The Amazingly Deep Ken Singleton

He was with the O's when Weaver was skipper and Palmer was king.

interesting article in sports ill a week or two back on them.

would have been an odd clubhouse environment, I think.

You may discover that the northernmost continent was settled from the west.

Oh I may?

Please elaborate.

Well, it was more of a north-to-south movement, but yes, it was first settled from the west.

That is an interesting (maybe not interesting enough to talk about but at least interesting enough to think about) question.

But why would the Dodgers still be in Brooklyn (not interested enough in baseball to figure it out myself)?

Yeah, but that's if you're, like, going by continental history not white folk history.

You probably can't figure it out because it doesn't make a lot of sense.

Suppose the New World was colonized from west to east rather than the other way around. Presumably, the colonists would have been Asian rather than European, since the Europeans wouldn't have gone around the world just to land in California. The Asian colonists, however, would have settled in the same sort of areas that Europeans did in the east: near sources of fresh water and close to harbors fit for ocean-going vessels. So they would have settled in many of the same places that are currently large metropolitan areas: San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, San Diego. Those cities would have been the equivalent of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Charleston.

As the years progressed and the population shifted eastward, other cities would have grown and prospered. If the development of baseball followed the same sort of demographic patterns, however, the professional game would have sprung up in the oldest established population centers first. So instead of the Cincinnati Red Legs and the Brooklyn Atlantics as some of the first professional baseball teams, we would have had the Seattle Red Legs and the Los Angeles Pacifics. The first major league would have had teams from the eight largest cities on the west coast. Rival leagues would then pop up as the years progressed, but the west coast would still be over-represented in the big leagues until the 1950s, when the second teams from some of the smaller two-team cities on the west coast would migrate eastward. So the Seattle Braves would move to Boston, the Portland Browns would move to Baltimore, etc.

If Los Angeles had two teams, there probably wouldn't be any reason for one of them to move -- after all, the LA area has demonstrated that it can support two teams quite well. So, if one of LA's teams was the Dodgers, there'd be no reason for them to move to Brooklyn (which doesn't have a team right now). New York would probably end up with two teams, but they'd be transplants from the west coast (in the same way that the SF area has two teams transplanted from NY and Philadelphia). In sum, far from keeping the Dodgers, Brooklyn would probably never even have landed a major league baseball team if the continent had been colonized from west to east.