Major League Baseball, 1903 to 1952 [Hand-drawn map]
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By Bill Turianski on 3 July 2026; twitter.com/billsportsmaps.
Note: this is a re-post from 3 years ago, and also from 19 years ago, because i am old and lazy now. Happy extended 4th of July to everyone :|
Upcoming schedule:
-2026-27 EFL Championship Attendance Map, sometime in mid-July.
-2026-27 Premier League Attendance Map, sometime in mid-August.
-Danish SuperLiga map, including a map of Greenland-based football clubs – a 2 part post, starting in mid-October :|
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Major League Baseball, 1903 to 1952 [Hand-drawn map]
Between 1903 and 1952, there was no franchise movement among the 8 National League and 8 American League baseball clubs. This map shows all the 16 MLB clubs from that 50-year time period, with selected emblems, cap crests, and uniform details.
Included on the map is an inset map of the Greater New York City area, which, from 1903 to 1957, boasted 3 Major League ball clubs. Their locations back then are shown: Yankee Stadium (1923) in The Bronx (New York Yankees), the Polo Grounds in Manhattan (New York Giants), and Ebbets Field in Brooklyn (Brooklyn Dodgers).
The evolution of these three NYC ball clubs’ crests, and the evolution of their colors, is also shown, within, and also right below, the inset-map.
[PS, the New York Yankees are still, of course, in The Bronx. But both the New York Giants, and the Brooklyn Dodgers, forsook their faithful fans in New York, and bolted to California, in 1958. For municipal hand-outs, including bags of money and free real estate. So in that way, the LA dodgers and the SF giants were way ahead of their time (in a bad way).]
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This map would not have been possible without the incredible book “Baseball Uniforms of the 20th Century” {at Amazon, here}. That book was researched, written, and illustrated by Marc Okkonen. His artwork for this book can now be found as the main uniform database (from 1900 to 1994) for the Baseball Hall of Fame site “Dressed to the Nines – A History of the Baseball Uniform”…{exhibits.baseballhalloffame.org/dressed_to_the_nines/database}
I made this map in early 1993, after my two brothers had given me, for Christmas, the now-out-of-print “Baseball Uniforms of the 20th Century”.
To draw the map, I used Caran d’Ache watercolor pencils and graphite pencil, on Bienfang semi-transparent paper. In 2023, I added the banner at the top of the map. The initial map probably took me about 90 hours or so to draw.
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