TDA Bullpen - Our Writers' Blog

Thursday, July 01, 2004

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus

...the Loudon County taxpayers will be stuffing the major league stocking before the end of next week, when MLB announces the "permanent" home of the Expos.

As I wrote the other day, one of several reasons why MLB focussed on our nation's capital was to remove the need to realign divisions. The elephantine types among our readers may remember that it was the proposed movement of just a single franchise -- the Chicago Cubs -- from one division to another that brought down the Fay Vincent Regime. Under the Selig Regency and Reign, of course, there have been 13 changes in division membership, 15 if you count expansion inserting two new teams.

So a looong time ago, back in 1997, Commissioner Selig proposed what was then called "radical realignment", a proposal that was seriously considered by owners in 1998. Since Selig got what he wanted when the Brewers were transferred between leagues, restoring to Milwaukee the seemingly more prestigious national league imprimatur, radical realignment was shelved.

At the time, being a knee-jerk conservative in several areas in baseball, I was adamantly opposed to the idea of shuffling up the leagues. Our sport has such a long and involved relationship with its traditions, and fan identity at one time was so tied up with being a "national league" or an "american league" fan that people actually rooted for one side or the other in the All-star game, they'd always root for "their" league in the World Series regardless of whether their favorite team was playing or not. There were perceived differences between the NL game and the AL game: the NL was a "fastball" league, while the AL was a "breaking ball" league, the NL was a "speed and little ball" league, the AL was a "three-run homer and slugging league", the NL was fast and the AL was slow, etc. Umpires in the NL called the high strike; umpires in the AL called side to side strikes on the black. There were even NL families (the Carpenters, the O'Malleys, et alia) and AL families (the MacPhails, the Yawkeys et al).

Of course, many of these differences had more to do with inertia on the part of general management and ownership, a little with separate umpire groups, and some differences in the types of ballparks being played in (more astroturf multipurpose stadia in the NL, a few more bandboxes in the AL).

What we've seen since the radical realignment concept was first floated is a more or less complete erosion of any meaningful differences between the leagues -- save the DH. Free agency certainly mixed up the leagues from the get-go, but the relaxation of interleague trade rules starting in the 1970 also accelerated the decreasing distinction between an "AL" and "NL" "type" player. Now upwards of a hundred players a year switch leagues. Nationwide satellite TV and interleague play have exposed players to nationwide audiences, and the purported differences turned out to be a bit less than fans might've expected. The NL and AL offices have been elminated and replaced by a central MLB organization; AL and NL presidencies are largely ceremonial. A single umpiring pool is used and the umpires rotate among NL, AL, and interleague games. The strike zone, insofar as it could be called "consistent", is thus uniform across the leagues. I for one don't feel as beholden to "my" league as I once did. And the destruction of an ancient league has a precedent: baseball oversaw the dismantling of the venerable American Association when AAA was contracted to two leagues.

In short, we're effectively playing one big league now -- again, with the exception of the DH, which is nevertheless trotted out to fans of the NL during interleague, and "old school" pitchers batting is exposed to AL fans.

I don't mean to revive the never-ending DH debate here, but it's the only substantive rule that's different between the leagues. And certainly there is just no real difference between styles of play and the basic ground rules.

So whatever objections I had to radical realignment -- and I can't rightly remember the rational ones, now -- would seem to be a bit unreasonable at this point.

To digess just a bit, I've contended for a while baseball should expand to 32 teams and stick there for a while. (I see our colleague Rob Neyer has a link to an article on that subject, but I don't pay for "insider" information from competing web sites, so TDA readers will have to summarize for me.) I feel that with properly-distributed markets -- another team in New York, another team in the Pacific Northwest -- there's enough market for 32 profitable teams, and having a number of teams that is a power of two provides many, many more scheduling and playoff options.

That, however, is a hypothetical that's not going to happen while the owners are crying poor mouth and raking in the bucks (as opposed to the last two periods of expansion, when the owners maintained all was well but really, really wanted the expansion fees.) But radical realignment does begin to make some sense when you consider the eccentricities that the current balanced/unbalanced and interleague play schedule requirements produce (such as teams flying from Seattle to San Juan and back to San Francisco, team vs. team season schedules being played out in the course of two weeks, and a host of others I could mention.) There's an economic justification in grouping teams closer together geographically: reduced travel costs, to be sure, but also a likely improvement in TV numbers as more clubs are able to play more of their games in their "local" prime time.

I'm not averse to joining in hypotheticals, of course, so I thought it would be fun to take a look at a potential realignment scheme or two, if we assume the Northern Virginia group will win the Expos franchise.

Northeast	Great Lakes	Southern	Midwest	Old West	Pacific
Yanks	Det	TB	Min	Ari	S F
Mets	Cle	Flo	Mil	Col	LA
Phi	Cin	Atl	Cubs	Hou	Ana
Bos	Tor	VA	Chisox	Tex	Oak
Pit	????	Bal	St. L	KC	SD

Of course, there's two problems with this. Seattle is homeless, unless we want to have asymmetrical divisions and stick a sixth into a Pacific division and leave the Great Lakes at only four. This is the case with the NL Central and the AL West right now, of course, and it's one of the more glaring problems with "fairness" for fans of the NL Central teams right now and their 20% reduced chance of making the playoffs on day one of the season.

One might suggest the following riff, though: move Pittsburgh into the Great Lakes division. Put Seattle into the Pacific division. Then move the Oakland franchise to New Jersey and the Northeast division.

With the exception of the "Old West" division, every club within each division above would play its division rivals within the same time zone.

Baltimore, by the way, while close to Philadelphia was historically a more southern city by a long shot. I haven't been to Baltimore in ten years, so I can't comment on what it's like now, but it seems like a reasonable grouping.

Of course, the first time a franchise moves cities, this might get messed up. But remember Major League baseball's anti-trust exemption allows it to control the movement of franchises.

This doesn't quite address the alleged big-market/small-market gaps, but I think it's pretty close.

Retain the current play-off system, I'd assume -- "natural" divisions are easier to come by in groups of five right now, anyway. But the schedule could now be "balanced" with unbalanced divisional rivalry play as follows.

Each team could play two four-game home-and-away series with all non-division teams. That's 100 games. Wipe six games off the schedule to make the players happy. For the remaining 56 games, play each of your four division rivals 14 times - a three-game home series and three-game away series, a four-game home series and four-game home series.

Properly set up, such a schedule could cut total travel miles in half.

The wild card becomes more fair because everybody is facing exactly the same opponents outside of the division.

posted by The Crank 5:30 PM