What is the strongest franchise in the history of baseball?   Which baseball team, among the 30, has the richest history and tradition?

            The answer to this question is so obvious that it seems silly to pose the question, and we ordinarily never would.   As the sun blinds us to the other stars, the dominance of the Yankees prevents us from even seeing a list of questions that we might otherwise debate.   Who has a stronger history:  the Phillies or the Cubs?   The Pirates or the Twins?   The Dodgers or the Cardinals?   Which team has the worst or least history and tradition?   How do we know?   How do we measure this?   How do we decide what constitutes a strong history and tradition?  What is relevant to the debate?

            I have developed a method to frame these debates—a method which compares the historical strength of each franchise to each other franchise, and rates the 30 franchises 1 through 35; that is not a typo, but I will explain later.   I’ll start my explanation with the Houston Astros, because the Astros’ history is straightforward.

Part I—The Astros and the Essentials of the Method

            The Houston Astros were created in 1962, and it might be said that prior to that time they had absolutely no history or tradition.    Once they began to play games, of course, a history and tradition began to develop, but how do we measure that?

            It is the operating principle of my analysis that previous history decays in baseball at a rate of 3% per season, and new history develops at the same rate—in other words, the “strength” of each franchise’s history is based 3% on what happened last year, and 97% on what happened in all previous years.

            It is not clear that this is absolutely the right ratio.   It is clear, however, that the ratio has to be in that area.   Suppose that we said that the ratio was 80-20.    If the strength of a franchise was based 20% on what happened last year, 80% on what happened before last year, then it would be based 89% on the last ten years, only 11% on what happened more than ten years ago.    This would lead to the conclusion, for example, that the Arizona Diamondbacks had a stronger and richer tradition than the Pittsburgh Pirates, that the Florida Marlins had a stronger and richer history than the Los Angeles Dodgers.   Obviously you would reject those conclusions, and so obviously this cannot be the right ratio.

            If the ratio was 90-10—that is, if each season as it occurred was 10% of the organization’s history—we would still have the same problem.   65% of the strength and history of an organization would be based on what has happened in the last ten years, and 88% on what has happened in the last twenty years.   Clearly, that’s still too much emphasis on recent history.   It places the Colorado Rockies and the Detroit Tigers on more or less an even footing.

            On the other hand, if the ratio was 99 to 1, then history would decay so slowly that it was hardly decaying at all.  At a decay rate of 1%, what happened in 1980 would be 75% as relevant, in evaluating the strength of each franchise, as what happened in 2009.   That doesn’t match the way we see things, either.   Nobody thinks of the Kansas City Royals as a thriving franchise because they were in the World Series in 1980.

            A 3% decay rate means

            a)  that 27% of the strength of the franchise is based on what has happened in the last ten years,

            b)  that 46% is based on the last twenty years, but

            c)  that what happened last season is two-and-half times more relevant to the debate than what happened 30 years ago.

            Not saying that 3% is absolutely the right answer; maybe you could work with 2½%, or 4%, or 5% or 2%.   It has to be somewhere in that area, and I felt that 3% was the best choice.

            What do teams do that builds tradition? 

            They win games, of course.   How much “history” and “tradition” an organization carries forward is a remnant of past successes.    As we have decided that it is a 3% remnant, then, each organization’s “historical strength” is:

            3% of last year’s wins,

            plus 97% of whatever it was the previous year.

            That’s formula one; we’ll build on it through several generations, but that’s the starting point.

            The Houston Astros, in their first season in 1962, won 64 games.   Three percent of 64 is 1.92.   The post-1962 historical strength of the Houston Astros, then, would be 1.92.

            Except, of course, that they weren’t the Astros then, they were the “Colt .45s”, then the Colts, then the Astros, but we’re not going to worry about that; that’s a pretty minor change.  We credit them with +1.92 for wins, but what about the losses?   Or are we going to treat 64-98 the same as 64-90, which would be a 154-game record, or 64-50, which would be a strike-shortened season type of record?

            History is built on wins, but we can’t totally ignore losses, either.   Each team’s “historical strength”, then, is

            .03 times their wins,

            minus .01 times their losses,

            plus .97 times whatever it was after the previous season.

            For the Houston team after the 1962 season, that’s .03 * 64, which is 1.92, minus .01 * 96, which is 0.96, making 0.96.    This chart tracks the historic strength of the Houston franchise from 1962 to 1969:

            “HSOF” standing for “Historic Strength of Franchise”, and not, as is widely believed, “Houston stinks of Fish” or “Houston Seems Overly Friendly” or “Help Stamp Out Forest Fires.”    None of that.   We have to call these numbers something, and so we are going to call them “Stakes”; the strength of the Houston organization in 1969 was at 8.4 stakes—increasing, in their infancy, at a near-constant rate of one stake per year.

            This chart tracks the development of the strength of the Astros franchise from 1962 to 2009:

II—The Angels and the World Series Championship

            The Astros’ stakes, you will note, have gone only up and up; they have never gone down.   However, it is fairly apparent that the strength of a franchise can go down.   Are the Pirates as strong a franchise now as they were in 1992?    Are the Reds as strong as they were in 1976?   Of course they are not.

            Franchise strength goes generally up, and in particular it goes generally up through the first 40 or 50 years of a franchise’s history, but eventually it levels off, and it can go down.   The Angels, like the Astros, had a “clean start”, but one year earlier.   This is the Angels’ franchise strength, since their first year in 1961:

            The Angels’ tradition—which is similar in value to the Astros’—has also gone only up.   However, there are two things here which are notable.   One is that the Angels’ number did go down just a tiny bit in 1994, when a labor strike shortened the season and the Angels finished last in their division with a 47-68 record.

            The Angels, however, have done something that the Astros never have, and something that is very relevant to our discussion.   They won a World Series.   When a team wins a World Series, that’s a big deal for the history of the franchise.   Those are the years that are remembered, the years that are significant for the franchise—1968 and 1984, for the Tigers, and 1987 and 1991, for the Twins, and 1985 for the Royals.   Those years contribute much more than proportionately to the history and tradition of the franchise.   How do we recognize this in our process?

            The Angels won their only World Series in 2002.   What we do is, we just add five stakes to the strength of the franchise at that time.

            If you look at the Angels, they’re going up every year, but they’re going up by 2/10^ths, 8/10ths, or 1.00 in a good year.   In 2002 their number goes up by 6.28.   That’s because of the World Series.

III.  The Expansion Teams

            What I mean by saying that the Angels and Astros had a “clean start” is that these franchises started from zero.    They didn’t inherit their franchise from another city, like the Braves or the Rangers, nor did they pick up the discarded legacy of another team, like the Brewers in Milwaukee or the Royals in Kansas City.   Of the fourteen expansion franchises, there are nine which had a Clean Start and have not re-located:

            Among these nine expansion franchises, of course, the richest histories belong to the earlier expansions.   This chart compares the Historical Strength of the nine expansion franchises which had clean starts and have not relocated:

            The Marlins, having won two World Championships in seventeen seasons, are far ahead of where either the Angels or the Astros were after their first seventeen seasons, while the Blue Jays—who also won two World Series in their first seventeen seasons—have moved ahead of the Padres despite the Padres’ eight-year head start.

IV. The Sustenance Number

            All of these are still “young” franchises, and all of them completed their 2009 seasons at their all-time high-stakes mark.  However, eventually these organizations will “mature”, and reach a point where their number goes down almost as often as it goes up.   What is that point?

            The number of games that a team must win to increase their stakes could be called the “Sustenance Number”, and this, of course, varies with the strength of the franchise.    The Rays’ are at 11.86, so what they will “lose” in 2010, due to the natural decay of their history, is 3% of this, or .3558 stakes.    Their number will go up, then, if their wins, times .03, exceeds their losses, times .01, by .3558 or more.

            When you work the math, you find that the Rays will lose ground in 2010 if they finish 49-113, but will gain ground—gain stakes—if they finish 50-112 or better.    Early in a team’s history, a team’s stakes will go up unless the team plays very, very poorly.   But after a half-century, the Astros and Angels have not yet reached the point at which they have to play .500 baseball to improve their numbers:

            But consider. ..well, the Chicago Cubs.   The Cubs also have a “Clean Start” in our data.   Going back to 1876, they started from zero and built up.

            Through the 1890s, although the Cubs were not as dominant in the 1890s as they had been in the 1880s, their stakes continued to build:

            In the 1900s, of course, the Cubs had a fantastic decade, winning very large numbers of games for many years in a row, and winning the World Series in 1907 and 1908.   Throughout most of this era, the Cubs were the dominant franchise in baseball:

            In 1901 the Cubs had a bad year (53-86), and the strength of the franchise waned just a tiny bit, but the later years were fantastic, and the Cubs were in 1909 essentially where the Angels are today.

            The next decade was a “flat” decade.    The Cubs won 104 games in 1910, 90+ in 1911 and 1912.  They were over .500 in 1913 and 1914.   In 1915, for the first time since 1902, the Cubs had a losing record.   In 1916 they were even worse—but in 1918 they rallied and were back in the World Series, although they lost:

            I am highlighting the “new highs”.   In 1926 the Cubs brought in Joe McCarthy.   McCarthy built a powerhouse offense, and the Cubs won 91 games in 1928, and 98 in 1929:

            The Cubs coasted through the 1930s, but they remained one of the strongest teams in baseball, and one of the strongest teams of baseball history up to that point.   Led by Gabby Hartnett, Billy Herman and Stan Hack, the Cubs won the National League in 1932, 1935 and 1938.   The Cubs finished at least 14 games over .500 every year from 1927 to 1939, and the historic strength of the franchise went up every year:

            From 1940 to 1944, however, the Cubs had losing records.   The other teams had built farm systems; the Cubs had refused to do so.   The other parks put in lights and started playing night games; the Cubs refused.   In 1945, in the chaos of the war years, the Cubs were able to have a good year.   The other teams began to sign black players; the Cubs were slow to get there.   Gradually the Cubs were overwhelmed by the Dodgers, the Cardinals and the Giants.    After the war the Phillies and the Boston Braves began to invest money to make them competitive with the Cardinals and Dodgers, but the Cubs did not.   The Cubs and Pirates dropped to the bottom of the National League:

            The Cubs, during the 1940s, did not meet their Sustenance numbers—nor in the 1950s, either, nor in the first half of the 1960s.   The Cubs’ high-stakes mark in 1939 remains, to this day, the high-stakes mark in the history of the franchise.   They’ve been up; they’ve been down—but the Cubs have been drifting for 70 years:

            Which actually is not the longest “drift” of any franchise.   It’s the second-longest. 

            The Cubs in recent years have not been a bad team.    They’ve been competitive, winning 88 games or more in 1998, 2001, 2003, 2004, and 2008.  Where the Cubs are right now is the strongest place they have been in more than 50 years—but still a substantial distance from their greatness of many years ago.   Their faded glory—fading at a rate of 3% per season.  

V.  The Theory of Historical Property

            I am creating here a whole lot of fairly arbitrary and perhaps meaningless numbers to make practical comparisons possible in place of vague intuitions.  But I am also—I hope—doing something a little bit more interesting.   I am proposing here the theory that, as there is intellectual property which is created by one’s ideas, there is also historical property, or what we could also call Historical Capital.   Historical Property is created by one’s history and, more significantly, by one’s accomplishments.   All of the things you do or experience are a part of your historical property—that girl you had a crush on in high school, and your college roommate, and your second-grade teacher, and that boss you had for your summer job your first year out of college who looked like he was sixteen years old and snarled at everyone to assert his authority and then would try to cozy up to you and be your off-hours buddy.   The size of your historical property is proportional to your age, but the strength of your historical property is proportional to your accomplishments.   It’s like scoring a resume; there is supposed to be an accent on that “e”, but for some reason my computer won’t put it there.  The size of each team’s Historical Property is fairly obvious; what we are attempting to measure here is the strength, which is less obvious and more subject to debate.

VI.  Dividing the Inheritance

of a Dying Franchise

            We come, then, to the most difficult issue in this discussion.   How do we divide up the legacy of a franchise when the franchise shifts to another place?   How do we account for it when one franchise picks up the remnants of another’s history?   What do we do with that?

            The simplest and easiest thing to do with it would be to pretend that each franchise is a unitary whole, undivided by history.    The Dodgers are the Dodgers; the Giants are the Giants.   Where doesn’t matter.

            Except, of course, that it does matter.   We think of the Red Sox now as being of the same cloth as the Red Sox of 1918.   We don’t think of the Braves the same way.   There are three teams, sort of:  the Boston Braves, the Milwaukee Braves, the Atlanta Braves.

            Except that it’s not three entirely separate teams, either; it is sort of half and half.   In some ways they are the same; in some ways they are different.   Reality is messy.

            Reality is yet more messy in this way:  that sometimes teams pick up the discarded legacies of other franchises.   I have 50 examples in mind to prove the point. . .I promise I won’t use them all.

            1)  Why are the Detroit Tigers called the “Tigers”?

            They are called the Tigers as a part of the legacy of an earlier franchise, the Detroit Wolverines of the National League (1881-1888).   The Wolverines wore garish stripes which reminded fans of Tiger stripes, and were called informally the “Tigers”.

            2)  Why are the Red Sox called the “Red Sox”?

            They are called the Red Sox as a part of the legacy of an earlier franchise.    Harry Wright, who founded the original Cincinnati Reds, also managed the Boston National Association team in their very early days, when teams were truly shoestring operations.    Wright brought his trademark red stockings with him from Cincinnati, and his team was informally called the Red Stockings, as were other 19^th-century Boston teams.   The American League team picked up the nickname from the earlier franchises.

            3)  Why are the Indians called the “Indians”?

            They are called the Indians in tribute to a popular Native American player who played in Cleveland, not for the Indians but for an earlier franchise.

            4)  Why are the Orioles called the Orioles?

            They picked up the name from numerous previous major league and minor league franchises, dating back to the 1880s.

            We have done enough of that, but why are the Royals called the Royals, why are the Angels called the Angels, and why are the Mets called the Mets?   In all cases the teams are called what they are to pick up on the legacy of previous teams that competed in the city.    I said the Angels had a clean start, but it’s only a clean start because we’re not counting the minor leagues.

5)  Why is there a statue of Jackie Robinson at Seaver Field in New York?

Jackie Robinson never played for the Mets.   He played in New York for a previous franchise, which abandoned the city in 1957.

6)  Why are there statues of Buck Leonard and Josh Gibson at Clemente Park in Pittsburgh?

To pick up the legacy of an earlier franchise.

These things could be characterized as deliberate or calculated efforts of one franchise to pick up on the memory of another, but the same blending of two franchises into one memory occurs constantly in casual conversation.  People often ask me if I grew up a Kansas City Royals’ fan.   When I first met Roger Angell in 1980, he asked me that question.  Obviously Roger Angell knew that the Royals were only eleven years old and that I could not have grown up a “Royals” fan, but he just blocked that out for a second, and saw the two franchises as one.    I have done the same thing myself; I have said in print at least twice that something happened to the Kansas City Royals that obviously happened before 1969, and thus obviously happened to the A’s.

The Royals moved into the stadium that had been re-modeled for the Kansas City A’s, and that before the A’s came to Kansas City had been a minor league stadium for the Kansas City Blues.    The Milwaukee Brewers in 1970—picking up the name of several earlier Milwaukee franchises, minor and major league—moved into the stadium that had been the home of the Milwaukee Braves, and which I believe had briefly been the home of a minor league team.   Teams pick up the traditions of other teams from the same city, even when they don’t quite realize they are doing it.   If there is a bar near the park where fans gather before the game, they will do so for one franchise and then for the next.  Teams pick up business contacts, the contracts of vendors and ticket sellers and dry cleaners and stadium maintenance crews.   The Kansas City Royals used the same groundskeeper that the A’s had used, the great George Toma.   They were reported on by the same newspaper guys and the same TV reporters.   Their games were carried on many of the same radio stations and the same television stations.   They had many of the same advertisers.  They had the same stadium PA announcer, I believe.   They had most of the same fans.

In the late 1990s, when some team had to move from the American League to the National, Bud Selig said that Milwaukee had always considered itself a National League city.   What did he mean by that?   The National League team had been there for 13 years; it had been gone for many more.  In some very meaningful sense the Braves were still there, still a part of the city’s baseball tradition.

The “history and tradition” of baseball in a city is not wholly wrapped up in the legal entity that is the baseball team.   It belongs as much to the city as it does to the “team”.

The question, then, is “How do we deal with this, in assessing the historical strength and vigor of a franchise?”   I don’t know that this is the right answer, but this is what I did.   When a team switched cities, I divided the stakes of that team into two equal parts.  Half went with the team to their new city.   The other half stayed with the city and lived on in the city unless or until

1) the memory of the franchise decayed until it was legally dead, or

2) the legacy of the old team was assumed by another franchise.

In theory, that may sound simple.   In practice, it’s messy.   I’ll explain the nuts and bolts of it in the next section.

VII.  The Practical Aspects of Dividing Credit

Let’s start with some of the simpler cases.   In 1952 the strength of the Boston Braves franchise was 39.6 stakes.    It’s not really a high number; the Braves had been at 36.4 in 1917, but had done little to build on that in the last 35 years.   In 1953, in any case, the Braves moved to Milwaukee.

In our view, one-half of that “franchise strength”—that is, 39.6 divided by two, times .97, which equals 19.2—moved on to Milwaukee with the franchise, and became a part of the history and tradition of the Milwaukee Braves.   The other 19.2 lived on in Boston, under the heading “Boston NL—Inactive.”   It continues to live on in Boston to this day—greatly decayed over time, of course, but still there.   In 2009 the strength of this memory was down to 3.5 stakes, still decaying at a rate of 3% per year, but still alive.

The Milwaukee Braves took their one-half of the organization’s strength and tradition and built upon it very impressively, posting thirteen straight winning records in Milwaukee with a World Championship included.    By 1966 they had re-built their stakes essentially back to the same level they had had in Boston (38.5).    Then they divided themselves again.

Again, one-half of the strength of the Braves’ organization transferred with them to Atlanta, while one-half stayed in Milwaukee (Milwaukee NL—Inactive.)    It was inactive, however, for only four years, 1966 to 1969.   In 1970 the Seattle Pilots moved to Milwaukee, becoming the M’waukee Brewers.   The Brewers then picked up or “absorbed” the tradition of the inactive franchise—decayed, of course, but decayed in this case for only a few years.

The Milwaukee Brewers, then, did not start at zero; they started with two strands of historical property.   They had what was left of the tradition of the Milwaukee Braves, which we value at 17.0, and they also had what had been accomplished by the Seattle Pilots in their one season in Seattle, which was basically nothing (0.46).    Still, when you add that to the 17.0 inherited from the Braves, the Brewers came into their first season not with nothing, but with a historical strength and tradition score of 17.5 stakes.

The history of the Philadelphia, Kansas City and Oakland Athletics is similar.   Due to a series of very poor years the strength of the Philadelphia Athletics tradition had decayed from 53.9 stakes in 1933 down to 43.4 in 1954, their last season in Philadelphia.   That number was divided in two in 1955, half of their tradition going with the team to Kansas City, and the other half living on as an orphan in Philadelphia.    It is still there, greatly decayed after all these years, but not yet having reached the point of being legally dead.

The other half of the Athletics tradition went to Kansas City with the Athletics.   This also started at a relatively low level (21.55), and, as the A’s had thirteen losing seasons in thirteen years, they did little to build their stakes.   After thirteen years they also moved on, sub-dividing their weakened tradition even more.   One-half of their history and traditional crawled on to Oakland.   The other half decayed in Kansas City for a year or two, and then was picked up by the Royals.

You may be uncomfortable with the idea that the tradition and history of the Boston Braves lives on in Boston yet today, but let me put it to you this way.  Look at the Baltimore Orioles.   The 19^th century Baltimore Orioles built a fairly solid tradition in a period of 18 years—yet they existed for only 18 years.   The American League Baltimore Orioles (1901-1902) attempted to pick up this tradition and failed to do so.   Nonetheless, when the current Baltimore Orioles came along a half-century after that, did they start with nothing, or did they start with something?

They started with something.   It wasn’t much; it wasn’t terribly meaningful.   The weight that I give it is 1.9—but it was still there.

The Braves were in Boston for a little more than 75 years.    They had a substantial history and tradition.   There isn’t much left of that, it is true, but there is something.

Or think about it this way.   There are five inactive franchises which still have a living memory that has not been picked up by any other team—the Boston National League franchise, the Philadelphia American League franchise, the St. Louis American League franchise (the Browns), the Brooklyn Dodger franchise, and the Montreal Expos franchise.    The Expos, having the most recent history, have the most viable history and tradition (14.15).

If the Brooklyn Dodgers no longer exist, then why do people still wear their uniforms?  I would bet that there are thousands of Brooklyn Dodger hats sold every year.    Is this not evidence that something of the Dodgers still lives in Brooklyn?

Suppose that Montreal was to get an expansion team next year.   Would that team have nothing to build on, or would they have something to build on?   Obviously, they would have something to build on—and obviously, Montreal is not going to get an expansion team next year.

Not next year, no, but what about in 30 years?   If Montreal gets an expansion in 2040, will that expansion team build on nothing, or will they build on the long-decayed remnants of the Montreal Expos?   I think the better answer is that they will build on the long-decayed remnants of the Montreal Expos—and so that is the way that I set my model up to work.

VII.  When Is a Franchise Legally Dead?

A franchise is legally dead, in my model, when the history and tradition of the franchise has decayed to a level less than 1.00.

A very strong baseball franchise might have 60 stakes.    It must be assumed that, let us say, the USSR. . ..the Soviet Union lasted not quite as long as the Boston Braves, but it must be assumed that the legacy of the Soviet Union, measured on the same scale, would have been thousands of stakes, or perhaps hundreds of thousands.    Thus, although the Soviet Union no longer exists and its memory is certainly decaying, it must nonetheless be assumed that its legacy will survive for hundreds or thousands of years.    The Roman Empire no longer exists, but its historical legacy was so vast that it will last for many thousands of years.

On the other hand, there are many, many, many baseball franchises which are now legally dead.   They have no fans; no one cares about them, no one wears their hats.   Their stadium was torn down a hundred years ago, and no one now actually remembers where it was or what it looked like.

In the early history of baseball (1871-1915) there were numerous franchises which came into existence and went out of existence very quickly and with little note.   The Philadelphia Athletics of 1876 won 14 games, lost 45, and unilaterally cancelled a late-season road trip.   For so doing they were expelled from the league.

The strength of that franchise on opening day was zero.   They won 14 games, which added 0.42 stakes to their legacy, but lost 45, which is a charge of 0.45.    Thus at the end of the season they were at negative .03.   One cannot have less of something than zero, so we score their legacy, at season’s end, at zero.    Zero is less than one, so the franchise was legally dead the moment they were expelled from the league.

The Toledo Blue Stockings in 1884 went 45-58 in their only season of existence.   That works out to a strength of 0.74.   They also ceased to exist immediately after the season, as did the Milwaukee Brewers of 1891 (21-15), and the Chicago Browns of 1884 (34-39), and the Milwaukee Cream Cities of 1878 (15-45), and the Milwaukee Cream Cities of 1884 (8-4), and the New York Mutuals of 1876 (21-35)—and many, many other franchises.    All of these franchises were legally dead, by our standard, as soon the decision was made that they would not play the next season.

Above them is a level of teams that accomplished enough that it took an inactive season for them to be legally dead.   The Brooklyn Wonders of the Player’s League (1890), for example, won 76 games and lost 56.   That level of success creates some modest little history, which we score at 1.72 stakes.

The Brooklyn Wonders didn’t play in 1891, however (the league went out of existence), and so we divide this number by two for the 1891 calendar.  That makes 0.86, degraded by 3% if you care about that; anyway it is less than 1.00, and the franchise was legally dead after the 1891 season.  After 1891 there was simply nothing there to build on.

Not nothing, perhaps, but at some point it becomes impractical to track it.   We COULD depict the living legacy of the 1884 Indiana Hoosiers (29-78), but at this point that would be .004 Stakes.   It’s not practical to keep track of those things.

And again, remember—I’m not claiming that my estimates are anything more than loose, simple representations of complex realities.   I’m trying to outline in numbers how these things operate.   I’m not claiming I’ve got it exactly down.

I drew up a complete list of dead franchises, but it turns out to be too boring to print.   I’ll print the first few entries as a sample:

Altoona Mountain Cities, Union Association (1884).   Peak strength, zero.   Legally dead at the conclusion of the season.

Baltimore Monumentals, Union Association (1884).   Peak strength, 1.2.   Legally dead, 1885.

            Boston Reds, Union Association (1884).    Peak strength, 1.2   Legally dead, 1885.

Brooklyn Gladiators, American Association (1890).   Peak strength, 0.1.  Legally dead at the conclusion of the season.

Brooklyn Wonders, Players League (1890).   Peak strength, 1.7.   Legally dead, 1891.

Brooklyn Tip-Tops, Federal League (1914-1915).   Peak strength, 2.8.   Legally dead, 1926.

And then, as we go forward, we’ll note the franchises which accomplished enough that it took at least a few years for them to decay into unrecognizable dust.

VIII.  Franchises That Live On In Another Uniform

There are four things that can happen to a no-longer-operating franchise:

1)  They can expire immediately or almost immediately, having accomplished nothing, having created no meaningful memories, and having built no fan base.

2)  They can live on until their memory decays into insignificance.

3)  They can live on to the present day (like the Dodgers, Expos, Philadelphia American League team, St. Louis American League team, and Boston National League team.)

4)  Their legacy can be absorbed into another franchise.

There are many, many examples of franchises that picked up the legacy of an earlier franchise, and I will discuss some of these in later parts of the article.  However, in most cases, the “present value” of those inheritances is negligible.

In the 19^th century there were several failed baseball franchises in Washington, DC, including two in 1884 (one in the Union Association, one in the American Association.)  These franchises made no mark, and were legally dead as soon as they stopped playing.

However, a team started in Washington in the American Association in 1891.   This franchise moved to the National League in 1892, when the American Association and the National League made peace, and it survived until 1899.   In 1900 the team was “contracted” out of existence when the National League shrunk from twelve teams to eight.

In 1901, however, the legacy of the Washington team was picked up by the American League Washington Senators, and by this good fortune, the legacy of this team, which started in a defunct league in 1891, survives now in three major league franchises—the Twins, the Rangers, and the Washington Nationals.   The legacy of the Washington NL team lived on in the Senators until 1960.  In 1960 that Senators franchise moved to Minnesota, and a new Washington Senators franchise was installed in Washington.   It’s a tricky question:  what do we do with the legacy?

The American League at that time announced that the records of the Washington Senator players would stay with the Washington franchise.   This is still “honored” to an extent; in a broadcast last week, I heard that some Texas Ranger player was the first to do something-or-other since Sam Rice in the 1920s.    This assumes that the Rangers carry forward the tradition of the “original” Washington Senators.

However, we are not bound by the proclamations of the American League President in 1960 or 1961; that’s just the spin that he was trying to put on it, trying to tell the Senator fans that this was the same franchise and they should continue to support it, even though they knew damned well that it wasn’t the same franchise.  The Griffith family is remembered in both Washington and Minnesota; Camilo Pascual is a part of the history of both cities.   It’s a judgment call, but I decided to split the legacy of the original Washington Senators between the Twins and the “new” (1961) Washington Senators.

The new Senators also failed, however, and left Washington in 1971.   This divided their legacy again, half moving on to Texas, and the other half lingering in the air in Washington.  That part of the legacy decayed in the sun for more than thirty years, but it was still there when the Montreal Expos moved to Washington in 2005.   Thus, some tiny, almost invisible speck of the history of this 19^th century team lives on today in three different franchises.

What do you do with the Mets?   Another tough one.   Obviously the Mets picked up the legacy of the previous New York National League teams, but which one?

I originally assigned the New York Mets the decayed legacy of both National League teams.    If you do that, however, then the Mets start out in 1962 more or less on a equal footing with the established National League teams; actually they would start out ahead of the San Francisco Giants, ahead of the Los Angeles Dodgers, ahead of the Milwaukee Braves, and ahead of the Philadelphia Phillies.   Obviously that doesn’t seem right, and it seems even less right when you look at the performance of the team in their first five or six years.   I decided that the Mets could inherit either the legacy of the Giants or the legacy of the Dodgers, but not both. 

Well, which?    They’re called the “New York” Mets, not the Brooklyn Mets.   They played originally in the Polo Grounds, where the New York Giants had played.   The legacy of the Giants was a tiny bit stronger than the legacy of the Dodgers, not that that’s anything meaningful because they were really almost tied, but I decided that the Mets should inherit the legacy of the New York Giants, while the Dodgers’ legacy continued to live on in Brooklyn. 

IX.  The Strongest Franchises Of Early Baseball

We have finally reached the point at which we can begin to suggest answers to the practical questions which are the point of this exercise.   If the Yankees are the strongest team of baseball history (if?  IF??), when did they become so?   How far ahead are they?   Who is second?  Who is weakest?   Is there any realistic chance that any other team could ever catch the Yankees?

We will get to those questions in the second half of this article, which will run tomorrow.