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Kevin Baker is a novelist and historian who is currently at work on a social history of New York City baseball, to be published by Pantheon.
I’m old-school. That is to say, I’m a hidebound, head-in-the-sand, troglodyte traditionalist. Especially when it comes to baseball.
I was vehemently opposed to the entire idea of including a wild card in the playoffs. I hated the idea of inter-league play with the white-hot intensity of a thousand suns. I even viewed the original idea of dividing the leagues into divisions, a-way back in 1969, with a gimlet eye.
(One exception: I have always liked the designated hitter, mostly because I can’t stand watching professional athletes do something they can’t do, i.e., pitchers trying to hit. We don’t make linebackers kick field goals or goalkeepers—hockey or soccer—take penalty shots. Do those games suffer for it?)
So I’m none too happy with the latest proposals to expand the baseball playoffs yet again—and not just because they’re likely to extend the season through Thanksgiving.
It seems to me that all of these adjustments to how baseball decides its champions detract from the great beauty of the sport, which is the long season. As far as I have been able to discover, the whole concept of league play started with professional baseball. Before the National Association began play in 1871, teams in all sports, amateur and professional, had challenge matches with other clubs or went on barnstorming tours, but that was it.
The whole idea of a months-long, league competition, with the same number of games played against all participants, was something new under the sun. What’s more, it was something that worked wonderfully well to emphasize the merits of the game: the hairsbreadth margin on which baseball is played, the way in which true class reveals itself only through so many accumulations of minute advantages.
The more rounds of playoffs you have, the more teams you include that didn’t finish first, the more random games you have against teams in another leagues playing by other rules, the more you diminish that beauty and smudge the mark of a true champion.
That’s the old-school theory, anyway. I have to admit that, in practice, while the wild card has annihilated some pennant races, it has created others, and both the modern playoffs and (some) inter-league games have created a brand-new excitement (although someone should look into why it is that, in recent years, so few playoff series have gone to their maximum, five or seven games).
Never content to leave well enough alone, Bud Selig and his merry band of magnates have been floating various proposals to add a new wild card team or more in each league. The leading idea so far seems to involve adding one more wild card, the number-five team in each league, which would then have a one-game “play-in” with the number-four team to determine which would continue in the playoffs.
They are also looking at new realignments to the leagues and divisions, such as transferring the Houston Astros to the American League so both circuits would have an uneven fifteen teams. Or, they are suggesting that all the divisions be abolished, period, leaving all the teams in each league to fight it out, with the top five making the playoffs for a competition as described above.
To all of which, I say, “Blecch!”
To be sure, the ideas have their merits. That one-game play-in idea for the wild card teams would leave the winner at a real disadvantage for at least the first round of the playoffs, thereby putting a much greater premium on finishing first in one’s division. Moving Houston to the American League West, say, would not only even up the leagues and the divisions, but create an active rivalry between the two Texas teams and provide some succor for the poor Rangers, now stranded two time zones away from all their division rivals.
Yet all of this sounds like the death of a thousand cuts for everything that’s best about the game. Nothing man-made can long stay as it was. How soon will it be before we get a sixth, or a seventh, or an eighth wild card in each league?
Moving Houston, after a mere half-century in the National League, flouts baseball’s other greatest attribute, which is its sense of tradition. It was bad enough plucking the Milwaukee Brewers from the American League already. Are we now going to see teams shuttled back and forth regularly on further whims? And while the idea of the big, fifteen-team league has a certain purity, I think it was back in the nineteenth century that someone first said you can’t sell a twelfth-place team.
So…all that said, and considering that baseball will feel compelled to fix what isn’t broken sooner or later, how about a big, fat, radical change now?
I’m talking about a major realignment, one that will make all the necessary changes at once and set all of baseball on a path to create new rivalries and new traditions as quickly as possible. One that will address most issues of competitive imbalance by pitting teams of comparable resources and markets against each other as much as possible. One that will provide a whole passel of new playoff games and playoff teams; new revenue streams; and contain something for everybody—players, owners, and fans.
It will even fulfill Commissioner Selig’s absurd yearnings for baseball to go “international.” I mean beyond the widely ignored, triennial “World Baseball Classic,” which right now could just as soon be renamed the “World Meat Grinder for Japanese Pitching Arms.”
What I’m talking is four, brand-new leagues, set up as follows:
Workers Internationale League
Boston
New York Yankees
New York Mets
Philadelphia
Baltimore
Washington
San Juan, P.R. (expansion team)
Santo Domingo, D.R. (expansion team)
Rusty Sunbelt League
Pittsburgh
Cleveland
Cincinnati
Detroit
Toronto
Atlanta
Tampa Bay
Florida
Prairie League
Chicago Cubs
Chicago White Sox
Milwaukee
Minnesota
St. Louis
Kansas City
Houston
Texas
True West League
Denver
Arizona
San Diego
Los Angeles Dodgers
Los Angeles Angels at Somewhere or Other
San Francisco
Oakland
Seattle
Note, please, that everybody is plenty close to one another, preserving all existing rivalries—Yanks-Sox, Yanks-Mets, Cubs-Cards, Giants-Dodgers, etc.—while adding the chance to create new ones. What’s more, all the Beasts of the East—Yanks, Red Sox, Phillies, and (potentially) Mets—are bunched together, opening up all sorts of competitive possibilities. And four different teams get a chance to finish first, in a genuine, eight-team league.
Playoffs would all be best-four-of-seven, starting with 1-4 and 2-3 matchups within each league, then following with playoffs between the leagues, and the final World Series. This would mean 16 playoff teams. In order to accommodate the longer playoffs, the season could be reduced to 156 games, with maybe each team playing 12 games against the other teams in its league, then a three-game series against all the other teams—just so nobody complains that they never get to host the Yankees, Red Sox, or whomever. This would shave a week off the season, while another one could be trimmed by scheduling doubleheaders—separate admission, of course, to stifle the screams from the club owners.
No doubt, there would still be objections to teams losing three homes dates a season. But overall, with the addition of the two expansion teams, there would be 2,496 regular-season games, to the 2,430 there are at present. At the same time, the number of playoff games would increase exponentially, from the current 24-41 to 60-105. Plus, of course, the owners would get to pry their usual, extortionate entry fees from the expansion teams.
We can also expect objections that the markets for these new franchises, in Santo Domingo and San Juan, will be too poor to support major-league teams. But they will have the entire island of Puerto Rico and the whole nation of the Dominican Republic behind them, the most dedicated fan bases in the world, and added leverage in luring the best players in the world today into staying at home and playing for less. If major-league baseball really wants to take its game international, where better to start than a couple of baseball hotbeds within easy flying distance of the United States?
And just to make sure that everyone is happy, team rosters might be expanded by two or three players, to 27-28 a club, in order to deal with the condensed season and extended playoffs.
Of course, it’s impossible to believe that this new alignment, sheer genius that it is, will remain set in stone, either. Man is born to trouble as the sparks fly upwards, and baseball owners to messing with a good thing, baby. But these four leagues are set up on a regional basis that will allow them to be expanded rationally—as the owners come to look for more extortionate entrance fees—down the road.
For instance, each league could easily be expanded and split into two divisions someday, as follows:
Internationale League
Redemption Division
Montreal (all is forgiven!)
Boston
New York Yankees
New York Mets
Brooklyn (the real solution to the New York market advantage)
Philadelphia
Global Warming Division
Baltimore
Washington
Carolina
Jacksonville
San Juan
Santo Domingo
Rusty Sunbelt League
Nowhere-But-Up Division
Pittsburgh
Cleveland
Cincinnati
Detroit
Toronto
Columbus Thurbers
Salsa Division
Atlanta
Tampa Bay
Florida
Havana (hey, he’s got to die sometime)
Nashville
Nicaragua Clementes
Prairie League
Keillor-Terkel Raconteur Division
Chicago Cubs
Chicago White Sox
Minnesota
Milwaukee
Indianapolis
Memphis
I’ve-Seen-Fire-and-I’ve-Seen-Rain Division
St. Louis
Kansas City
Houston
Texas
San Antonio
New Orleans
True West League
Azteca Division
Arizona
San Diego
Los Angeles Dodgers
Los Angeles Angels
Mexico City
Mexico City (hey, they got 21 million people, they can handle two teams)
Grunge Division
Denver
San Francisco
Oakland
Seattle
Portland (because it’s just so nice)
Vancouver (win or lose, they’ll run amok)
Or something like that. You figure it out. But I say that if baseball is going to change, then change, and stop with all this picking it apart, one new wild card game at a time.
Oh, and as for the designated hitter? Of course it will be universal! What is this, the twentieth century?
Thank you for reading
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is the real solution, you definitely have a point there.
Best parts of the proposal: lumping the mega-market teams into one league, and adding teams in PR, the DR, and Mexico. Gotta get this done!
I also think the opening arguments sound a little absurd when you turn around and propose a 16 team playoffs. Why not only the top 2 of each league?
I do generally like the idea of a complete realignment, but I am not sure I would choose the same combinations. I kind of like the idea of two leagues, four 4-team divisions, no wild cards. Then you would not have to put the sox, yanks, phillies and mets into the same division but could still have them play each other in the regular season without introducing inter-league games.
Unfortunately your suggestion is far too sensible, and has the added disadvantage of having proved itself for nearly a quarter of a century, to ever be adopted by MLB.
Odd definition of traditionalist.
Personally, I like David Silverwood's proposal to just go back to two divisions. However, bowing to reality, I would still have two wildcards in each league. This would, at least, reduce the chances of some 83 win team winning a weak division. I admit to having some nostalgia at times for the pre-1969 alignment where you knew the best teams would play each other in the World Series but this is not realistic in today's world.
I have also wondered why there have been so few five or seven game series in recent years and almost none in the World Series. It may just be random chance but it seems as if a team is always down 2-0 or 3-1.
Why is this a bow to "reality" and Silverwood's advocacy of return a system that worked well from 1969-1993 and that was not crying out to be changed (unlike the "reality" we have now)somehow unreal?
Why the hell leagues waste time chasing mindless drones like that is the real mystery here.
a DH and like Pat Burrell before him he sucks. You balance a player's assets and liabilities. It's part of managing and putting together a team. Never trust a person who wants to "improve" baseball by trying to make it more like football.
Traditionalist my foot. If you're an AL team with a good lineup you don't even need a bench most games. What about players who were famous for pinch-hitting? Smoky Burgess, Manny Mota, Jim Eisenreich...that's baseball tradition too. All unnecessary with the DH. Manging your pinch-hitters and pitchers in long extra-inning games...certainly not as interesting with the DH. But God forbid somebody with an attention span of a mosquito has to be bored when a pitcher hits. Non-stop mindless action...that's the hallmark of our movies and our music today so why not baseball? Subtlety be damned. God save us from traditionalists such as the author of this piece.
If you’re going to be a traditionalist, go all in or go home. Man up, and reinstate baseball to the way God himself intended and channeled through Alexander Cartwright in the 1840s!
Actually, I expect that soon you'll hear calls for a lowering of the mound again, now that the offensive fraud of the steroid era has subsided, and the common offense-loving "baseball fan" will soon find it too boring.
For the record, I accept that the DH is here to stay. I also accept that Lady Gaga is here to stay, and sequels to "Meet The Fockers" are here to stay. Doesn't mean I have to like it or that I can't "rant" against it even though I may "not be a big fan" of them.