The Expansion Of Professional Baseball - 1553 Words

How Did the Expansion of Professional Baseball Relate to the Time Period? Perry Wilson Geography I Baseball has evolved from a regional sport in the 1850’s to a national sport today. In this paper I will discuss the expansion of baseball and how the challenges of various time periods relate to the number of teams and their location. There are three main reasons that baseball’s history relates strongly to the geographical theme of location. First, when baseball was an emerging sport in the late 1800’s, most travel was limited to train. If a team was imagined in the west, then it would be a three day train trip to get there just to play a game, and then all the way back. For this reason, all of the original baseball teams were†¦show more content†¦The people living there wanted to enjoy Major League Baseball (MLB), and the cities had the money to support a team, so the National League eventually recognized this opportunity and baseball expanded to the west, covering all of United States. Baseball around the time of the Civil War was based on amateurism and played by club members. As popularity grew, paid players began to sneak in although not openly. Eventually this changed. the CIncinnati Red Stockings were the first openly professional club and used pay to attract the best players. Soon many clubs were â€Å"professional† and pro leagues began to form. There were many leagues at first, the National Association of Professional Baseball Players (1872) which became the national league, the Western League (1893) which became the American League in 1901, the Union Association, and others. But the National League became dominant and signed all the best players. â€Å"Organized baseball had a monopoly, they didn’t want any rival leagues to be formed.† The original teams were in boston, Brooklyn, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Chicago, and St Louis, and this area remained within the reach of overnight train travel. A huge factor for early professional baseball s limited expansion was that teams travelled by train. â€Å"This meant that there could not be any teams very far away from each other, because it would take too long to travel there for an