As he did with expansion, the automated strike zone, instant replay, the zombie runner, the golden at bat, etc. etc. etc. over the years Rob Manfred opened his mouth in front of a microphone and spouted thoughts about realignment. And for the last few days everyone has been talking about this.
We’ve seen proposals for four team divisions.
There have been people mentioning 8 team divisions if/when MLB expands to 32 teams.
Your typical AL/NL north, south, east, and west divisions.
Balanced schedules?
Moving
teams across leagues?
Eliminating the leagues all together!
All of these ideas have pluses and minuses. Anything that really only works with expansion should have to wait until there actually is expansion. Remember when the AL West had four teams and the NL Central had 6? If there are geographic divisions then you would want to make sure those expansion teams ended up settled first before you draw up that map. Considering we don’t even know for sure that the Athletics will end up in Las Vegas or the Rays in Tampa or St. Pete or Orlando – you get the picture.
I’ll come right out and say my personal belief is that this is the leagues need to stay. As long as you’re going to have the World Series it’s a contest between the AL and the NL. It’s not just two best teams that made it through a playoff gauntlet. They might be vestigial labels now but they should stay.
The one interesting idea I heard mentioned was to do it randomly.
Thirty teams, thirty-two teams, doesn’t matter.
Balanced schedule? Doesn’t’ matter.
So the idea is this: in August, just like now, the MLB schedules are released for the next season. You’d know who you’re playing, when, and where. And how many times. Just like today. It it were up to me, you’d know your league. Because I think that’s still a part of the history of the game to continue. There is no reason to mix up the leagues or replace them with East and West to have some type of structure to determine, eventually, who faces off in the World Series.
Then you’d have your Winter Meetings and free agency. Just like today.
But in Spring Training, divisions would be drawn.
So your division would be disconnected from schedule. But is that really an issue? There’s no reason Red Sox-Yankees, Dodgers-Padres, Mets-Braves etc couldn’t still have a few more games, like they do now because they’re in the same division.
Now, in this example I would still have AL and NL. So the randomness is a little less.
If you want to go whole hog though, there are 29 other teams…
But what it would mean is that teams can’t simply “budget down” to their division rivals. Right now if the Angels think the AL West will be weak next season, they can say “we don’t need one more reliever.” We’ve see the Minnesota Twins and Cleveland Guardians do this in the AL Central. Heck, the Cubs sort of did this over the winter trading Cody Bellinger for salary relief and are now getting punished by the Brewers.
It would be wildly different. You could have rivals but not know how important they were. You could get a “good draw” or a “bad draw” – stronger or weaker teams. But every team would be in the same boat. Your division could, in some scenarios, include the Yankees and Mets and Dodgers and Astros but also it could be the Pirates and Rays (in a down year like 2025).
If I were commissioner I admit I’d probably keep things close to how they are now. But if I had to make a change why do cardinal direction divisions like the other sports. Why not swing for the fences and re-imagine the whole thing. It might fail spectacularly but baseball has been going 150 years, there’s time to rethink too and try again.
