Your Baseball Team's Genealogy, in One Incredible Infographic

There's a good chance the team you cheer started in a different city with a different name.

The New York Yankees started as the Baltimore Orioles. The Minnesota Twins were once the Washington Senators. But not before they were the Kansas City Blues. And the Cleveland Indians? To some, they'll always be the Grand Rapids Rustlers.

Pro-baseball has seen its share of relocations, new names, and disbanded franchises, enough to confuse even the most history-obsessed fans. Thankfully, information designers Bill Younker and Larry Gormley have mapped it all out for us in one incredible infographic.

Gormley tells us it took over 1,000 hours to put together. The final result is an end-all reference guide for when your friend doesn't believe the Detroit Tigers really have always been the Detroit Tigers (established in 1894), that Brooklyn couldn't stop renaming its team (before the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles, they were, at various times, the Trolley-Dodgers, Bridegrooms, Robins, and Superbas), or that the Newark Peppers were a real thing.

The whole thing is too big to recreate here, but here's a snapshot of how Boston and Chicago's team names evolved in the late 19th and early 20th century: 

The National League we know today saw a lot of franchise shuffling.

A glimpse at the teams in the ill-fated American Association:  

Things started to settled down after merging with the American Association (no relation to the American League we know). A series of franchise contractions followed a few years later.

During the mid-20th century, things got pretty crazy in the American League:

H/T Fast Co. Design

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