THE IMPACT OF EXPANSION
From 1901-1952, the major leagues had had the same teams in the same cities: The Boston Red Sox, New York Yankees, Philadelphia Athletics, Washington Senators, Cleveland Indians, Detroit Tigers, Chicago White Sox and St. Louis Browns in the American League and the Boston Braves, Brooklyn Dodgers, New York Giants, Philadelphia Phillies, Pittsburgh Pirates, Cincinnati Reds, Chicago Cubs and St. Louis Cardinals in the National League. There had been some name changes and stadium changes and even a rival league for two years during World War 1. But there had been no truly major changes in the first half of the 20th Century.
One reason was that the owners of those franchises didn’t want to cut additional pieces of the same pie for other owners. So the number of teams stayed at 16, even though the population of the country had increased from 77 million to 157 million, the barriers to black players had been lowered and the game was starting to bring in players from other countries. In addition, the population shift from the cold Northeast and Midwest to the warm South and West had begun. But the owners didn’t’ want to move their teams out of the northeastern quadrant of the country because they felt that the rate and cost of transportation made scheduling games impossible and bottom lines too uneconomic. For decades St. Louis was both the southernmost and westernmost major league franchise.
But two transportation inventions changed everything. The automobile became not just a useful device for personal mobility but a status symbol. Everyone wanted to have one and they would use them to go to public entertainments instead of public transportation. That was a problem for owners whose teams played in ball parks built in an age when people did use public transportation to get to such events, including a team originally known as the “Trolley Dodgers”:
http://www.ballparksofbaseball.com/past/pictures/ebbets_top.jpg
How would you like to be parked in the middle of one of those lots and have an emergency during a game where you had to get home? The Dodgers were famous for their loyal fans but saw fewer and fewer of them at the ballpark in the post-war years even though that was the period of their greatest success. In 1948 they’d set a franchise record, drawing 1.8 million fans. By 1954, it was barely over a million, an average of 13,254 in a stadium that seated 32,000.
The other invention was commercial airliners and, eventually, the jet plane, which made it possible for teams to go all over the country to play games. The big league’s first reaction was for their secondary teams in shared markets to seek markets of their own. The first move was by the Boston Braves, who had long since lost the battle for fans with the Red Sox, to Milwaukee in 1953. The Braves moved into Milwaukee County Stadium, built on the site of a former stone quarry. It was the first stadium financed with public money and was built specifically to attract a major league team. It was surrounded by tons of parking:
http://sports.mearsonlineauctions.com/ItemImages/000034/93bbbd05-90be-4d1f-9980-66fa631a5bec_lg.jpeg
The Braves drew 281,000 fans in Boston in 1952 and more than 1.8 million in Milwaukee in 1953 to lead the major leagues. The search for greener grass- and more parking was on. Bill Veeck, who had wanted to move to Milwaukee but was refused permission, moved his St. Louis Browns east to Baltimore in 1954. The Philadelphia Athletics moved to Kansas City in 1955. But the big move was in 1957, when both the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants moved all the way to the west coast, Los Angeles and San Francisco. The Washington Senators were making plans to move to Minnesota to become the Twins, which they did in 1961.
It caused other cities to beckon the big leagues. But the owners were not willing to abandon the northern part of the country entirely- it was still where most of the people lived. And they still weren’t willing to expand and share the pie. So they told a lot of cities that were ready for major league baseball “No”. That and the National League’s abandonment of New York City created considerable discontent and discontent produces more change.
This interested the idle Branch Rickey, who had been forced out of New York himself by Walter O’Malley and from his subsequent positon with the Pittsburgh Pirates by health problems and disagreements in 1955. Rickey had already profoundly changed the game twice by inventing the farm system and then integrating the game. He also changed it in lesser but significant ways, (he had the Pirates wearing batting helmets as early as 1952- helmets produced by a company he owned). Now he sensed a chance to change it again. So did a Brooklyn attorney named William Shea.
In November 1958, Shea proposed that a new, third major league be created. A formal announcement of something called the Continental League came on July 27, 1959 with teams in New York, (owned by Mrs. Joan Payson), Toronto, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Denver and Houston. Rickey was named President of the new league and made a publicity tour to promote it, testifying before Congress and appearing on What’s My Line:
Atlanta, Buffalo and Dallas/Fort Worth were added later, with an intent to open for business in 1961.
This forced the hand of the major leagues, who created four expansion teams: a new Washington Senators team, (now the Texas Rangers), an American league team in Los Angeles to be called the Angels, a New York National league franchise to be owned by Mrs. Payson and called the Metropolitans, (they would eventually move into a new stadium named after Mr. Shea), and the Houston Colt 45s, (who later became the Astros).
Shea had started the idea of the new league simply to get a second New York City Franchise and now withdrew his support of the Continental League, which collapsed without a franchise in New York. But it had played its role in history, opening up the major leagues to expansion. They owners realized there was money to be made in charging “expansion fees” and that the increased popularity of the game in all sectors of the country would benefit the sport and everyone in it. Every city that was to be a part of the Continental League eventually got a team in the American or National Leagues, except for Buffalo.
I’ve often wondered why the initial expansion was 1961 in the American League and 1962 in the National League. Reading these two articles on Baseball-reference.com, I get the impression that the leagues were rivals in those days and not just in the All-Star game and World Series, but off the field as well, (now they are just part of “Major League Baseball”: the leagues haven’t even had their own Presidents since 1999: the Commissioner runs both leagues). The NL was actually the first league to decide to expand and set it up for 1962. The AL then decided to get the jump on the NL by expanding for 1961. It was as simple as that: rivalry.
http://www.baseball-reference.com/bullpen/Expansion_of_1961
http://www.baseball-reference.com/bullpen/Expansion_of_1962
I really think the leagues should have split into divisions when they expanded. I don’t like small divisions but nobody should be in 9th or 10th place. But the fact that they expanded in different years prevented that. You couldn’t have an ALCS in 1961 but no NLCS. One wonders what might have happened if they had expanded together and we’d had an extra round of playoffs in the years before 1969. We’ll never know.
It’s been axiomatic over the years that expansion has diluted the talent base in baseball and caused records to be more easily broken, (especially batting records). The problem with this theory is that it assumes the talent base has remained the same. By 1960 our population was up to 180 million people. By the second expansion in 1969, it was 202 million. The third expansion came in 1977, when we were at 220 million, the fourth in 1993 with 257 million people and the last in 1998 with 270 million. Baseball increased from 16 to 30 teams while the country was increasing from 180 to 270 million. And the use of international players, mostly from Latin America and the Caribbean more than made up the small difference.
I can’t imagine that the quality of training was any worse over that time. It’s often alleged that players spend less time in the minor leagues since expansion and therefore they don’t learn the game as well. Bill James did a simple study on this. He has all the “Who’s Who in Baseball” publications since they started, (100 years ago) and he looked at the major league regulars and how many years they played in the minors before becoming major league regulars: it’s remained three throughout baseball history, with the exception of the war years and the expansion years. In both cases young prospects and career minor leaguers got a shot at the big leagues, especially on the expansion teams. But the people running those teams had gotten their training with established teams and used the same systems and judgments for running their farm systems they had learned from the other clubs. The average years in the minors quickly returned to historical norms. What there used to be was far more minor leaguers: before television eroded the minors and the major league teams completed their take-over, there were many more minor leagues and minor league teams. But the major league prospects in those leagues didn’t spend any more time there than they do now.
What caused people to think the game was being diluted was that offensive stats tended to rise in expansion years. I remember my brother and I collecting baseball cards in the 60’s and noticing that everybody in the American League seemed to have their best year in 1961 and everybody in the National League seemed to have their best season in 1962.We couldn’t figure it out until we realized that those were the years those leagues expanded. My theory is that it takes longer to figure to figure out who the good pitchers are than the good hitters, among the new players who get their shot in an expansion year.
The big thing that happened, of course was that Roger Maris broke Babe Ruth’s home run record, an act of hubris that so infuriated Ruth’s old pal, (and the ghost writer of his autobiography), Commissioner Ford Frick, that Frick ordered that the mound be raised and the strike zone extended to make it hard for hitters to break famous records in this “diluted” era, (this took effect in 1963). He also ordered than an asterisk be placed next to any record set in a 162 game season. The result was what has been called “the second dead ball era”, a period when pitchers strangled offense just as baseball’s supremacy in American sport was being challenged by football.
Let’s take a look at the statistical impact of expansion. I’ll look at the two years prior to each expansion, the expansion year and the two years after expansion. The numbers I will look at is the league’s composite batting average and slugging percentage and then the average runs per team for 162 games and the average number of home runs per team for 162 games.
American League, 1959-1963
1959 .253BA .384SP 707runs 143HR
1960 .255BA .388SP 711runs 143HR
1961 .256BA .395SP 733runs 153HR
1962 .255BA .394SP 707runs 155HR
1963 .247BA .380SP 662runs 149HR
Expansion didn’t make batting averages go up at all. Home runs and slugging percentages went up but not tremendously. Frick’s new mound and strike zone more than negated any impact of expansion.
National League , 1960-1964
1960 .255BA .388SP 687runs 136HR
1961 .262BA .405SP 733runs 157HR
1962 .261BA .393SP 726runs 145HR
1963 .245BA .364SP 617runs 121HR
1964 .254BA .374SP 650runs 121HR
Interesting. The NL’s pre-expansion year, (1961), was actually a better offensive year than their expansion year, (1962). Of course 1961 was the AL’s expansion year but the leagues had their own internal expansion drafts: no NL teams wound up on the Senators or Angels and no AL players wound up on the Mets or the Astros. It’s also interesting that batting averages went up went up in 1964 from 1963, the first year of Frick’s new mound and strike zone. But home runs did not.
American League 1967-1971
1967 .236BA .351SP 599runs 120HR
1968 .230BA .339SP 553runs 110HR
1969 .246BA .369SP 663runs 137HR
1970 .250BA .379SP 675runs 145HR
1971 .247BA .364SP 627runs 124HR
National League 1967-1971
1967 .249BA .363SP 622runs 110HR
1968 .243BA .341SP 558runs 89HR
1969 .250BA .369SP 657runs 122HR
1970 .258BA .392SP 732runs 140HR
1971 .252BA .366SP 633runs 115HR
This time both leagues expanded simultaneously and split into two divisions. Also, new commissioner Bowie Kuhn changed the mound and strike zone back to what they had been. Both teams had a jump in both batting average and power and actually got a little better in 1970. But then the numbers lid back down again. The numbers till weren’t back to 1950’s levels, probably because of all the new stadiums with regular dimensions.
American League 1975-1979
1975 .258BA .379SP 697runs 123HR
1976 .256BA .361SP 649runs 94HR
1977 .266BA .405SP 734runs 144HR
1978 .261BA .385SP 681runs 120HR
1979 .270BA .408SP 756runs 144HR
The American league expanded because Seattle had been promised a team after the failed experiment with the Seattle Pilots in 1969, (who became the Milwaukee Brewers the next year). They added the Toronto Blue Jays, (after thinking about a third attempt at a Washington Senators team), because scheduling is easier with an even number of teams. Again the expansion draft was strictly internal: only AL players were drafted. So despite George Foster’s amazing year, (52 homers, 149 RBIs), that was not the product of expansion. But Rod Carew’s amazing year, (hitting .388) might have been. It’s interesting that the numbers went down in the first post expansion year, then up- slightly higher than the expansion year- in the following season, (1979).
National League 1991-1995
1991 .250BA .373SP 664runs 119HR
1992 .252BA .368SP 628runs 105HR
1993 .264BA .399SP 727runs 140HR
1994 .267BA .415SP 749runs 155HR
1995 .263BA .408SP 750runs 154HR
The National league finally decided to increase its membership to be equal to the American League. The numbers went up with expansion but went up again the following year. It didn’t go back down. See below for my theory as to why.
American League 1996-2000
1996 .277BA .445SP 873runs 196HR
1997 .271BA .428SP 799runs 177HR
1998 .271BA .432SP 812runs 178HR
1999 .275BA .439SP 839runs 188HR
2000 .276BA .443SP 858runs 192HR
National League 1996-2000
1996 .262BA .408SP 759runs 159HR
1997 .263BA .410SP 746runs 154HR
1998 .262BA .410SP 745runs 160HR
1999 .268BA .429SP 811runs 181HR
2000 .266BA .432SP 811runs 188HR
The latest expansion had no discernable impact on the numbers at all. The American League’s best year in this period was 1996, the National League’s 2000. My strong feeling is that the owners knew the 1994 strike was coming because they were forcing it. And they knew the impact of a strike after so many labor disputes over the previous generation would be very negative so they juiced the ball by tightening the laces beyond anything they’d ever done before. They wanted records to be set to keep or bring back the public’s interest after the strike. The impact of this overwhelmed whatever impact expansion might have had.
And that’s the point. Baseball since 1961 has been impacted by greater forces than expansion, suggesting that any dilution of talent has been minimal, if it ever really happened at all.
