Hey, everybody, I'm Justin McGuire, and this is Baseball by the Book, the only podcast that

matters. That's right, folks, you are once again listening to Baseball by the Book, the podcast

in which we talk to authors of baseball books past and present. Today we are joined by Andy McHugh. He's

here to talk about his new book, Stumbling Around the Bases, The American League's Mismanagement of the Expansion Era.

Let's get started.

Hi, Andy.

Welcome back to baseball by the book.

Justin, nice to be here again.

One thing I wanted to talk about right off is something that I think a lot of younger listeners and younger baseball

fans in general may not fully understand, but it's something that's really important to your

book. And that's this idea that prior to like the 90s, the American League and the National

League really existed as separate entities in a way that they don't today. There were separate

league offices,

separate presidents, separate umpiring staffs. And a very important point to your book is

owners of the league would make kind of individual decisions about expansion and other important

topics like that, I'm kind of, you know, separate from the other league. So if you just start

out maybe to give people to a little bit of the background,

what was the kind of the history of the two leagues and their separateness?

In other words, like what was it like prior to this entity we know now as MLB?

Right.

Well, it goes back, I guess, to 1876 when the National League was formed.

And it had a rocky couple of decades there before

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