LA Browns?

Jet travel made a quantum leap between 1941 and 1946 thanks largely to the war and military technology. The football Rams could move that soon because it was one game a week and it was paradise.

A little surprised in retrospect that baseball took so long to follow suit, but then again you're talking about a group of 16 teams that clung en masse to their legacy markets for 50 years.

 

Commercial jet travel in the US didn't become common until the Boeing 707 came in 1958. Until then, any flight to or from a West Coast city was at least 6 hours from Chicago or St. Louis, effectively killing a whole day in travel each way.
Football, with one game a week, could handle it, but baseball, usually expecting to play 5-6 games a week, would be a battle.

Supposedly they had schedules all figured out for the Browns if they had made the move in '42, but it would have been insane.

 

That doesn't refute my supposition that air travel was OK for once-a week football. Prop planes could've gotten the job done too in baseball. Trains from St. Louis to Boston took longer.

 

Those were the days when teams would schedule a dozen or so doubleheaders a season. To make that LA deal work, you'd pretty much have to do that.

 

In 1942-60 MLB teams played each other 22 times; 11 home, 11 on the road. Had the Browns moved, each team would have made two trips to LA, played a five-game and a six-game series, with a to-and-from travel day. PCL teams did this with regularity when they played a 180+-game season, the Seals, Oaks, Angels, Padres, Stars, Solons would go to Portland or Seattle and stay for the entire week.

Had the Browns moved, the A's would not have been far behind, and has been previously stated, could have gone to SF and the AL would have owned the West Coast.