Hey there, ladies and gents! It’s time for your seemingly biennial speculation on MLB realignment! Are you ready?
ESPN’s Buster Olney became the latest to chime in on the idea of realigning the current — ahem — unbalanced league format, which apparently takes inspiration from the astonishingly levelheaded and sensical decision to have two groups of teams separated by nothing but caprice play by a different set of rules, by writing* that various and sundry individuals under the MLB umbrella are seriously considering the notion, and that there is some momentum to get it done**. As if you don’t know, we’re currently dealing with a structure where the AL has 14 teams including a four-team division (AL West) while its older counterpart features 16 squads and a six-team division (NL Central).
*The article appeared in Olney’s blog on ESPN.com, but since he (probably) wrote it while wearing pants, I’m going to say that he ‘wrote,’ not ‘blogged.’ That’s about as much dignity as a grown man named Buster deserves, so enjoy it, dude.
**Technically, that’s not a run-on. Practically, I apologize.
Now, sure, it’s just about impossible to improve upon that format, but if you’ll allow me to beat a dead horse – as of this writing, it has been 33 hours since Olney’s article went up, after all* — I’d like to take a look at who stands to benefit and who would be gnashing their teeth in frustration should MLB realign. As it happens, each winner seems to have a concomitant loser, so I’ll address the two groups in pairs, naming a winner and a loser in the event of realignment. Let’s hop to!
*Has the voluminous commentary on the fast-moving nature of news on the internet turned into a dead horse of its own? I suspect that it has, which makes me sad, because if I have the energy to beat TWO dead horses, I could clearly be doing something more productive.
The NL Central and the AL West
As it stands, the Cubs, Cardinals, Astros, Brewers, Pirates and Reds would have their collective faces plastered on MLB’s version of a human rights campaign asking you to donate money to help end overpopulation. Can’t you just picture a sad-faced Aramis Ramirez? Perhaps Paul Janish can affect a particularly melancholic air. Or maybe Neil Walker could shed a single tear that would really tug at your heartstrings (whatever those are). The only notable absentee would be Hunter Pence, who would be too busy flailing around the room with a hand mirror trying to swat a bird*.
*If you’ve had the distinct pleasure of avoiding televised Houston Astros baseball, then you might not know that Hunter Pence – whether running, fielding or hitting – looks like the coach’s kid from your Little League team who played left field in the sense that if you pointed him in the right direction and gave him a little shove, he’d figure out where to stand. At least until he had to come back to the dugout because he forgot his hat.
Meanwhile, the AL West teams are sitting out there like some gold-rich fat cats in their luxurious penthouse suites overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Hell, the A’s don’t even have to see the Rangers unless they really want to.
In baseball terms, what that means is that teams in the NL Central are, by default, at a competitive disadvantage. When you talk about competitive disadvantage and realignment, the first thing that comes up is usually the AL East, and how unfair it is – and we’ll get there, believe you me. But that’s a function of the strength of those teams right now. Twenty years ago, the Blue Jays weren’t complaining; go back another decade, and the Orioles were sitting pretty. In the NL Central, though, the competitive disadvantage isn’t tied solely to the ebb and flow of talent among the top teams; one must also consider that the NL Central’s winner needs to compete against five other squads, whereas the AL West champ needs to surpass only three. Inherently, the latter is easier, and realignment would help to level that particular playing field.
Of course, as the rosters are presently constructed, the resultant Houston Astros vs. Seattle Mariners games would be unwatchable. Which brings us to our next group of winners and losers …
The Houston Astros and Florida Marlins
The Astros and Marlins are two popular candidates for relocation, the former because they are in the process of being sold and could thus be forced by MLB to accept a move to the American League and the latter ostensibly because they’re moving to a new stadium anyway, so why not make it an extra fresh start, but also because … well, because they’re just erstwhile like that anyway.
I have to believe that the Marlins stand to benefit more from realignment, provided that MLB maintains some sort of geography-based grouping of teams whether through keeping divisions intact or creating an imbalanced schedule that pits teams from the same area against each other the way they currently play divisional foes. See, the Marlins have what the doctors call a little bit of an attendance problem. The good news is, they’re getting a new stadium which should help drum up interest (for at least one season). The other good news is that there’s a really easy cure for attendance problems: play against the Yankees and Red Sox! If the Marlins head to the AL East, and MLB maintains its division-heavy scheduling, then you’re talking about a ton of added revenue for the team. Sure, it’s from the same people who’ll be rooting against your team, but … well, but you’ll make money. So suck it up.
The Astros, on the other hand, wouldn’t seem to benefit as clearly from the transition. Texas already has an American League team, and while it might be good for rivalry purposes to have those two in the same division, it would be a fine silver bowl for the new ownership to dig into on their first day. I can’t imagine that would go over too well with the new team, and since they’re ridding the baseball world of Drayton McClane, we as baseball fans should hope for better things to befall them anyway.
And hey, as long as we’re talking about teams …
(N.B.: all the following presupposes a realignment strategy that does away with divisional play and moves instead to two 15-team leagues that would each send four representatives to the playoffs)
(And hopefully also adopts the DH rule universally, because pitchers hitting is the worst thing since Andy Van Slyke decided he was going to start a line of tofu-based vegetarian options to bring out ‘The Lean, Mean Hitting Machine In You.’*)
*Fictional. Probably. And, unfortunately.
The Tampa Bay Rays, Toronto Blue Jays, Baltimore Orioles and whoever faces them for the next like seven years
As I mentioned earlier, alignment discussion invariably includes the AL East teams not hailing from those most insufferable bastions of New England culture. The Rays’ excellence the past three years notwithstanding (which is a really big thing to declare notwithstanding, but hey), the Red Sox and Yankees have established a clear hegemony over most of the baseballing world. They have revenue streams and fanbases that put most other franchises to shame (the Phillies stand out as an exception, but that’s of small solace to our Canadian friends) and are poised to dominate the current divisional format for years to come because of advantages not tied exclusively to present dominance of players. So obviously, it would be a boon for the Rays, Jays and O’s* to escape the shadow of pinstripes and pink hats.
*If you squint hard enough, that could be the alternate title for Ray J and Kim Kardashian’s sex tape. Sorry; ribald.
But like with the AL West, one imagines that other teams aren’t going to be too terribly thrilled by having their own chances of making the postseason slashed by the arrival of a new team. The Rays have held their own in the top-heaviest division in at least two of the major American sports, and both the Jays and the Orioles (though mostly the former) have respectable enough squads that the playoffs wouldn’t be a complete pipe dream from Day One. If the 2012 playoffs had four teams from the AL East competing, I think White Sox fans would kill themselves en masse.
Which, I guess, would make White Sox fans losers, too. But it’s not just them …
‘Traditionalists’ and ‘Night Owls’
Both groups of baseball fans in this final category are being referred to euphemistically, because it would be unbecoming to say ‘old sportswriters’ and ‘drunk kids plus West Coasters, which, redundant!’. Although I did just give an alternate title to a celebrity sex tape, so I don’t know if I’m really qualified to make that distinction.
(The real reason was that I already used up my overlong title allowance in this article, and needed a succinct way to lead in to this point. Which I have now entirely ruined.)
ANYWAY, let us hearken back to our collective youth for a moment. Remember those box scores in the local paper that were either omitted or informed us about the goings-on of two nights previous out west because the game from the night before was a Late Game? And that if, for whatever reason, you wanted stats from the latest Colorado – San Francisco tilt (my youth included the Rockies, and I’m proud of it), you’d have to wait for either the evening paper or the next day’s edition? Such a thing is clearly unheard of in this day and age, but to my five-year old eyes, there was a little bit of mythos to those games. Like, what happened in games that went past, oh, 23:00? Did they have different rules? Were players allowed to use bats as weapons? Ohmygod, did Dante Bichette club Matt Williams as he (Bichette) approached third base on a home run trot? Do they need extra hours to report on that??
I was a weird little kid, is kind of the point, but the real point is that sportswriters who have, throughout their career, struggled to cover late-ending games are going to suffer from this change. The scores of those games weren’t promptly reported for a reason: all the people in charge of printing those scores for papers east of the Mississippi (or wherever the demarcation is) were abed. Because it was late, you see, and that’s what sensible folks do when the witching hour rolls around. Notable among their (i.e. early-to-bedders) ranks are the actual (viz non-euphemistic) traditionalists, who insist that baseball in its current state is the living embodiment of freedom, hope and truth and that each baseball used in The Major Leagues contains a solitary feather from one of the great-great-great (…) great-great grandchildren of the original American bald eagle, the entire lineage of which has been kept in a special room in the backyard of each and every commissioner of Baseball since 1922 (it took Kenesaw Mountain Landis a year to warm to the idea).
What I’m trying to say is that crotchety sportswriters – which, almost without exception, is what they’ve turned into these days, or perhaps my generation has just aged to the point where we recategorize the same stuff they’ve been turning out for decades – and also those people who insist that baseball is a game of tradition and shouldn’t be changed* would be up in arms about making such a drastic change to the game.
*The Venn Diagram there is basically an opaque circle
We need not rehash now-cliche points about staunch anti-progressivism in the game of baseball, but we should consider that late-starting baseball is a boon for the night owls among us – which, if my Twitter math is accurate, is 103% of the sabermetrically inclined audience raised to the power of (20 x BAC). The younger generation of fans and the West Coasters love what would be late start times on the East Coast, because it means there’s baseball on after midnight EST. And that’s the kind of wholesome entertainment that keeps us entertained in bars and giving us a topic of conversation for late-night Twitter so that we can be connected in the world despite never leaving our couches!
And that’s an important consideration, since traveling long distances for baseball games is neat at first, but very quickly becomes tiresome. Which is why our very last category is …
The Players
If I were to see the winners-vs-losers concept all the way through to the end, then I’d mention that some players support the idea of realignment and some don’t. The preferred outcome for each should be obvious.
But except for the members of the Rays, Jays, O’s* and the NL Central, I don’t know that any players would really benefit from a divisionless structure. See, the reason that we have divisions in the first place is because it kind of sucks to have to travel all over the country to play your games. The Vancouver Canucks and Boston Bruins are playing a Stanley Cup Final in which each team is traveling literally across North America to get to the other team’s arena; having the Angels and Yankees in separate divisions helps ensure that those teams don’t have to deal with similar issues too many times per year.
*Ha.
While the divisional format doesn’t always make sense (the Atlanta Braves used to be in the NL West), it does help cut down on the cost of travel, both from the standpoint of player fatigue and the checkbooks of the teams. But given that teams travel on chartered flights and not, y’know, commercial (ew), the concern about long trips is somewhat alleviated. Because cases of beer fit much better under the seat in front of you when you’re flying private, see.
So, in sum: if MLB were to realign its leagues and give us two balanced leagues in the old-school, divisionless format, then you will be happy if you self-identify with one of the following groups: NL Central teams (doubly so if you’re a Houston Astro and the Florida Marlins migrate to the AL), AL East teams hailing from neither New York nor Boston, (drunken) night owls, and either a professional baseball player who loves traveling or a fan of professional baseball who doesn’t care what sort of traveling MLB players have to do.
But most importantly, if you’re a fan of a reasonable rulebook, then you’re also a fan of realignment. I know that baseball is big on their quirks, and that they’re the only sport that not only allows but practically encourages unique ballparks from stadium to stadium (imagine if the Chicago Bears played with a 120-yard football field) and lets 14 of its 30 teams let an actual, professional hitter stand in the batter’s box in the stead of a player who handles the bat about as ably as you, me or Yuniesky Betancourt, but it’s time for some change in the sport. I fully support two 15-team leagues, both sending four representatives to the playoffs, and both using the DH; do you? And, more importantly (sorry; I promise your opinion is valuable to me!): does Bud Selig?
