Editor note: Today’s post is by AMSTS’ newest contributor, “AirBall”.

Japanese baseball is a blast – I recommend taking in a game if you ever have the chance. The crowd is incredibly committed, and if you’re not Japanese you’ll probably be on the Jumbotron a few times. The best part? You’ll be able to watch the players of your childhood jogging around the bases (I’m looking at you, Tuffy Rhodes). I’ve had the pleasure of witnessing the Yomiuri Giants beat the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters in the Tokyo Dome. But where is Yomiuri? And what is a “Nippon-Ham Fighter”?

It turns out that baseball teams in Japan take on the name of their corporate owners – Yomiuri is mixed media company and Nippon-Ham is a packaged food producer. Teams are owned and named by a wide variety of companies – The Yakult Swallows are owned by a yogurt beverage conglomerate, and the Hiroshima Toyo Carp are partially owned by Mazda’s parent company.

This got me thinking… what would Major League Baseball look like if corporate sponsors got a chance to put their spin on team names? Could there be a Harley-Davidson funded Brewers franchise? Perhaps Apple would back the Giants? I brought the pieces together to get an idea of who would likely be sponsoring each team. Using a weighted-by-revenue Fortune 500 and combining it with geolocation data to calculate the as-the-crow-flies distance to each teams stadium, I was able to get a pretty idea of what we might expect. And I’ll be honest,: I just guessed for Toronto.

A few MLB cities don’t have many or any large Fortune 500 companies – Kansas City, Baltimore, Tampa, Denver – and a few companies are so huge they have an almost nationwide gravitational pull. For example, both Chicago teams and Milwaukee could easily be sponsored by Boeing. Berkshire Hathaway makes a run at Colorado all the way from Omaha. Wal-Mart (based in centrally located Bentonville, Arkansas) got tapped for sponsorships on three MLB teams through their sheer size. Luckily, we aren’t likely to be subjected to the Wal-Mart Royals, the Wal-Mart Cardinals – and in an amazing feat of Tampa Bay’s corporate feebleness, the Wal-Mart sponsored Rays (from 899 miles away).

In the final cut below, I’ve required each team’s sponsor to be based within 50 miles of the team’s stadium, and I’ve broken down Boeing’s monopoly on Chicagoland. Incredibly, only one of the real-life stadium naming rights overlap with this list (Target/Minnesota)

Can you imagine a world where people cheering for the Sherwin-Williams Indians or the Freeport-McMoRan Diamondbacks… or the Comcast Phillies? Nonetheless, some of these don’t seem that unrealistic – the Dodgers by Disney, Coca-Cola Braves and the Target Twins. Changing “The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim” to “The Ingram Micro Angels of Anaheim” doesn’t even add any additional words.

My only regret is that Major League Baseball itself isn’t on the Fortune 500 – they would make a great sponsor for the Yankees.

See below for the full list: