Can You name every MLB team?

 "Baseball is the hurrah game of the republic! That's beautiful: the hurrah game! well — it's our game: that's the chief fact in connection with it: America's game: has the snap, go fling, of the American atmosphere — belongs as much to our institutions, fits into them as significantly, as our constitutions, laws: is just as important in the sum total of our historic life."

-Walt Whitman

Here is something I found on CNN:

(CNN) -- Quick quiz:

Name every big-league baseball team.

No fair looking it up online, or checking a newspaper sports page.

Just name them all.

Take your time. We'll wait.

(Pause)

Are you back?

If you could do it, congratulations -- you may belong in the Hall of Fame. I've followed baseball since I was a kid, and I couldn't come up with all the teams when I tried just now.

I don't feel so bad about it, because I asked two baseball fanatics -- guys who really know the game -- if they could rattle off all the teams, and they had their doubts. "I probably couldn't do it," said Rob Fleder, formerly executive editor of both Sports Illustrated and The National Sports Daily, and editor of "Damn Yankees," an anthology of original essays about the New York Yankees by celebrated writers, to be published next month. "I'm supposed to know this, but I'd probably miss one or two."

Fleder said that if you were to go up to people on the street and ask them to name all the Major League teams, "I'd guess that only 5% or 10% could do it -- most likely closer to 5%."

Author David Krell, who is at work on "Blue Magic: The Brooklyn Dodgers, Ebbets Field, and the Battle for Baseball's Soul," agreed with Fleder: "Less than 10% of people would be able to do it. Maybe a lot less. I know that I'd end up leaving some teams out."

The premise of this article was amazing to me. Of course I can name all thirty teams. I can list them by division, by league, by state, by 2012, 2011 ranking, by 2010 ranking, by the alphabet, by the manager, by best player, by uniform colors, by the style of mustache preferred by their part time left fielder in 1899 (if they were around back then) you name it. The concept that a true baseball fan could not name all the teams is amazing to me. But the article alludes to an important point.

Major League Baseball has too many teams. We could argue all day about this, make graphs relating the US population with number of teams and the revenue gained or lost or anything else. But this is circuitous and ultimately inconclusive.

For me, there is one point that proves that there are two many teams.  Major league baseball has 30 teams, which means that you either have a 14-team league and a 16-team league, which is the case now, or you have two 15-team leagues with interleague all year round, which will be the case come 2013. Neither of these options is attractive, because the 14-16 split is unfair and the idea of abandoning the hallowed interleague stretches in the dog days of summer.

So the options are to either create two brand-new MLB teams, or to take two away. I don't think there are enough fans or good players (or suitable cities, for that matter) for more teams, so our only remaining options are to strike two teams from the big leagues, preferably a team with no history, no fans, and modern-looking uniforms.

Hmmm....

Florida should not really have two teams...

The Marlins have a great new stadium, the Rays have an awful stadium...

The Marlins have no manager, the Rays have a great manager...

The Marlins have a great, young outfield, the Rays have a great, young infield....

The Marlins have a low payroll and very few fans, the Rays have a low payroll and very few fans....

Let me paint a picture. Merge the teams. Call them the Miami Rays. Logan Morrison and Giancarlo Stanton in the outfield, Evan Longoria and company in the infield. A top tier rotation (before the Marlins traded Josh Johnson and Mark Buehrle, I would have said best rotation in baseball, bar none). All led by Joe Maddon from the lime-green dugout with the built in fish tank in Miami. And the best part is the fans and payrolls would (presumably) increase and maybe possibly reach the levels of a big league team.

Sounds good right?

What other team would I axe? I don't know. What do you think?