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The Pittsburgh Pirates may end up receiving their nickname for plucking players away from MLC, rather than the competing AA.

The Red Sox fandom gets their sweet relief eighteen years earlier. Buckner still gets released in '87, plays for the next few years, and retires in 1990, now a real estate developer in Eastern Massachusetts and also owning an auto dealership in Worcester, Massachusetts. The revelation...

Pretty much, yeah. American football didn't really bust out of the colleges until the 1900s and later, and didn't even have a solid professional league until the 1920s, but by then it had taken root in blue collar communities, particularly in the Midwest (whereas the blue collar appeal for...

Well, that was really more establishing the biggest point of potential divergence, in which association football could have taken root as dominant. All which I posted was as it happened in OTL, but it basically highlights just how close America might have come to playing association-like rules...

It's a frequent callup around here, and the answer is pretty much the same. It's all Harvard's fault. Soccer, befitting its upper-class* roots in the English public schools, also played in mostly the same venues in the US, which mostly meant the New England prep schools and Northeastern...

Indeed, stickball games in the back alleys and city streets, largely in the US Northeast, is where quite a few major leaguers would have gotten their start. It's remarkably easy for four or five kids to dig up a broom handle and a rubber ball, and use cars/parking meters/cardboard...

I immediately have a major issue with your timeline. ;) go Whalers...

Questions: 1) Which four Canadian franchises? No WHA history I've seen includes any that survive past 1976, other than the Oilers, Jets and Nordiques. Do you mean, perhaps, the New England cum Hartford Whalers? 2) Where did this mythical Hamilton team come from? You don't refer to much WHA...

Possibly, but I don't think it would make much sense to do so. The best time to have done it this way would've been in the consolidation of Greater New York in 1898, allowing the towns of Queens, Bronx and Richmond (Staten Island) Counties to maintain their independent governance. Brooklyn...

Coming from one of those states, who would undoubtedly see a huge benefit from enlarging the already existing shipping base, the idea of a "naval militia", one step of organization and sanction beyond privateers, intrigues me. It seems like it'd be well in line with the US military philosophy...

Got it. Defensive pass interference was enacted in 1978, as an attempt to curtail the physical style of play of dominant Steelers cornerback Mel Blount (before this rule, defenders were allowed to contact the receivers until the ball was in the air; now it's illegal beyond five yards from the...

Pretty much all of these suggestions are possibilities. I don't think it would change the run/pass dynamic much, at least as far as pro football goes. Maybe in the lower levels, as the talent levels are lower, coaches would be less likely to take big chances with less-sure handed receivers...

It sounds to me like it's precisely because of the GW experience that they don't. Perhaps the lesson learned in the Great War vis a vis tactics was, similar to the theory of barrel usage that Custer used to great success, put all your strength against one point and break the opposing army that...

It gets just as hot and muggy up in New England during the summer as it does in DC, and usually with as much regularity. EDIT: That is to say, it's not too bad in the Green/White Mountains, Adirondacks in NY, or in upstate Maine, but it is where there's any significant amount of people and...

Why not Montgomery? It already WAS the capital of the CSA before Virginia seceded.

Well, they could do what the East Coast Hockey League did a few years ago when they absorbed the lower-level West Coast Hockey League and change their official name to the ECHL. The initials no longer stand for anything, even though historically they did. NATO can be the same thing.

A POD no earlier than 1920? That's about sixty years past the last good hope of it happening. Well, maybe twenty. But even that would require a bit of handwaving to surpass baseball.

Well, once Jonathan Moss got grounded, information of any kind on the air war disappeared. You heard all kinds of developments in GW, because Moss was living it. Not so much once Return Engagement closes out... Furthermore, when your viewpoint is from the ground, all guys dropping shit on...

My name is KingDobbs, and I approve of this message. As long as Hartford keeps the Whalers.

Apparently Al Gore won the 2000 election in this timeline... So, how's the weather in New Mexifornia? I think I want to take a trip there in January. ;)