Kicking Around Expansion and Proposed Alignment

Tracy Ringolsby at Baseball America has written about proposed MLB expansion to two new cities and a realignment to fewer divisions, fewer games and elimination of the two leagues. I say bravo, if they do it right.

He's talking about Montreal and Portland hosting the new franchises. That's a discussion for another day. Neither you nor I knows all the details about placing new teams there or anywhere else.

Thirty-two teams makes for good math. It's a nice logarithmic number. 32 is two 16s, four 8s, eight 4s and 16 twos.

The Divisions
He proposes four eight-team divisions, organized more or less geographically, without regard for current league. So Arizona, Oakland, San Diego and Seattle (among others) would all compete in the West. More importantly, the city and state rivalries get wratched up six notches. The New Yorks, Chicagos, Los Angeleses, Pennsylvanias, Ohios and Canadas each share divisions, which means they compete directly and play each other regularly.

There would be four division winners and eight wild cards. Those eight teams play-in for four playoff slots against the four division winners. It almost guarantees that division winners are really good teams that deserve their bye.

The Schedule
The season would be shortened to 156 games to make the math work. Each team plays its seven division foes 12 times each, its 24 non-division opponents three times each. Inter-league play would die without leagues, but it had run its course anyway. Small price to pay.

The Twins are the odd-team out in this arrangement. If Portland joins the Majors, that pushes Colorado into the Midwest and Minnesota into the North with seven other Eastern Time (and mostly big market) teams. C'est la vie.

No More Halloween Baseball
Six fewer games could move the playoffs forward a week. Reduce the odds of playing the World Series in sleet. That alone would be worth the price of admission.

It also means lost revenue, ameliorated by reduced travel costs. Ringolsby says it's a push. I don't work for Travelocity, so I don't know. Or care.  Ain't my dime.

Two more Wild Cards is sub-optimal, but it's from a slightly larger pool. The play-ins place a further premium on winning a big division. The odds of taking a division with 89 wins would be quite low.

This really is quite sensible. It's transformative, which means not every fan base will love it, but there's no way to please everyone, even with the current arrangement.

Go for it, Rob Manfred!