The National League West is one of the three Branches of the National League of Major League Baseball in North America (including Canada).
This Section has been made for the 1969 year when the National League expanded to 12 teams by incorporating the San Diego Padres and the Montreal Expos. For purpose of maintaining a regular-season of all 162 games, half of the groups were put into the new East Division and half into the brand new West Division. Within each branch, the teams played 18 games each against their five branch mates (90 games), and also 12 games against the teams in the opposite division (72 games), totaling 162 games.
Regardless of the geography, the owners of the Chicago Cubs insisted their team be placed into the East Division along with the teams at New York City, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh. Also, the owners of this St. Louis Cardinals wanted that team to be in precisely the same branch with their natural rivals of the Cubs. The league could have insisted on a geographical alignment like the American League did. However, the owners were concerned about what they thought would be a massive imbalance in the strength of these divisions. From the previous two seasons before realignment, the Cardinals, Giants, and Cubs finished 1-2-3 at the National League standings. The owners were concerned about putting those groups in the exact same division, thereby producing one very strong division (West) and one weak one (East). Given All This, the owners of the Atlanta Braves and the Cincinnati Reds agreed to being placed in the West Division, although Atlanta and Cincinnati are both from the Eastern Time Zone. Consequently the West Division had teams spread all the way from the East to the Pacific Coast, and scattered over four time zones. The East Division was spread across the Eastern Time Zone and the Central Time Zone – despite the fact that the National League had six teams in the Eastern Time Zone and six teams disperse involving the Central Time Zone and the Pacific Time Zone.
All this increased the traveling distances and times for each of the teams, and it also made radio broadcasting and TV broadcasts of the games more challenging to schedule. The Braves and the Reds had to travel all the way to California three times during every baseball season, along with the 3 groups in California had to travel to Atlanta, Cincinnati, and Houston three occasions also. Sometimes, the problem could be alleviated to get them by playing some games in Chicago, St. Louis, or Pittsburgh on the same long road trips. The 1994 addition of the Central Division would completely remedy these problems, when the Reds and Braves moved into the NL Central and NL East respectively.
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