I take vitamins and supplements every day, along with aspirin and Aleve. Apparently, they help me face each day, faithful in the knowledge that my inner body is getting most of the vital chemical ingredients necessary to function at a relatively normal level. I say apparently, because I haven't NOT taken these pills and capsules for a very long time. What would happen if I quit? Maybe nothing much, except I'd save about a hundred bucks a month. Maybe I'd suddenly, or possible gradually, start getting un-healthy. Who knows, except that I'm probably going to continue, unwilling to risk the chance that the stuff is actually helping.
Sorry, what this verbal exercise is really going to be about, is Baseball, not my personal health regimen. Mostly Major League Baseball, and mainly my two favorite teams, the Rockies and the Yankees.
I've been a diehard Yankee fan since the early-mid 50's, growing up here in Colorado when the Denver Bears were a AAA farm team of the Yankees. The Golden Age of baseball. In 1953, there were 8 American League and 8 National League teams in the Major Leagues. That year, the Boston Braves had relocated to Milwaukee, which had been without a team since 1902, when one of the charter American League franchises, the original Milwaukee Brewers, moved to St. Louis to become the St. Louis Browns. The Browns floundered in St. Louis for over fifty years as the red-headed step-child to the dominant Cardinals, until the franchise moved to Baltimore in 1954 to become the Orioles. The American League Champions of 1953 were the New York Yankees, while the Brooklyn Dodgers won the National League pennant. The Yankees won the 1953 World Series over the Dodgers, four games to two, for their unprecedented fifth consecutive World Championship, and sixteenth overall. Billy Martin was the World Series MVP with 12 hits in the Series, including the walk-off single in the bottom of the ninth of the sixth game. (When did we start calling them walk-offs? I think probably one of those things brought into our lexicon by ESPN.)
The American League also contained the Washington Senators, one of the original eight. The American League voted to expand for the 1961 season and awarded a franchise to the city of Minneapolis. The Griffith family, owners of the Senators, requested that the Senators be allowed to move to the Twin Cities, and let Washington, DC have the expansion team, which became the expansion Washington Senators. This team suffered through many years of mediocrity and lagging attendance, so they were granted their request to move to the Dallas - Ft. Worth area to become the Texas Rangers in 1972. The Philadelphia Athletics were also a charter member of the American League in 1901. Eventually, the Athletics moved to Kansas City in 1955, then owner Charley Finley moved the franchise to Oakland in 1968.
The National League was made up of: the aforementioned Brooklyn Dodgers (moved to Los Angeles in 1958), the Milwaukee Braves (moved to Atlanta in 1966), the Phillies, the Cardinals, the New York Giants (moved to San Francisco in 1958), the Cincinnati Reds, the Chicago Cubs and the Pittsburgh Pirates.
Expansion over the years has swelled the Major Leagues to 30 teams, fourteen in the American League and sixteen in the National League. The first spurt from the original 16 teams came in 1961 when the Angels of Los Angeles and the Senators of Washington, DC were added to the American League. In 1962, the Metropolitans of New York and the Colt 45's of Houston were enfranchised in the National League. In 1969, the Montreal Expos and San Diego Padres joined the NL, and the Kansas City Royals and Seattle Pilots were added to the AL. The Pilots lasted only one year, were bought by a car dealer named Bud Selig and moved to Milwaukee in 1970. In 1977 the American League expanded once again, adding the Seattle Mariners and the Toronto Blue Jays. In 1993, the Colorado Rockies and Florida Marlins joined the National League. The most recent expansion wave took place in 1998, when the Arizona Diamondbacks and the Tampa Bay Devil Rays were added to the National and American Leagues, respectively. That should be 15 teams in each league, but in 1998, the Milwaukee Brewers agreed to switch to the National League so that the schedule-makers could keep an even number of teams in each league.
Sorry again. I meant to talk about actual baseball in this first blog, but I got carried away by my research, and if any of you know me or read my other blog, you know that I have a tendency to wander, meander, percolate, extravagate, ramble.........well you get the idea. It's been interesting to me to follow the growth of baseball in my lifetime. And now that the season is in full swing (unlike the Rockies' bats lately), I will be sharing more baseball insights and opinions in the weeks to come. And, if you're like me and my family, I need baseball more than I need my vitamins. Please stay tuned to more musings from the mind of a deteriorating lunatic.
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