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Allan Huber Selig, a 79-year old man who prefers to be called "Bud" and current Commissioner of Baseball, announced his intention to retire from the position in January 2015. It has been suspected by many [citation needed] experts and analysts that before retirement he will seek to annex the United States and Canada to create the Empire of Major League Baseball. Furthermore, some[citation needed] say that one of his first actions will be to dissolve the states, provinces, and territories that make up of the two former independent countries of United States and Canada and to rearrange his Empire into 30 sectors, one for each Major League clubs.
It is believed[citation needed] that the plan is to base each sector of control in the stadium of the team, and that the borders of the sectors will be defined by the midpoint between two stadiums. That is, all points in a particular sector would be closer to its base stadium than any other Major League stadium.
I live in Toronto, so it is obvious that I will be living in the new sector of TOR, but what if you are in an area that is near several stadiums? What new sector and which new sector's general manager / overlords should you prepare to swear your allegiance to?
To help, I reached out to cartographer Zara Matheson (@zmatheson) to draw out the new political map of the Empire (click to enlarge):
We can see that the SEA sector, based out of Safeco Field in Seattle, will be by far the largest, clocking in at 6,773,473 km2. The MIN sector will be next, reaching all the way up to Alert, at 3,549,087 km2. The TOR sector, based out of the home of the Blue Jays, is the third largest at 1,604,773 km2 being just slightly bigger than the hated BOS sector (1,344,964 km2). The smallest sector will be NYM at 6,203 km2 taking up not much more than Long Island and a bit of what was Connecticut. The second-smallest CHC sector (22,882 km2) is sandwiched between the larger MIL And CWS sectors, and the MIA sector (28,635 km2) comes in third as the "head" (or "glans penis") of what was Florida.
Some other points of interest:
- What was Canada will be divided into eight sectors. The largest ones are SEA, MIN, TOR, and BOS, the smaller ones include a small triangle of the COL sector in what was Saskatchewan, a triangle of MIL in around the Pukaskwa National Park on the north coast of Lake Superior, as well as small slices of DET in the Windsor and (surprisingly) the Sault Ste. Marie areas. If you look closely, you will see that there is a small slice of the CLE sector on the north shore of Lake Erie, around Port Stanley.
- There is what looks like a quadrapoint (or close-to-quintpoint) shared by STL, ATL, HOU, AND TEX.
- What was Hawaii is now part of the SF sector, which controls most of the northern part of the San Francisco peninsula.
- The ATL sector covers most of "the South".
So, if you live in the U.S. or Canada, which sector will you belong to once Emperor Bud completes his plans?
I could've easily written this post as "which MLB stadium are you closest to as the crow flies?" but it would've been much less fun.
Appendix
Sector | Area (in km2) |
SEA | 6,773,473 |
MIN | 3,549,087 |
TOR | 1,604,773 |
BOS | 1,344,964 |
COL | 1,218,295 |
TEX | 595,422 |
ARI | 511,304 |
ATL | 507,595 |
KC | 389,025 |
OAK | 327,745 |
HOU | 318,338 |
STL | 277,090 |
CIN | 197,386 |
MIL | 170,330 |
WSH | 161,296 |
LAD | 150,246 |
SF | 106,463 |
PIT | 103,690 |
TB | 94,081 |
DET | 92,403 |
CWS | 68,428 |
NYY | 61,569 |
LAA | 46,807 |
PHI | 36,884 |
CLE | 34,010 |
SD | 32,315 |
BAL | 30,818 |
MIA | 28,635 |
CHC | 22,882 |
NYM | 6,203 |