Realigning Baseball

The NFL has arguably the best conference/divisional setup of any of the four major sports. 32 teams, 2 conferences of 16, 8 divisions of 4. It's so perfectly round that it's almost like any expansion or relocation would ruin the circle of harmony the league has going right now. Every franchise has their place and the divisions of 4 lend themselves perfectly towards developing rivalries. 

There aren't so many divisional games that the novelty of an inter-divisional matchup loses its appeal and there aren't too few that the point of having a division is lost. Remember when the Browns returned to the league and the AFC Central had 6 teams? The 3 years between Cleveland coming back to football and the Houston Texans rounding out the NFL meant that teams in the AFC Central division would play 10 of their 16 games within the division. A team could conceivably lose every game outside of the division and still make the playoffs. 


The NFL's current alignment is about as fair and balanced as a league that schedules only 16 games a season can get. That is, unless you're an NFC team and you aren't allowed the fortune of playing in the western division. It is apparent that as far as divisional setup goes, we are in the NFL's golden age.

This  well-rounded setup the NFL has going for it is missing in the other three major team sports. Baseball has the biggest problem. Currently, the National League and the American League have a disparate number of teams in each league. The NL has 16 while the AL has 14 teams. Until the Reds' recent playoff appearance, it always irked me that teams in the AL West only had to combat with 3 other teams for a postseason spot while the Reds had to compete for a playoff spot in the NL Central against 5 other teams, though you could argue that being in a division with the Pittsburgh Pirates is an unfair advantage to those in the East and West. 

The reasoning behind the unbalanced leagues is that if each league held 15 teams then there would have to be at least one interleague series going on at any one time. This difference in the number of teams isn't a problem with me. The biggest problem that I have is that over a 162 game regular season, teams still aren't playing balanced schedules. Teams within the same division have different interleague matchups. Teams across divisions in the same league battle for the same wildcard playoff spot, but have drastically different schedules. A team that plays in a tough division is at a tremendous disadvantage. 

There are mutliple solutions here. One, either drop interleague play, or move Milwaukee back to the American League giving each league 15 teams and you play a constant interleague schedule throughout the season. Baseball purists will cringe at the thought of playing across leagues from day 1 to day 162, but it would eliminate the differences in interleague schedules that are set up by in-state "rivalries" (Marlins-Rays anyone?). My plan is to retain the interleague matchups, but drastically alter the divisional alignment. 

As previously alluded to, what baseball uses right now is flawed. 4 teams make the playoffs in each league. This means that the three division winners and the best second place team battle for the right to go to the World Series. There are a few problems here. One, this doesn't guarantee that the 4 best teams in one league make the playoffs. In 2006, the Blue Jays, Red Sox, White Sox, Angels, and Phillies all finished with more wins than the St. Louis Cardinals, but none of them made the playoffs. That of course, is the Cardinals team that went on to win the World Series. This event does a good job of highlighting the flaw in the current system. The 11th best team in baseball won the World Series that year. It used to be, you didn't even get to play for it unless you were the best team in the whole league after 162 games. We need a system that does a better job of selecting the 8 best teams for baseball's postseason and one that does it with a balanced schedule and I think I've found it. 

Plan to fix baseball

Step 1: return to 4 divisions. 2 divisions of 7 for the American League and 2 divisions of 8 for the National League. 6 divisions is clunky and creates disparity between schedules to the point that the wildcard is less about what team is better and more about what team had the more favorable schedule. Here's how the divisions would be structured: 

AL East

Baltimore - Boston - Cleveland - Detroit -  New York - Tampa Bay - Toronto

AL West

Chicago - Kansas City - Los Angeles - Minnesota - Oakland - Seattle - Texas

NL East

Atlanta - Cincinnati - Florida - Milwaukee - New York - Philadelphia - Pittsburgh - Washington

NL West

Arizona - Chicago - Colorado - Houston - Los Angeles - San Diego - San Francisco - St. Louis

Those of you well versed in the history of MLB's divisional lineups will notice that this is basically the same alignment that the league used prior to the divisional reshuffling of 1994 save for some small differences. The Cubs and Cardinals beginning in 1969 were placed in the East, while the Reds and Braves were put in the West. Those of you well versed in a map of the continental United States will understand that this made no sense. To correct this, they've been switched. Also, expansion teams have been added according to geography and Milwaukee, who joined the National League in 1998 was placed in the East so not to disrupt the Chicago-St. Louis rivalry. 

Step 2: Balance the schedules. These teams play 162 games. There is no reason that over that span they shouldn't be playing the same schedule. The rat-trap that is interleague was mentioned earlier and many seem to believe that in order to balance the schedule then you have to eliminate it or accept it across the board. Personally, I'm tired of it. The novelty is gone and the intense rivalries that we were promised haven't heated up. Nobody is fighting over Ohio Cup outcomes here in the buckeye state and what about those uber-intense Rockies-Twins battles. It was a fun experiment, but it's run its course. 

In the National League, teams would play everybody in their division 18 times. That's 7 x 18 which comes out to 124 baseball games. Then each team plays every other team in the opposite division 6 times. Add the 48 games and you get 162. This schedule is perfectly balanced and places additional importance on divisional games, this will be touched on later. In the American League teams would play their own division 18 times each. That's 6 x 18 which comes out to 108 baseball games. They'll play the other division 6 times each. This comes out to 150 games, which leaves 12 games, but that can be solved by making 4 game series and spreading the remaining games across the entirety of the schedule. I don't know how to make that as fair as possible, but we'll let the scientists in Washington tinker with the final drawings. 

Step 3: Fix the postseason. The unbalanced schedule's biggest problem is that it often leaves some of the top 8 teams out of the mix and on the other side the current system occasionally rewards teams that have no business being in the playoffs a chance to win it all, such as the 2005 San Diego Padres who finished 82-80, the worst team to ever make the playoffs. You may be asking yourself, "Sean, you want to return to only the 4 division winners making it to the postseason?" Of course not, silly. What I would like to see implemented is that the top two teams in the each division are awarded with a postseason appearance. This means that 8 teams still make the postseason (the perfect number for baseball, but that's a different argument) only now it means that weak teams such as the 05 Padres or the 06 Cardinals will be less likely to sneak into the playoffs by virtue of having a weak division. 

Once in the playoffs, there are a couple ways this thing could be organized. I'd prefer to keep the first round as a best of 5 so that we don't extend the season anymore than it already is. The first way is that the first place team in division A plays the second place team in division B and vice versa OR and this is what I'd love to see, a true division championship series. First place against second place. You have to win your division in one way or the other and I really don't like the idea of a second place team winning in any sport, especially the one that puts the most importance on finishing first in a division. If you want to place a premium importance on finishing first in a division then give the first place team home field for 4 out of 5 home games. Teams would definitely vie for that. Once the divisional series were completed then the rest of the playoffs would continue on as usual. 

In this format, any team left out of the playoffs has nothing and no one to blame for missing the playoffs but themselves. Baseball fans get pennant races back in a similar form to how they used to be and the schedule is perfectly fair for everyone. Who do I need to talk to get this implemented?