A bit about fandom

First, the spiffy graphic that started this...
This brought to mind one of my pet gripes; the malalignment of the divisons in major league baseball. The numbers are even and it should be rather simple. Thirty teams in two 15-team leagues playing in three five-team divisions each. Not for the folks at MLB. Instead of that clean, simple arrangement, even the very foundations are skewed.

Instead, we now have 16 teams in the National League and 14 in the American. You would think that with two rounds of expansion that could have been corrected but there was a fly in the ointment. It all revolves around Milwaukee.

The team now known as the Milwaukee Brewers of the National League began life as the Portland Pilots of the American League. The first years in there new home, the team remained a part of the American League West. During that time, a rivalry with the neighboring Chicago White Sox was beginning to blossom with fan trips to the opposing park and the like. It promised to become the Pale Hose' equivalent of the Cubs-Cardinals traditional animosity.

Enter Bud Selig, owner of the Brewers, who is now the head of Major League Baseball, a move which neccesitated divesting himself of the franchise. He was the one who insisted on moving the Brewers into the National League, in part to placate the disconcerted and abandoned the long-time Milwaukee Braves fans following the move of that team to Atlanta. As an aside, the Braves themselves were fairly recent arrivals in the midwest, having started life as the Boston Braves.

As a result, the National League has two five-team divisions and the Brewers' six-team division while the American League has two five-team divisions and one four-team division. Throw interleague play on top of the need for fairness and you have a scheduling nightmare. The solution, however, is quite simple.

Return the Brewers to the American League Central divison and move Kansas City the now under-sized American League West to join their heartland brothers the Texas Rangers, planting the seeds of a natural rivalry.

This rant could used a lot of documentation and I bet wiki would have been a great help; perhaps on a later day.

I was thinking of going on about the unique situation of having two professional teams in a town but I will save that for later as well.