Boring baseball trivia, with footnotes

I'm sure that I'll tell you more about this later, but while I was in Seattle I saw some baseball. I can't remember how I came across this map today, but I'm glad I did, since it is a fairly unique look at how baseball is laid out in the US and has got me thinking about how unique my beloved Mariners are.
Now, I'm sure that the boundaries are up for discussion. But that's not what I'm thinking about. You hear a lot (especially in Seattle) about East Coast bias, and though some of it is just West Coast Whining, some of it is justified - because most of the teams are in the East. St. Louis was for a long time the westernmost team in Baseball, so let's just draw a line of longitude through it (if you'd like, you can imagine me standing in front of the map, with a t-shirt over my button down, Picture Pages style). This leaves us with 12 teams. If we really want to talk about the West and use the Rocky Mountains as our line of demarcation, we're down to 8 teams. If we take the wayback machine to 1997, Arizona drops out, and turning the dial to 1992 removes the Rockies. In short, I can easily remember a time when there were 6 teams west of the Rockies, 5 of which were in California. Of those 6 teams, only 3 of them originated there, the Giants and Dodgers having arrived from New York in 1958 and the A's having passed through KC on their way from Philadelphia, finally arriving in 1968. Of those three native teams, the Mariners are the youngest (remember, we're back in 1992), arriving in the league in 1977*. Of those 3 teams, 2 were originally owned by entertainers - the Angels by army air force pilot and singing cowboy Gene Autry and the Mariners by the alleged homosexual, communist, draft dodger Danny Kaye**. It's probably why the Angels continue to kick our butts to this day.

*For those nitpickers out there, 1969 marked the arrival of the short-lived Seattle Pilots, who, after one solitary season of play, were moved to Milwaukee by none other than comissioner-to-be Bud Selig despite plenty of legal attempts to keep them there. For awhile it was unclear where the team would be for the 1970 season, and their gear was being held in Provo, oddly enough. Sound familar to other recent Seattle sports news? Problems with the Pilots stadium were even part of the problem. Let's just hope that ClayClay doesn't someday become the commisioner of the NBA, or else we're all screwed. Oops, might be too late (put this photo with this caption).

**Shocking, I know. I never accused him of anything.