WI there were more important professional leagues? OTL, there are basically four major professional leagues--the two American and two Japanese. There are also several other less important professional leagues. How could there be more leagues around? My ideas:
* A Mexican league. It seems plausible, at least, given how Cuba or a lot of other Latin American countries adopted baseball, that Mexico could develop its own professional league at some point. This might happen like Canada, where there were MLB expansion teams in several areas, or it might simply be an outgrowth of the actual Mexican League, an OTL minor league.
* A Filipino league. Like the Mexicans or Japanese, they were significantly under American influence for some time, and baseball did apparently become popular for a while. What would it have taken for them to form professional teams?
* A third MLB league. OTL, the closest any minor league or non-affiliated team came to this, leaving aside the possibility of more pre-MLB leagues surviving and affiliating themselves with that organization, was the Pacific Coast League. In the late '40s and early '50s, they came fairly close to becoming a true major league, helped by the then-popularity of the minor leagues (the only way of seeing a game without living in or taking a trip to a major city) and the paucity of major league teams on the West Coast. With the advent of television and the movement of several MLB teams to the West Coast, they collapsed back into a minor league. WI they had managed to become a full member of MLB before that happened?
How could there be more teams in Canada? It seems odd that Canada--with 30 million people--has just one team, and even before the Expos were moved, had no teams on the West Coast.
WI Castro hadn't come to power in Cuba? I know, odd question for a baseball thread, right? But baseball was very popular in Cuba prior to the Revolution (still is, actually), and Cuba had a number of professional teams by that point. It seems reasonable to ask what effect a Cuba continuing under significant US influence would have on baseball. I think it's reasonably likely that that would lead to more international influence on the sport--Cuba had been a significant feeder to the US major leagues, and with desegregation (Cuban teams were integrated some time before US teams) it seems possible that professional Cuban and US teams could start regularly playing each other.
WI the World Series was just that--the world championship? OTL, there are a number of other professional leagues (the Japanese leagues being the most prominent), but the World Series only includes American and Canadian teams. What would need to be changed to make it a true world championship?
My guess is, perhaps some international teams could be invited to play exhibition games against the World Series champions at some point (perhaps the Mexican champions, Cubans, Japanese after World War II, Filipinos, someone). For some reason (perhaps the World Series champions lose!) the foreign teams are invited for another round the next year. This then evolves into a tradition of having several post-postseason international games against the other national champions, and eventually this event overshadows the original World Series, which is relegated to "merely" the US championship, while the new events become an actual best-of-several tournament.
Anyone else have any ideas?