Joe’s Notes: What MLB Expansion Needs to Get Right

The A’s are moving to Las Vegas, we learned last week for the umpteenth time. It is, to be fair, a more significant step than usual. They’re actually buying the land. Still, we’ve known this was coming. If the probability is 99% now, it was 95% before. That’s a five-fold difference, but it’s a small five-fold.

It’s always sad when a team moves. It’s never a happy occasion. Also, MLB owners have been lying for years about the financials of running a baseball team. They are making money hand over fist, with even the least valuable MLB club—the Marlins—valued by Forbes at an even one billion dollars this offseason after checking in at $172 million in 2004. In less than twenty years, the value of the least valuable MLB franchise is up more than 500%. Inflation in the United States over that timeframe is 60%.

Even acknowledging the sadness of the A’s leaving Oakland, though, and leaving no charity for A’s owner John Fisher, the move makes sense, for the A’s and for Major League Baseball. It could have been different, and the A’s could have done things differently, and Major League Baseball could have done things differently, especially the thing where they gave the Giants the rights to San José and boxed the A’s into a place they couldn’t fit. Oakland, the city, didn’t make the wrong decision—the price the A’s were asking was enormous—but sometimes, things don’t work out. The A’s options were to 1) engage in a costly upgrade of the Oakland Coliseum that would still leave them second fiddle in the market, 2) build a beautiful new stadium themselves that would still leave them second fiddle in the market, or 3) go somewhere a city would be willing to pay for much of the beautiful new stadium themselves, a place the A’s could finally be the top dog when it came to baseball. It isn’t quite this simple, of course—part of Fisher’s calculus, a part that deservedly enrages Oaklanders, is that stadiums these days often come with more real estate ventures lumped in than just the ballpark—but if there were 29 baseball teams and you were choosing where to put the 30^th, Oakland would not be considered, while Las Vegas would top the list. This doesn’t make it suck any less for A’s fans, but for the rest of us?

To make the Las Vegas advantages a little more clear: Property values and taxes are such that the cost of living in Las Vegas is 30% lower than the cost of living in Oakland, something that doesn’t translate one to one to stadium affordability but exhibits a strong correlation. There is no entrenched team in Las Vegas already, so while the A’s will compete in a sense with the Raiders and Knights, they’ll be in a better position to do so than even in other two-sport cities, like Indianapolis. If I’m reading the Census data correctly, Las Vegas’s metropolitan population grew by 19% between 2010 and 2020. Among the fifty largest American metros, that ranks tenth, while the Bay Area ranks 27^th over the same time frame, with almost all the Bay Area’s growth coming earlier in the decade. Las Vegas is, simply, a good place to put a professional sports team right now, and it absolutely sucks to say this, but Oakland is not. I’m gutted for A’s fans, like so many others, and I wish Fisher had a heart and made this work. But this is different from the Sonics leaving Seattle.

What this does bring closer is the eventual expansion of Major League Baseball from 30 teams to 32, something that’s long been on the table but has been waiting on the A’s and the Rays to figure out their ballpark situations. The A’s is, by the looks of it, figured out. That leaves the Rays in a deadlock with Tampa while Montréal and other cities beckon.

I feel strongly about few things in the expansion situation. I don’t know whether Portland and Nashville are the best places for new teams or merely the most consistently loud. I don’t know whether Major League Baseball’s tradition of placing close geographic teams in opposite leagues should or shouldn’t be maintained. I do know, though, that the American League and National League must stay, as opposed to switching to an Eastern and Western League, and I know that each league needs two divisions of eight, not four divisions of four.

Keeping the leagues with their same names and same teams is obvious: It’s history. It’s tradition. It’s part of the soul of baseball, and nothing is broken enough with the setup that we should dissolve leagues older than the World Series itself. The Dodgers are a National League team. The Yankees are an American League team. There is no value to be gained by proposals that switch those to West and East.

The divisions piece is less evident, but bear with me. Let’s start by saying the Major Leagues expand in Nashville and Portland, with Portland going to the National League and Nashville going to the American League (to assuage ownership in Seattle and Atlanta, respectively). Let’s say the Rays move to Montréal after all, but that the league allows them to stay in a league with the Blue Jays and doesn’t try to do something like swap the Brewers back to the AL in exchange. That leaves us with two options for setup.

In one option, the correct option, we have two divisions of eight in each league. They look like this:

AL West	AL East	NL West	NL East
Anaheim	Baltimore	Arizona	Atlanta
Chicago	Boston	Chicago	Cincinnati
Houston	Cleveland	Colorado	Miami
Kansas City	Detroit	Los Angeles	Milwaukee
Las Vegas	Montreal	Portland	New York
Minnesota	Nashville	San Diego	Philadelphia
Seattle	New York	San Francisco	Pittsburgh
Texas	Toronto	St. Louis	Washington

In the other option, the incorrect option, we have four divisions of four in each league. They look like this:

AL Southwest	AL Northeast	NL West	NL Northeast
Anaheim	Boston	Los Angeles	New York
Houston	Montreal	Portland	Philadelphia
Las Vegas	New York	San Diego	Pittsburgh
Texas	Toronto	San Francisco	Washington
AL Northwest	AL East	NL Central	NL East
Chicago	Baltimore	Arizona	Atlanta
Kansas City	Cleveland	Chicago	Cincinnati
Minnesota	Detroit	Colorado	Miami
Seattle	Nashville	St. Louis	Milwaukee

There are travel distances associated with each, of course, and you break up a few close geographic teams, but those issues exist already. Pittsburgh and Philadelphia are in the same state but not the same division right now, while one’s in a division with Miami. It isn’t a problem. Also, as the schedule balances out, travel becomes less and less associated with what division a team is in. Some people are using the travel issues in the 4×4 solution to justify abolishing the AL and the NL. These people do not like baseball. They are blindly attached to the 4×4 solution, when the 4×4 solution is no solution at all, but is instead a problem unto itself. The solution is the 2×8 model, and this is why:

The important thing is competition. In a 2×8 world, playoff format flexibility is boundless. You might not have as many division races in total, but the ones you have will be meaningful in virtually any proposed playoff format, instead of having something like the current setup where the third division winner still has to play in the Wild Card Series. By breaking up the Central Divisions, especially the AL Central, this should also create a world where winning the division consistently means something impressive. Division races only matter if they’re a point of pride or if they have a large associated benefit. Right now, there’s some of the former and some of the latter. In the 2×8 world, both pride and benefit will increase, in correspondence with the difficulty. We are dangerously close to seeing a sub-.500 team win a division as it stands right now. Lower the number of teams in each division, and that level of farce may be an annual occurrence.

So, as we take this penultimate step towards a world ripe for 32 MLB teams, please tell your friends: When the day comes, we need fewer divisions than we have now. It will make baseball better. The alternative will make it worse.

What’s Happened in the National League?

There was a moment this offseason when we thought the Giants had signed Aaron Judge. There was another when we thought the Giants had signed Carlos Correa. At each of those moments, the general impression of the National League was this:

Seven teams are going for it.

All six of the Mets, Phillies, Braves, Dodgers, Giants, and Padres appeared at those moments to be all-in, and with the reality that someone was going to win the Central, this made the National League a straightforward affair.

That isn’t what’s happened.

Instead, entering play today, only Atlanta appears confidently assured of a playoff spot, and we have a full twelve teams with realistic hopes of playing well into October.

It isn’t just the Giants, though they of course ended up with neither Judge nor Correa. They’re below where they were expected to be, but they aren’t the big shifter here. The bigger surprises, speaking relatively to that point in time, are the Phillies, the Mets, the Dodgers, the Padres, and the Pirates.

The Padres have been playing fine ball, and so have the Mets, while the Phillies and Dodgers haven’t much underperformed their rosters (especially their post-injury rosters). But all four of these teams are not playoff locks, and a very good question is: Why? The answer, I’d offer, is that money is still not all that valuable in baseball.

This is heresy, of course, and it’s especially heretical while we’re all trying to beat up John Fisher with our keyboards. Money can, however, only buy you so many wins.

A substantial development in the post-steroid era of baseball has been the realization that not only is the best value available cheap, but sometimes the best players are too. Players, we’re growing to realize, don’t peak as late as we thought. The best definition I’ve recently seen of a player’s prime is that it starts whenever they get acclimated to the league and then ends after they turn 30. That 30 piece isn’t new, but the idea that Ronald Acuña Jr. has been at his best for a few years now is very new. Add in that we’re still fewer than two decades removed from an era when names themselves carried a massive price in free agent markets (the departure from this is an effective, quick way to explain the Billy Beane revolution), and what we have is players generally playing their best baseball through the first six years of their MLB career, after which point they begin to fall off.

Coincidentally, there are three years of arbitration. Coincidentally, it takes three years to reach arbitration before you get those three years of arbitration. In a grand coincidence, players’ best seasons of their careers come before they can reach free agency. Free agents are great for patching holes. But for building a roster? You’re better off identifying productive youth, not only because of affordability but because those players are simply often the better ones out there. Which brings us to the Braves.

The Braves did not sign Xander Bogaerts or Trea Turner or every available big name this winter. The Braves just kept doing what they’ve been doing: Acquiring talent and extending it for a value that gets the player lifetime security while still getting the franchise wins at a good price. The Braves are doing something like what the Dodgers did for all those years, all those years until this one when the Dodgers finally decided they needed to take a breath. They’re amassing loads and loads of affordable talent, backfilling their holes with more talent around the edges, and crafting what’s really the best roster in baseball. This is why, of those six teams, the Braves are in a great spot and the other five are in a mix of good to medium. They’re just a lot better, even with a payroll something like 60% that of their division rival up in Queens.

At the same time, those other five—plus the Brewers and Cardinals, something of different beasts—aren’t that much better than the Marlins, Diamondbacks, Cubs, or Pirates, the first three of which haven’t overperformed all that much (all three opened the year between 10% and 25% playoff-likely on FanGraphs; all three are still south of 25%). The Pirates are a surprise, and that complicates it, but what’s really happening here is that the Mets, Padres, Phillies, and Dodgers are closer to the pack than we could instinctively grasp, and for the first three of them, that’s a facet of their big offseason spending only being able to do so much. We think that if a team goes and buys the best free agent at every position, they’ll be the best team in baseball, but that’s not how it works. Not when the Ronald Acuñas of the world still wouldn’t have the service time necessary to reach free agency in a world where he hadn’t signed that extension.

This is also part of why there was that huge free agency standoff a few winters back, and it’s also why small market teams can compete so well in baseball, and it’s also why the same small market and large market teams continue to compete well year in and year out, generally speaking. Baseball isn’t about getting the most expensive players. It’s about developing the best ones. That’s more complicated than spending money.

The Aaron Rodgers Return Is Great

So the Packers, for Aaron Rodgers and a fifth-round pick, move up two spots in the first round, get a second-rounder, get a sixth-rounder, and get either a first or a second-rounder next year. All for a quarterback that was not going to play for them.

The dead cap hit is still evidently there, but I think something all of us fond of the Packers would be better off agreeing on sooner rather than later is that the Packers aren’t going to be that good this year. If the Packers win the NFC North, it is going to be hilarious, because it should not happen. That doesn’t mean the current salary cap situation doesn’t matter, but it does make it matter a little less. Because that Rodgers dead cap piece of it will, by my understanding, go away next year.

I also suspect it isn’t reasonable to expect a ton out of the Packers in 2024. Every NFL team is justified in hoping on a playoff appearance every other year—the NFL is set up to make that a possibility, which is part of the luck and/or brilliance that’s led to it being as big a product as it is—but Ken Ingalls understands the salary cap better than I ever hope to, so if he says the belt’s gonna stay tight through next year, I believe him. This makes the return in this deal even better, because if the Packers aren’t likely to be pushing for a Super Bowl in the next two years, the difference between a first or second round pick this year and the same pick next year isn’t as large. In fact, getting back to our baseball conversation just a moment ago, you could argue that it might be better, backloading the affordable talent. I hope I’m wrong and that the Packers win the Super Bowl each of the next two years, but this feels like a good conclusion to the saga.

Speaking of the saga: I hope Aaron Rodgers thrives in New York. Why not, you know? He gave the Packers a ton of great memories, and he was frustrating towards the end, but that was mostly him being a weirdo. I hope he does well in New York, retires in a few years, and comes back to Lambeau Field for a jersey retirement ceremony while Jordan Love wears a ring on the sidelines.

(We really owe you an explanation sometime on why we’re Cubs/Bulls/Packers fans. The short version is that Iowa doesn’t have professional sports, and that Wisconsin and Minnesota hardly did themselves in the 1960s.)

Empty Netters Are Fun

I love hockey, and I am reminded of this every April when I sit down to finally watch some hockey. I like it in the regular season, too, but it almost always conflicts with baseball or college basketball, two things I like more. I love hockey, and I understand it in a limited fashion, and that makes things like the empty net a sheer delight.

The great thing about the empty net is that it goes both ways. If you’re cheering for the team that’s trailing, the goalie leaving the net is a burn–the–boats moment. Once that happens, it’s on, and you’re either tying the thing up or you’re going down in flames. If you’re cheering for the team that’s winning? It’s an opportunity for the dagger. I’m not sure there’s anything like it in any other sport. Especially since the goalie’s always hustling to get off the ice, wearing all those pads.