MLB Realignment

By now you’ve read the talk about the potential realignment for baseball. A team moving to the AL. No more divisions. Interleague all the time. Stark’s Rumblings & Grumblings has a good conversation with Olney about it.

No one seems to be talking about solving some of this with expansion or contraction. I don’t think contraction will happen, but why not expansion?

It will take a bit of work. It might lead to more distance between the top teams and the bottom. If they wound up as small market losing teams it would be more competition with the likes of the Pirates and Royals at the top of the draft. My only suggestions to help with this, and this is just for fun, so these could be argued, would be a cap or lower luxury tax threshold, and reworking the draft. Having a global draft with limits on draft pick salaries is a must without my expansion suggestion.

My first shot at the new teams are Portland and Vegas. Rivals for the Mariners and DBacks. This would bring the total to 32 teams, 16 per league. Then the divisions can be divided up with 4 teams in each. For the playoffs there could be no wild card, or two with some sort of bye for the top division winners. Oh, and the World Series homefield is for the league with the better record in interleague, which I have been saying forever. Also, with an even number of teams in each league eliminates that odd NL-only matchup during interleague times of the season, which really screws with the out of town scoreboards.

While I’m making things up, might as well come up with the divisions.

I didn’t do anything drastic. Seems to fit pretty well. I probably screwed up some rivalries, but most of the geographical ones are still in place.