*moves boxes * *blows dust off* Hey, it still works.
Let's talk some baseball! (Oh, and we'll ignore that I have not yet posted my recaps for the NFL conference title games and Super Bowl. Those will come when the lockout ends. And not a second sooner.) Specifically, let's talk the latest rumblings of realigning MLB's teams.
This comes up occasionally, and has again during talks between the owners and the players' union. Most proposals being made public would move a team from the National League to the American League, creating two 15-team leagues, then doing away with the divisions entirely.
I'm not against realignment. But there's no need to overdo it. And two 15-team leagues - especially based on geography - is overdoing it. Mostly because there's no need to change it up that radically just for its own sake. But the explanations I've been reading, while they seem to stress that they don't want to change it just to change it,
The biggest problem is it makes scheduling an absolute nightmare, since by necessity, you're going to have an interleague game pretty much every day every team plays, and if you thought the complaining about how teams' interleague schedules vary dramatically was loud now, how'd you like to be the team playing an interleague game on the last day of the regular season?
The plan would also come with another expansion of the playoffs, possibly to 10 teams (5 per league). That creates its own set of problems, such as who plays who, when, and for how many games? Remember, MLB added the wild-card team when it went to three divisions in 1994 so that nobody would have a bye and have to sit and wait. That's unavoidable with five playoff teams per league.
Also, some of the motivation behind this seems to be based on the statement that "it isn't fair that the other AL East teams have to compete with the Red Sox and Yankees' payrolls" (Olney's article specifically mentions this), which is slowly becoming a sad, tired cop-out. The only thing an astronomical payroll guarantees you in baseball is the ability to shrug off an expensive mistake. (The Yankees, in particular, made a ton of these during the '00s. There's a reason they only won one World Series last decade.) You want a league where team prestige and money not only guarantee, but bring championships? In the 82-year history of La Liga, top-level soccer in Spain, nine teams have won the league title. Real Madrid and Barcelona have won it a total of 52 times.
So if you're reading this, you know that I wouldn't be going on about this if I didn't have my own idea. I think this is a case where turning back the clock might, for once, be beneficial to baseball in solving this problem. I say we go back to two divisions (and nobody has to switch leagues!):
NL East: Philadelphia, N.Y. Mets, Washington, Florida, Cincinnati (how the Reds ended up in the NL West when MLB went to divisions in 1969 is both before my time and beyond my comprehension), Atlanta, Milwaukee (I was trying to figure out how to keep the Cardinals and Cubs in the same division until I remembered the Brewers are in the NL), Pittsburgh
NL West: St. Louis, Chicago Cubs, Houston, Arizona, San Francisco, San Diego, L.A. Dodgers, Colorado
AL East: N.Y. Yankees, Boston, Toronto, Baltimore, Tampa Bay, Cleveland, Detroit
AL West: Chicago White Sox, Minnesota, Kansas City, Texas, L.A. Angels, Seattle, Oakland
Top two teams make the playoffs, keeping it at eight. Any more and you start running into the problems with byes and all that that I mentioned earlier. The division winners face the second-place teams from the other division, which will make the owners happy that they won't lose any playoff games.
I'd scale interleague play back to four series, played during the weeks of Memorial Day and the Fourth of July instead of the seemingly random times they occur now. (Look, unless you're in Cleveland, the Pirates coming to town isn't going to draw any differently on May 27 than on June 27.) Each team would be designated a rival from the other league and play a home-and-home series. The other opponent would be the team from the other league's division that finished in the same position the previous season. I admittedly haven't thought through what happens if it's the same team. Probably nothing, actually. Feel free to offer suggestions/tweaks/etc.
This isn't difficult, Major League Baseball. Don't screw it up.
----------------
Listening to: Outkast - Hey Ya
via FoxyTunes
