The 1950s were a decade of movement in Major League Baseball. No franchise had changed cities since the Baltimore Orioles had become the New York Highlanders (the original incarnation of the New York Yankees) in 1903. In the 1950s, five teams would change cities: the Boston Braves moved to Milwaukee, WI in 1953, followed by the St. Louis Browns who left for Baltimore, MD the following year. In 1955, it was the turn of the Philadelphia Athletics to escape the status of second team in a two-team city, heading out to Kansas City, MO. All of the new homes had hosted major league cities at some point in the past, albeit for brief periods, but the real shocker occurred in 1958, when New York's two National League franchises, the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers moved all the way to the West Coast, ending up in San Francisco, CA and Los Angeles, CA respectively, the first major league franchises ever to be located in those cities. The movement would continue through the 1960s as well.
See Major League Players Who Played in the 1950s.
 Further Reading
- Gene Fehler: Tales From Baseball's Golden Age, Sports Publishing LLC, Champaign, IL, 2000. ISBN 978-1582612478
- Gene Fehler: When Baseball Was Still King: Major League Players Remember the 1950s, McFarland, Jefferson, NC, 2012. ISBN 978-0-7864-7065-5
- Daniel A. Gilbert: Expanding the Strike Zone: Baseball in the Age of Free Agency, University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, MA, 2013. ISBN 978-1-55849-997-3
- Lou Hernández: Memories of Winter Ball: Interviews with Players in the Latin American Winter Leagues of the 1950s, McFarland, Jefferson, NC, 2013. ISBN 978-0-7864-7141-6
- Donald Honig: Baseball Between the Lines: Baseball in the '40s and '50s as Told by the Men Who Played It, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, NE, 1993 (originally published in 1976). ISBN 0803272685
- Donald Honig: Baseball in the '50s: A Decade of Transition, Random House, New York, NY, 1987. ISBN 0517565781
- Bill James: "The 1950s", in The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, The Free Press, New York, NY, 2001, pp. 220-248.
- Andy Jurinko and Christopher Jennison: Golden Boys: Baseball Portraits, 1946-1960, Skyhorse Publishing, New York, NY, 2012. ISBN 978-1616084509
- Roger Kahn: The Era, 1947-1957: When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World, Bison Books, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, NE, 2002 (originally published in 1993). ISBN 0803278055
- Rich Marazzi and Len Fiorito: Aaron to Zuverink: A Nostalgic Look at the Baseball Players of the Fifties, Stein & Day Publishers, New York, NY, 1982. ISBN 978-0812827750
- Marc Okkonen: Baseball Memories 1950-1959: An Illustrated Scrapbook of Baseball's Fabulous 50's, Sterling Publishing Company, New York, NY, 1993. ISBN 978-0806904276
- Rick Swaine: The Black Stars Who Made Baseball Whole: The Jackie Robinson Generation in the Major Leagues, 1947–1959, McFarland, Jefferson, NC, 2006. ISBN978-0-7864-2316-3
 Related Sites
-  Article examining the many changes taking place in baseball in the 1950s in The Hardball Times.