I used to be much more interested in preserving baseball tradition than I am now. Most of the change results in the degree to which traditions have become outdated if not absurd, or (more charitably to those traditions) the degree to which baseball is already ignoring too much, where there's a choice between half-heartedly keeping a tradition stupidly, or making a clean break and doing something that makes sense.
Joe Sheehan ranted about interleague play earlier this week, yet his proposed solution really doesn't do anything to address the actual problem.
(Other than the second-order problem that MLB vastly overstates the excitement of interleague play by failing to adjust for time of year and time of week; as Joe points out, summer weekend series will always draw better than school-in-session weeknight series.)
Anyway, my wife finds it strange that particular teams will play each other only once every three years or so. The schedule as it stands now is confusing and (as Joe illustrates) unfair. If you temporarily ignore how we got here, a better way would be for all 30 teams to play each other at least once series a year, no?
So I have in mind three 10-team divisions. You get one three-game series a year against each team outside your division (whoever you host in even years you visit in odd years). With the 162-game schedule that leaves 102 games within the division, which averages to 11.3.
So in a given year you'll have 12 games each against three particular division opponents and 11 games each against the other six. As the current schedule features 52 series in 26 weeks (although there's the All-Star Break, there's also exactly one occasion where teams get three series, 2-2-3, in one Monday-Sunday cycle), there'd be 20 series outside the division and 32 series within. Three of your division opponents you'd do 3-3/3-3; two of them you'd do 3-3/3-2; four of them you'd do 4-3/4. It's the least problematic way to implement this.
Who's in what division?
Call them West, Central, and East, and you're 90% there. Move the Houston Astros to "West" (buy off Astros owner Drayton McLane for the trouble of the few more West Coast trips that the Texas Rangers already fail to object to).
Do we continue to make sure that same-metro teams aren't both {at home, on the road} at the same time? If so, how?
Sure, why not. The most straightforward way to do this is split each division into five teams that tend to do the opposite of their five counterparts. So you'd have something like:
OAK-LAD-SD-COL-SEA[-OAK-LAD...]
SF-LAA-ARI-HOU-TEX
CHW-MIL-MIN-KC-STL
CHC-CIN-CLE-PIT-DET
FLA-TB-ATL-WAS-NYY
PHI-BOS-TOR-BAL-NYM
(Each pair of same-metro teams could be flipped here. In general I think non-division teams would want to host at least one team per pair of the {Yankees-Red Sox}, {Cubs-Cardinals}, and/or {Dodgers-Giants} any given year.)
I haven't fully put this down to paper (spreadsheet?) but as a general rule road trips would be a sequence of 2-3 teams from one of the cycles above (so e.g. Seattle then Oakland, or Tampa Bay then Atlanta, or Cubs then Cincinnati).
What does the schedule basically look like?
Keeping things as simple as possible unless/until we butt into mathematical impossibilities, I have it in my mind as:
Nine series, everyone in their division (round robin). 15 series, two divisions face each other and the third stays within itself. (5-5-5 for each of those combinations.) Nine series, everyone in their division. 10 series, everyone outside their division. Nine series, everyone in their division.
Your season series with any given division rival would start no later than the first May series and end no sooner than the last August series.
What about playoffs?
This implementation mostly doesn't care about that. The ideal would be three division winners plus a wild card, but if the masses insist on eight playoff teams then the smoothest scenario is three 1st place teams, three 2nd place teams, two wild cards.
What about the DH?
Another question on whose answer this implementation doesn't necessarily depend. But I will say, coming full circle to my belief in baseball tradition (or lack thereof), that my personal preference order is:
1. Everyone uses the DH
2. Nobody uses the DH
[large utility gap]
3. Whether you use the DH depends on who the visiting team is
4. Whether you use the DH depends on who the home team is
...yes, of the four obvious ways to do it, MLB picked the one that (in my opinion) is worst. (Why is "depends on the home team" worse than "depends on the road team"? Because it's ridiculous that pitchers on "DH teams" bat so rarely that they bat only on the road. If an A's pitcher is going to bat maybe once or twice a year, it should happen in front of the home crowd!)
Oh, while we're here, my wife has suggested that from the 10th inning onward, the home team bat first each inning (but the next team to score wins!). I've come to like that idea...
Posted by Matt Bruce at June 19, 2008 01:32 PM