Re-alignment...a good idea that MLB is going to screw up.

15 teams in each league? Good.
No divisions? Bad.

Last week it leaked that Major League Baseball was considering proposing re-alignment during the upcoming collective bargaining talks. The plan is to take a team from the National League (likely the D-Backs or Astros) and move that team to the American League.

But on top of that, the proposal is to eliminate divisions and to have the top 4 or 5 teams in each league go into the playoffs.

MLB fixes one problem and creates an even worse one. Having equal number of teams in each league (and each division) would potentially fix the unfair scheduling that has plagued MLB since interleague play was introduced. Finally it would be possible to set up a schedule that would be fair and equal between each team inside of a division.

But then if you remove the divisions, you create the same problem all over again, except worse. There aren't enough games in the season to accommodate creating and equal and fair schedule for every team in your league unless you increase to a 174 game schedule (6 games verses every team in baseball). Even if the schedule was expanded, it destroys the logic in having the two leagues. The reason divisions were created was to ensure that rivalries were preserved as the league expanded and that true, tighter pennant races were created by teams that were known well by each other.

In the end, I don't want to possibly see the Cubs going down to the final series of the season possibly having to play the Royals to win the division because they already played their 6 games against the Cardinals in April and May.

The only way to make this work is to do some sort of NFL type of scheduling when dealing with interleague play that pits the better teams from previous season against each other. Don't ask me to explain that to you...it would take too long, but, this would allow for more games to be played against teams in your own league.

But for a more sane approach, once you have balanced divisions and balanced leagues, you can create a fair schedule for every team in each division. Quite simply it looks like this:

-18 games against each team in your division (72 games)
-6 games against each team in the other two divisions in your league (60 games)
-6 games against each team in one of the divisions in the other league (30 games)

162 games…simple!

Each year a division in one league plays the division in the other league, so the NL East would play the AL West and the NL Central would play the AL East and the NL West would play the AL Central…and this would be rotated through every 3 years.

This isn’t rocket science. Yes, you have to eliminate the rule that interleague play can only happen for a few weeks during the season and you would eliminate the requirement for interleague rivalry games (like the Cubs having to play the White Sox every year). But we would finally have a schedule that was fair. No more of this bullshit where ever single year the Cardinals get to beat up on the Royals while the Cubs have to play the White Sox. No more situations where the Cubs have a series against the Yankees while the Cardinals get to play the Orioles instead.

So kudos to Major League Baseball for finally floating the idea of balancing out the leagues, but shame on them for screwing it up by eliminating the divisions floating the idea of eliminating divisions.

Major League Baseball just doesn't get it.

Baseball moves to give the Cubs more chances to get swept out of the playoffs

It sounds like the GMs have given overwhelmingly support to a plan to increase the number of playoff teams from 8 to 10.

Most of you know I hate the wild card already, so it's obvious that I'm against this.

For me, adding more teams to the playoffs punishes those teams who have played consistently well all year long by putting wild card teams, who are often heading into the playoffs on a hot streak, up against them.

It's kind of a stupid argument, I know, but the baseball playoff are quite wonderful compared to other sports. There are games almost everyday and in the blink of an eye, they are over in less than a month...almost. Since the wild card and the Fox TV contract, the playoff schedule has become a bit more whacked. Expanding the playoffs make baseball just that much more like the other major sports leagues.

So what does an expanded wild card mean for baseball? Well, it all depends on how they want to implement it. I think the most obvious scenario would be to have a simple 3 game series between the two wild card teams and then expand the second round (currently called the division series) into a best of seven series. Based on how scheduling of the baseball playoffs has been in the past, this would add one full work the the post season. So the question must be asked at that point, would that push the playoffs too late into the year?

I really want to say yes, but based on how the playoffs have gone since 2000, I don't think it would affect things too much. Another option would be to start the regular season a week earlier into March. I think that would be worse. We've seen more bad weather in late March than we have in early November.

The other option, reduce the season by a week or knock it back down to 154 games. I highly doubt anyone would be on board for that. Asking 20 out of the 30 teams to take a revenue knock of that sort would never fly. Another option...adding scheduled double headers again. Traditional double headers have the same problem as reducing the schedule, and scheduling day-night double headers might satisfy the owners, but would never fly with the players union.

What will hopefully happen (and I know it won't because of baseball) is that this expanded playoff system will push MLB to start seriously looking at realignment and the making the regular season schedule more fair. On top of that, possibly even considering expansion to make a more even 32 teams (and 8 four team divisions???).

Regardless, unless something drastic were to happen in the next few months, baseball likely will not implement this until 2012 when, hopefully, the next collective bargaining agreement is completed. Everyone seems to be on board with this except me. So I guess I'll just cave.

Expand the playoffs? No…contract them!

The rumor is that Major League Baseball is in the process of proposing expanding the playoffs to include 10 teams from the current 8 team format.

How do they intend to achieve this? The most likely scenarios would be either a play in game between two wild card teams in each league or a short three game series between said teams.

I would imagine that this would also coincide with the expansion of the division series from 5 to 7 games….and thus pushing the MLB playoffs out past the Super Bowl.

I think baseball is going about this all wrong.

They shouldn’t be looking to add more teams to the playoffs…they should find a way to eliminate the division series all together.

So here is my proposal: The division winner with the crappiest record doesn’t get in the playoffs.

Yep…this year, no Cincinnati Reds. No Texas Rangers.

I dont' know about you, but I could have gone without seeing this guy in October.

Ok…and here are my reasons…

1. Award teams that have played well all season. Avoid letting a team that was hot for the last month of the season to come in and sweep through the playoffs defeating a team that played consistently well all year round.
2. It places more emphasis on playing well the entire season. I hate the trade deadline where teams one player that allows them to eke into the playoffs. This can help eliminate that and force teams to try to build a winning team earlier in the season.
3. It adds excitement for good teams at the end of the season. People talk about expanding the playoff to add more teams into the excitement…to add more interest nationwide into the game. Personally, I don’t care about that. We’ve seen that the wildcard has brought inter-divisional competition to the playoff race. Why not make the division titles inter-divisional too by eliminating the crappiest division winner? It serves a similar purpose.  Let these teams, like the Phillies, have something to play for during the last week of the season. 
4. It forces MLB to re-examine the schedule…hopefully making it a little more balanced for all the teams.
5. It ensures the Florida Marlins will never win another World Series title.
6. No November World Series.
7. TBS will have fewer games to broadcast.  This results in less exposure for Craig Sager and his stupid 1970’s used car salesman suits.
8. Less playoff fatigue. I honestly believe one of the reason playoff rating have been down so much over the last 10 years is because of the wild card. Adding the extra round to the playoffs makes each game a little less important, and by the time the World Series comes around, more casual fans just don’t care anymore.
9. Less cost on my season ticket holder post-season ticket package. Seriously, when I have to buy a post season ticket package for the Cubs, I have to sell a kidney or something because come September, I’m pretty much broke from paying $7.50 for an Italian Beef at the ball park all season.
10. Just hurry up and let the Yankees get their World Series title faster so we can all focus on the off-season, which is really the best and happiest time of the year for us Cubs fans.

So there you have it. I think Major League Baseball has this all wrong, and I think I’ve done a pretty good job explaining why.

Hurry up and just give them the damn trophy.

So now that the division series is over, we’ll have to wait a month before we get to see the Yankees destroy the Rangers and the Phillies crush the Giants.

What to do about MLB Scheduling: Part 2...some simple steps

On Friday I started complaining about the pathetic state of the MLB schedule. I know that they have hired people to create the MLB schedule for a number of years now. It isn't an easy job with the constraints that baseball has put on these people creating this schedule. As I outlined last week, Bud Selig and the owners have absolutely destroyed the nice symmetry that the schedule once had by things like unequal division sizes, expansion, and interleague play...all along with keeping to the rigidity of 162 games.

Well, here are some simple solutions to try to fix the symmetry of the schedule.

1. Fix the divisions.
30 teams, 6 divisions…PUT 5 TEAMS IN EACH DAMN DIVISION!!! The easiest thing to do would be to take a team from the NL Central (6 teams) and move them to the AL West (4 teams)…but the only team that would fit in this scenario would be Houston, and I don’t think Major League Baseball wants both Texas teams in the American League West. So, what I would do is move the Astros to the NL West and put the Rockies in the AL West.

Ok, we now have equal sized divisions…yea!

Oh no! How do we deal with the fact that we have an odd number of teams in each league? That puts interleague play into issue. NEXT!

2. Spread out Interleague play
Now, let me just say that I flat out HATE interleague play. But, it has become a fact of life now…so let’s use it to our advantage.

Someone needs to explain to me why interleague play only can happen during a few weeks in May and June. If we take interleague play and spread it throughout the whole season, we solve the problem of having an odd number of teams in each league. At any one point, there will be at least 1 interleague series going on.

Ok…and while we are on interleague play…

3. DUMP THE RIVALY SERIES.
No more of the Cardinals beating up on the Royals every year. If the Cardinals get to play the Royals…then the Cubs should get to beat up on them as well. Get rid of these games, unless every team in the division gets to play the same team.

******************
Ok, so I’m now claiming that these 3 steps would fix the fairness of the MLB schedule

So we now get into the nuts and bolts of how this would work.

With a 162 game schedule…we basically have 54 three game series throughout the course of the season. Now some of the series are 4 games, some are 2 games…but it all evens out to 54 series. Let’s look at how we could spread this out.

Let’s start with intra-league, out of division play. The best and simplest way to do this is to have a home and an away series against each team in the other two divisions of your league. That is 20 series (5 teams, 2 divisions, 2 series).
Ok, so we have 20 series (60 games) from that, leaving us with 34 series (and 102 games).

Then, you have interleague play…you can go a few ways on this…
1. 1 series vs. each team in one division from the other league
2. 1 series vs. each team in 2 divisions from the other league
3. 2 series vs. each team in one division from the other league
My proposal is to expand interleague play to 10 series, and do option #2…which will ensure a series against a rivalry team 2 out of every 3 years.

So we now have used up 30 series (90 games) leaving us with 24 series and 72 games.

Intra-division play…becomes fairly simple. A team will play the other team in its own division (4 teams), in six series, 3 home, 3 away. Six times 4 is 24…add that to the 30 out of division games…that’s 54.

54 series!

162 games!

Hallelujah!

Problem solved!!!!

Can this work? I don’t know, but this becomes a fair schedule. There are the small oddities here that would have to be worked out…basically the fact the in this scenario, only intra-division series could be 2 or 4 games. That might not work. To make the schedule a little more flexible, we might have to look at having some unevenness in the home/away teams…the Cubs might play the Dodgers only 2 games at home and 4 games on the road while playing the Giants 4 games at home and 2 games on the road, or something like that. That would hurt the “fairness” that I’m trying to fix, but only a little bit.

Would this ever be done? It would be a seriously hard sell. Having a team switch leagues would be very difficult, and I believe as part of the agreement when Denver was granted a franchise was that the team would not be forced to change leagues (for some period of time). But I think a realignment could happen if enough people screamed about it.

The other obstacle…removal of the mandatory rivalry games. Teams like the Cubs and White Sox would scream bloody murder if they didn’t get a chance to compete for the BP Cup every year. The added revenue from these rivalry games, for some of the smaller market clubs, is important too. Cincinnati, Cleveland, Kansas City and the like are much more likely to sell out when they play their geological rival from the other league. That’s some big money. But it doesn’t help with the integrity of the schedule.

So, there you have it.

Part three will be later this week…throwing some other variables into the system.

Could the DH actually go away and will the AL and NL actually merge into one league?

Earlier this week, the commissioner's office announced that they were forming a rules committee, officially titled "The Special Committee for On-Field Matters". It's makeup is similar to what the NFL currently has in their Competition Committee, with the idea that during each off-season, this committee will evaluate possible rules changes to help protect the players, and to fix problems with the game in general.

Many people have speculated that this was to help expand instant replay use in baseball...and that likely will happen with this committee in place.

But the whispers going around over the last week have been that this committee may be been formed as a way to unify all the rules in baseball.

What does that mean? Well, Bud Selig, during his reign over the MLB, has slowly been working to merge the National and American Leagues. There are no longer any league presidents. There are no separate NL and AL umpires anymore. And the most drastic change, interleague play.

Basically we don't have two separate leagues anymore...except for one thing: The Designated Hitter.

It is my belief that Selig will want his ending legacy to be the merging the NL and AL into one league. He has continued to state that he plans to retire in 2012 (assuming the Mayans were wrong).

Now I don't know if the DH will ever go away. The players union wants to keep it desperately as it is a way to have aging hitters stay in the game without the strain of playing in the field. More starting players = higher salaries on a roster. And the MLBPA is ridiculously powerful.

Baseball, in general, has worked well with different rules for each of the leagues and it satisfies fans both pro and con on the DH matter to have 1/2 the teams playing with it and 1/2 not. I personally hate the DH, but for me, having equal rules throughout all of baseball is more important, especially if we are going to have inter-league play (which I hate too).

We'll see what happens here. This is uncharted territory for baseball. Will Selig try to add one last crowning achievement onto his reign as commish...One Major League?