The Dodgers won 106 games this year and will now play in a single-elimination Wild Card Game that decides if they can enter the meat of the Major League Baseball playoffs. Some people are upset about this. Some people think this means the structure should be changed. The structure may well be changed, possibly to something that sets up less drama than yesterday held and less drama than these single-elimination Wild Card Games hold, but will bring in more revenue for Rob Manfred’s puppeteers, and that’s whom we’re cheering for anyway. We’re here for them.
Setting that all aside, though, baseball’s format likely will change in the next ten or twenty years. Baseball is due for expansion. 30 teams is a bit unwieldy. Montreal wants a team. Nashville wants a team. Portland wants a team. Other cities want teams. Tampa and Oakland want teams, but want the local Manfred puppeteers to pay the weight of that themselves. Soon, baseball will go to 32 teams. And when it does, it should go to two divisions in each league.
No matter what playoff format you use, you’re going to have division champions, and you’re going to have Wild Cards. No matter what playoff format you use, you’re going to want to have Wild Cards and you’re going to want the divisions equal in number (easing and equitizing scheduling). The questions, then, are how to get the puppeteers the most money and how to get the best teams in the playoffs. Presumably, enabling the latter will help the former. This is in everyone’s interest. Getting the best teams into the playoffs is a good thing, and the fewer divisions you have, the easier it is to do that, because the harder it is for a team to win its division with something like—sorry, Atlanta—88 wins.
So, answering the two questions:
How would the divisions be set up?
For this, let’s take the controversial stance that the Rays are headed to Montreal. If that happens, there’s reason for Montreal to become a National League club once more—namely, that it could give Canadians two rooting interests rarely in direct competition. Let’s also, for the purposes of gaming this out, assume that Portland gets a team, and gets a National League team, giving that slice of Pacific Northwesterners a similarly easy rooting transition away from the Mariners. Finally, let’s assume the last team goes to Charlotte or Nashville. You’d probably want this team in the American League since Atlanta holds so much sway in the area, which would leave us with one team needing to flip from the NL to the AL, something for which the Diamondbacks make a lot of sense due to 1) nobody caring about them as a significant rival and 2) it helping keep these divisions reasonable geographically, with the Mississippi River the divide in the AL and the Eastern/Central Time Zone border the divide in the NL. Rather than worry about the Oakland situation, let’s assume they either move to Las Vegas or stay in the Bay Area, both of which would affect none of this.
AL West
- Seattle
- Oakland
- Anaheim
- Texas
- Houston
- Minnesota
- Kansas City
- Arizona
AL East
- Boston
- New York
- Toronto
- Baltimore
- Detroit
- Cleveland
- Charlotte/Nashville
- Chicago
NL West
- Los Angeles
- San Diego
- San Francisco
- Portland
- Colorado
- St. Louis
- Chicago
- Milwaukee
NL East
- Atlanta
- Miami
- Philadelphia
- Pittsburgh
- Cincinnati
- Montreal
- Washington
- New York
How would the schedule work?
If you want to stick with something like 162 games (and the puppeteers do, because that’s a lot of games to have people walking through the gates), you could drop from playing in-division opponents in six series a year to four series, going from 19 games against division opponents to 13 (keeping an odd number for the sake of easing seeding). That’s 91 of a team’s games. For non-division league opponents, six or seven games could stay the norm, bringing us up to between 139 and 142. You could still have one annual interleague rivalry (Cubs/White Sox, Yankees/Mets, Giants/A’s, Orioles/Nationals, Twins/Brewers, Royals/Cardinals, Mariners/Portland, Atlanta/Nashville-Charlotte, Blue Jays/Montreal, Padres/Diamondbacks, Angels/Dodgers, Tigers/Pirates, Reds/Guardians, Red Sox/Phillies, Astros/Marlins, Rangers/Rockies), with four games in that rivalry series so it’s a home-and-home, bringing us to somewhere between 143 and 146. Then, with rotating interleague play, you’d have two or three games left against each of seven or eight more interleague opponents a year, meaning each MLB team would play in each MLB city at least once every four years, rather than once every six years as is currently the case. With the annual interleague rivalry, only two would cross divisions (White Sox/Cubs, Marlins/Astros), with a straightforward solution of having those four teams play more games against each interleague opponent in trans-division years (when East plays West and most teams play nine interleague opponents but these four play eight) and fewer against each interleague opponent in cis-division years (when East plays East, West plays West, and most teams play eight interleague opponents but these four play nine).
If travel was actually a concern and not just a talking point, you could also switch to pods, abandoning the unnecessary “equal schedule” (MLB schedules are rather equal naturally in difficulty, thanks to the nature of a sport where there are hardly ever games where one team is more than 75% likely to win). It’s hard to believe, though, that ticket sales would worsen from having more variety in one’s home opponents (currently, nearly half of a team’s 81 home games are against the same four teams; currently, Seattle has to play six series in Texas a year—three against the Astros, three against the Rangers).
We’re a long way out, so this might seem irrelevant at the moment, but the prevalent narrative is that we’re headed towards a four-team-division setup (West, Central, Northeast, Southeast, with something silly like Kansas City in the AL Southeast), and we need to stop that narrative before it becomes any further entrenched. Not because there’s anything inherently wrong with it, but because the goal should be to maintain things like yesterday’s excitement (think of how many more ties you could have with eight-team divisions) while minimizing things like a 106-win team having a massive disadvantage relative to an 88-win team. Consider this the opening salvo. Join us in this fight.
