[FuzzyRussianHat]

The Asian Baseball Federation had continued to see impressive growth since the six Central Asian teams joined from the 2000 exodus of Eurasian Professional Baseball. ABF did an expansion in 2009 that added Kabul (Afghanistan) and Gaziantep (Turkey), but was looking to gradually keep expanding. Although Iran and Turkey did have more potential cities, ABF wasn’t looking to put another team in either quite yet. The hope was to give a second team to the larger “Stans.”

Part of the challenge was that these countries were within the East League, which was already two teams larger than the West League. ABF officials wanted the expansion to balance the leagues out at 14 teams apiece. To do that though would require shifting two teams from the EL to the WL.

Officials settled on shifting Kabul, as a newer expansion franchise without the longer standing rivalries, from the North Division to the Central Division. Also making the same shift would be Asgabat, whose location in Turkmenistan made them geographically slot in with Kabul and the Iranian teams. To achieve balance, Baku was shifted out of the Central Division to join the six Turkish teams. The division was renamed from the Turkish Division to the West Division.

The East League kept the seven Pakistan teams in the South Division, leaving the one remaining Pakistani team (Peshawar) and the four Central Asian teams in the North Division. This meant both expansion teams for the 2020 campaign would come into the North. Officials primarily centered on adding one team in Kazakhstan and one in Uzbekistan.

In Uzbekistan, they had two viable choices of similar sized cities that were on opposite ends of the country from the existing Uzbek team Tashkent. Samarkand in the southeast ended up getting the nod over the northeastern Namangan, thus introducing the Samarkand Spurs to the ABF.

Kazakhstan was a tougher choice with the large landmass of the country. The capital Astana in the north was a popular choice, but it was far more geographically isolated from the other existing teams. For example, it was a 15+ hour drive to the other Kazakh team Almaty. Shymkent in the south made more logistical sense, but was a slightly smaller city. It was fairly close to the borders of the neighbors, although Tashkent 125 kilometers away was worried about losing some market share.

EPB was also looking to expand around the same time and planned to extend outside of Russia, heavily keying in on Astana. It was actually geographically closer to a few of the Siberian teams. As to be discussed in another post, Astana took a sweetheart package to join up with EPB in the same year. Thus ABF went with the Shymkent Squirrels. This gave Kazakhstan three teams between two world leagues.



ABF wouldn’t change their playoff structure at all at this point, leaving it as the two division champs and two wild cards. It would be another decade before ABF’s next expansion, which would bring four teams total split between the WL and EL.