- Publish date:
THESE MEN FOR SALE
The final weeks of this baseball season are going to add up to something after all: $22.5 million. Once again baseball is expanding, this time to Montreal, San Diego, Seattle and even back to Kansas City, a town it only recently departed. But who is to play and where? Under expansion plans of both the American and National Leagues, each of the 20 existing teams must submit a list of its basic roster of 40 top major and minor league players to the new members of the lodge after the conclusion of the World Series. In the first round only 15 of the 40 can be protected against selection. Each player chosen in the American League will cost $175,000 and each in the National an estimated $200,000. Once a player is selected on the first round, the existing teams can protect three more players. Ultimately each new franchise will stock itself with 30 players, some old and some blue, some young and some through, and some—unlike those who went in the earlier expansion drafts in 1960 and 1961—remarkably good. They include well-known names not yet eligible for Medicare as well as problem performers who have played more towns than 'The Glass Menagerie.' The rarest talent to come by for the new teams will be catchers, shortstops and centerfielders, and several clubs with a plentiful supply of the best young performers—the Oakland Athletics, Houston Astros, New York Mets and St. Louis Cardinals—are expected to be hardest hit. The teams, of course, have tried to keep secret the names of their best-known available players. Too bad. Here they are.
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