A while back, I was looking for information on the New York-Penn League when I stumbled upon an online copy of the league’s 2011 media guide. While I later discovered that it was not a perfect resource (it contained an error that led to a mistake in the league preview I wrote last month), it was still pretty cool and I spent some time flipping through it.
Around the time this season started, I think it was, I saw that the 2012 version of the media guide was online, so I’ve been checking that out and mining what I can in terms of information. One of the things that stood out was a list of all the teams that have been a part of the league since 1939, when it was the Pennsylvania-Ontario-New York (PONY) League. I thought it would be a neat idea to use Google Maps to make a map of all those cities.
View Historic New York-Penn League Cities in a larger map
I find it interesting that the league as currently constituted is historically spread out to the north, east, and south, and that Mahoning Valley would be the farthest west if not for London. It’s also cool to see the two east-west corriders that run roughly parallel to one another in New York, and to note that having teams below the New York-Pennsylvania border is a relatively recent thing. (If you draw a line straight across, ten teams fall below that border. Unless I’m missing, the oldest of those are Williamsport and Hudson Valley, both of which began in 1994.)
