Baseball commissioner Bud Selig would be the first to tell you that his game is quite healthy, thank you, and that the changes that have taken place during his reign have all worked out splendidly.
He’d be partially right. The big picture, however, reveals a few rips in the polyester.
Splitting each league into three divisions and adding a wild card team to the postseason has been a good thing. It’s increased fan interest in many markets, and the necessity of play-in games the past 3 years has brought additional attention nationally.
The downside? By going to an unbalanced scheduled — teams play opponents in their own division a lot more than teams outside of it — has essentially handed postseason slots to the Yankees and Red Sox almost every year, and doomed the Orioles, Blue Jays and Rays to infrequent windows of opportunity.
On its face, the unbalanced schedule seems like a good idea, but the revenue disparities between the clubs in the AL East make it an exercise in futility. There’s no salary cap on the horizon, and revisiting the balanced schedule is worth looking at.
Interleague play began in 1997, and while Selig raves about it’s success, the truth is, it’s lost quite a bit of luster. One of the major issues is that there are too many interleague matchups that lack real marquee value. Royals-Rockies? Pirates- Mariners? Couple that with the two dedicated interleague playing periods during the season, and a lot of those games get lost in the shuffle.
When baseball went from 28 to 30 teams in 1998, Selig’s Milwaukee Brewers switched leagues, from the AL to the NL. The logic behind that was that each league needed to have an even number of teams, so the AL had 14 clubs and the NL 16. With the tri-division set-up, the senior circuit had 2 five’s and a six, and the AL 2 fives and a four.
If interleague play is here to stay, baseball should go with a pair of 15-club leagues, with three divisions in each league. Move somebody from the NL to the AL. (My pick: send Houston from the NL Central to the AL West.) With this format, there would be an interleague game everyday. With just a single interleague matchup on the schedule daily, it would get a lot more national attention. As things stand now, the lone NL matchup during the interleague periods gets no love at all.
Some have suggested over the years that baseball blow up its traditional American League-National League structure and realign like pro football did when the NFL and AFL merged. I’ve never embraced that concept, if for no other reason than baseball fans, in general, consider their record book sacrosanct. Football fans, not so much, since their rules seem to change every other year.
Two 15 team leagues and a balanced schedule; sounds like a pretty simple fix to me.
Phil Wood is a contributor to Nats Xtra on MASN. Contact him at philwood@
washingtonexaminer.com.
