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This Day In Sports…February 2, 1876:
Baseball’s National League is born in a meeting at the Grand Central Hotel in New York City. There would be eight teams—in Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, Hartford, Louisville, New York, Philadelphia and St. Louis. The American League was formed 25 years later, in 1901. They were originally rival organizations, but two years later they agreed to consider each other “major” leagues, leading to the first World Series, played in 1903
The only two NL clubs to operate continuously since 1876 have been the Chicago Cubs and the Boston Braves, and only the Cubs have stayed in the same city all the way through. Ironically, the Cubs were first known as the “Chicago White Stockings” and the Braves as the “Boston Red Stockings,” unrelated to the White Sox and Red Sox of the modern era. The first game in National League history was played in Philadelphia on April 22, 1876, with the Philadelphia Athletics (unrelated to the Oakland A’s of today) beating Boston 6-5.
There was a lot of franchise churn in the late 1800s, but by the turn of the century, membership in the NL had stabilized. Not a single franchise changed cities until 1953, when the Boston Braves moved to Milwaukee. The seismic relocation came in 1958, when the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers uprooted from the Big Apple and took up residence in San Francisco and Los Angeles, respectively.
The first expansion in the National League was in 1962, when the New York Mets and Houston Colt 45s were born. The Colt 45s, of course, are now the Astros, and they’re now in the American League. The San Diego Padres and the Montreal Expos (now the Astros) were added to the NL in 1969, the Colorado Rockies and Florida (now Miami) Marlins joined in 1993, and the Arizona Diamondbacks were formed in 1998.
It’s no secret that Major League Baseball would like to expand by one franchise in each league, giving it a total of 32 teams, same as the NFL and NHL (the NBA, like MLB, has 30). Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred has mentioned a number of cities as expansion candidates: Charlotte, Las Vegas, Montreal, Nashville, Portland and Vancouver, BC. One or two of those cities could pick up the Oakland A’s or Tampa Bay Rays if those franchises can’t get new stadium deals done. Oakland is further away from one than Tampa.
(Tom Scott hosts the Scott Slant segment during the football season on KTVB’s Sunday Sports Extra. He also anchors four sports segments each weekday on 95.3 FM KTIK and one on News/Talk KBOI. His Scott Slant column runs every Wednesday.)
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