.

The Continental League (aborted in 1960)

In response to the relocation of the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers to the West Coast in 1958, businessmen in several cities joined to found a third major league: the "Continental League." It was to include teams in New York, Houston, Toronto, Denver, and Minneapolis-St. Paul, and play was supposed to begin in 1960. However, the American and National Leagues quickly foiled the initiative by pledging to expand their rosters to ten teams each, and the whole concept quickly died.

Relocations

During the 20th century, major league franchises relocated to new cities a total of twelve times, and three of the teams (the Browns/Orioles, the Braves, and the Athletics) moved twice. Interestingly, five of the eight teams that relocated only one time changed their names (including both incarnations of the Senators), whereas two of the three teams that moved twice kept their original names. Only one franchise changed its team name twice: the Milwaukee-St. Louis-Baltimore Brewers-Browns-Orioles. In general, the earlier relocations were more successful than the later ones. One lesson is that Milwaukee and Kansas City are good stopping-off points, but find it hard to hold a team permanently! Of these twelve franchise moves, five could be called success stories, based on their teams' performance and financial condition, and the other six were marginal. It's too early to judge in the case of the recent move of the Montreal Expos to become the Washington Nationals, but early indications are very good. This may debunk the widely-held belief that Washington doesn't have a strong enough fan base to support a decent franchise, which is why MLB dragged its heels in approving the relocation of the Expos to D.C. until 2005, several years after it was clear that Washington could support the franchise better than Montreal.

The gray-shaded cells in the table below denote cases when teams moved into relatively new stadiums. In most cases, those stadiums were built "on speculation."

Expansions

At the outset of the 20th century, there were 16 major league franchises, eight in each league. One hundred years later there are a total of 30 franchises, and this would have declined to 28 this year if Baseball Commissioner Allan "Bud" Selig had had his way. (Under the terms of the labor contract reached in August 2002, there will be no contractions for at least four years.) Whereas five cities had multiple teams a century ago, only four do now, if you count Anaheim and Oakland as part of Los Angeles and San Francisco, respectively. (Oakland could reasonably be considered a separate city; Anaheim could not.) Thus, there are 22 other cities with their own teams, vastly outnumbering the present "Big Four." This geographic dispersal of franchises has made it possible for a much larger proportion of the U.S. population to see major league games, but baseball has to compete with alternative forms of entertainment that no one could even dream of at the turn of the last century. Four of the 14 expansions were meant to compensate cities that had lost franchises, so only ten were really "new" cities. What happened to the 14 new franchises that were created along the way? The following table provides a good overall evaluation: Five of the expansions succeeded fairly well, five are marginal, and four are (or were) outright failures. Caveat: No judgment on success or failure is ever definitive; as they say, "Here today, gone tomorrow." Thus, for example, while the Diamondbacks' victory in the 2002 World Series might suggest that the team's massive borrowing paid off, their future financial health depends on high ticket sales, which in turn depend on continued (or resumed) success on the ballfield.