The vagaries of divisional alignment
DMZ · August 11, 2009 at 8:50 am · Filed Under Mariners
If we’re lucky, we’ll get to see Alex Rios play in this home stand against the White Sox. The White Sox claimed him on waivers, picking up his massive (though not that unreasonable) contract as part of their effort to capture a division title.
The M’s, you have no doubt noted, are a couple games ahead of the White Sox in the wild card standings.
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Calgary’s also a terrible place to play baseball.
It’s at altitude, it’s windy as hell, and the weather is entirely unpredictable basically all the time. I’ve seen snow in every month in Calgary. On any given date the difference between the record high and record low is about 100°F.
You’d get better weather playing in Edmonton. And Edmonton has pretty much the same local climate as Moscow does.
If Las Vegas got a team, could Pete Rose manage it?
The best divisional lineup solution is to add two more teams — don’t care where they are — then form four divisions of eight: the original AL, the original NL, new guys west, and new guys east. 154 game schedules, four to the playoffs, no DH. Baseball purity at its best!
Even in Vancouver, as much as I`d love to not have to drive to Seattle to watch games, I`m not sure where you would play. The only stadium available with enough capacity is BC Place Stadium, which looks exactly like the Metrodome.
IIRC, it`s also the place Edgar Martinez tore something (hamstring?) because of bad turf in a pre-season game that forced Edgar`s permanent move to DH.
form four divisions of eight: the original AL, the original NL, new guys west, and new guys east.
Neat idea. Oakland would be awfully lonely on the west coast and have a horrible travel schedule, though, especially if you go super-purist and don’t have interdivisional play.
Okay, revise it to three straight years under 70 wins (Pittsburgh sold after 07, KC after 06), or ten years without leading the division at least one day after, say, June. Instead of penalizing one bad year, penalize long-term futility, or perhaps better, complacency.
The M’s have a good FO this year because, for all the flack Howard and Chuck get, they weren’t complacent about things and were smart enough to try something different when Bavasi didn’t work out.
I would say this is a backwards statement. Baseball has the biggest home field advantage. It is the only sport that has different sized fields of play, which a home team can use to their roster advantage, i.e. Safeco being friendly to Lefthanded hitters and Pitchers, Yankee and New Yankee Stadium being the same. Colorado needs to have great defensive outfielders because they have such a huge outfield and they plan their roster according. Every field plays different than every other.
I do not like the idea of four 4-team divisions per league. Look at the NFC West and AFC East this past NFL season. The AFC East had three 11-win teams, while the NFC West had its division champion win nine games. A similar scenario in baseball – say 3 95-win teams in one division and an 82-win champ in another – does not interest me at all.
Allow me to cast my vote for the “three 5-team divisions per league with interleague play all the time”-solution.
I would also be vastly in favor of expanding the playoffs to six teams per league, giving the two best teams a bye then having the 3 vs. 6 and 4 vs. 5 match-ups be best-of-three ALL at the higher-seed’s home field. I would favor this not because I necessarily want to see more teams like the 2009 M’s have a shot at the playoffs, but to give a greater advantage to the teams who had the best regular seasons.
One reason I threw Calgary in there as a possibility was that, with the money floating around there in recent years, it wouldn’t be hard to get corporate sponsorship, at least (though the economy has had a downturn nearly worldwide).
You’re right, though, re weather…you’d basically have the same set of variables as the Rox do in Denver…only further north and even colder. There’d definitely have to be a retractable roof stadium on the order of Rogers/Skydome to ever make it happen there.
Too funny — and actually, rumor had it a couple of years ago that Chris Pronger’s wife didn’t want him re-signing with the Oilers for the very same reason. 🙂
I remember when the roof deflated at BC Place during that windstorm a few years back. Though it was good for a brief chuckle at the time, it’s damned lucky the Lions weren’t playing a home game in there when that happened…scary.
Haha, Chris Pronger’s wife didn’t want to leave because of the weather. That was the story the press went with, because its a much more PG version.
But what really happened is that Pronger’s wife slept with his teammate Jarret Stoll. Chris retaliated by working his way through every whore in Edmonton he could find (and in Edmonton, those girls love their hockey players). To save the marriage, they decided to move. Healthy marriage.
Ah, Pronger. Like Paul O’Neill years ago, he’s one of those kind of guys you can only seem to root when — and if — he’s playing for your team.
…And it usually seems like those guys wind up on teams that you can’t stand!
I like this idea as well. Though I know it wouldn’t sit too well with some of the so-called “traditionalists” out there, I can’t for the life of me figure out why MLB — who plays more games than any other sport — is still the only one not using a modern playoff system. Yeah, I know it was even worse before the Wild Card came along (remember the 103-win/no-PS 1993 Giants, anyone?)…but personally, I’m all for expanding the post-season to the top-eight teams in each league — with the first round pitting 1-8, 2-7, 3-6, 4-5.
For those who think that “everyone would make the playoffs” in such a system, keep in mind that every year in the NBA and NHL, there seems to be at least a team or two with a winning record who still didn’t get in. It may, however, be a more effective way of bringing at least a little more equity to the game once and for all — and give some incentive to teams playing in tough divisions (read AL East) to not want to just automatically throw up the white flag in the middle of an 85-90 win season knowing that “we can’t get past the Yanks and Red Sox, anyway”.
Also, from the food for thought department, consider the ’02 & ’03 seasons when the M’s won 93 games each year — and would’ve gotten into the post-season as a #4/#5 seed both years in just such a system.
I grew up in Moscow, er, Edmonton and, although it’s not the little podunk town it was then, it’s still not that big. I doubt that they could muster 81 home games worth of interest.
And, there’s the weather…
You wanna hear some traditionalism, I’m of the opinion that the schedule be balanced and the best team from each league go strait to the World Series and just play an 180 game regular season.
scott19 –
Funny you mention the NBA’s playoff system… I for one cannot STAND the fact that they routinely have two or three (or sometimes more) teams in the playoffs with LOSING records. Sure, those teams almost never get past the first round, but it’s still rediculous. Hack four teams off the playoffs and give the top two seeds in each conference a bye for crap’s sake, that’s all the first round is anyhow…
Then again, most times I find the NBA barely tolerable off the court anyways…
This blogs login authentication system is messed up! Image several domain hosted WordPress blogs and don;t have such login issues. Dunno but I suspect session cookie issues on the httpd server.
Back on topic… 8 teams in the playoffs is more than enough. The season has to be worth something! I don’t like how the NBA or CFB does it. In CFB if you don’t have a losing record you likely get to go bowling. Whoop-de-do.
The NFL and MLB have it about right. I do wish equal number of teams per division. Brewers should come back to the AL and move KC to the west and then one interleague series going all the time.
Image = I manage 😉
“It’s much easier to beat 3 teams than 4 teams.”
While that is true in terms of division lead, it seems like it can be beneficial to have a crap team in your division you get to play a lot and pad your numbers for the wild card. A team like the Nationals or something in the AL west would go over very nicely right about now. You’d tack on a few extra wins over the teams outside of your divisions (potential wild card competitors), and subtract possible extra loss or two against the good teams in your division due to presumably playing them less to account for the 5th team. My logic could be flawed there, just something that just popped in my head and I haven’t reflected on it any more than what I wrote here.
well if you don’t expand to 16 eams in each league and create 4 4 team divisions in each, which is my fav scenario (although expansion may really water down pitching for about 10 years), then i’d advocate adding one more wild card team in each league, the 2 wild card teams play a best of 3 with all 3 games at the home of the team with a better record, then the divisional round begins next day at the best record regardless of if it is a division opponet or not, and is a best 4 of 7, league championship is the same, i like a best of 9 world series.
regular season, i like the unbalanced schedule, but i can take or leave interleague, and i do advocate the NL taking on the DH.
The Royals had a chance to move to the NL in 1997 and they declined.
Which sport has the biggest home field advantage?
Baseball has the smallest home-field advantage, or the second smallest, depending on measure.
It would be nice if they put some measure of random variability in those measures, but beggars and choosers…
It doesn’t. We could have a 1-game schedule, and resolve ties in the standings with run differential, followed by total runs scored, followed by (if necessary) penalty kicks…
Seriously, however, the 162 is an artifact of the 1961 AL expansion. This ended the 1903-1960 period when the schedule was 154 games and there were two 8-team leagues. Each team would play 22 games against each of the other 7 teams in their league (and indeed, 22 is a lot of games against one opponent–I’m immediately reminded of the “Don Hoak!” moment in City Slickers). The new 10-team AL changed to 162 games, with an 18 x 9 balanced format. The NL also changed to 162 games in 1961, even though they didn’t expand until the following year. It’s as if playing 8 additional games conferred some other benefit, besides the opportunity to re-balance the schedule. If anyone knows another reason the owners wanted to lengthen the season, I’d love to hear an explanation.
The home vs. road winning percentage differentials, both league-wide and for individual teams don’t show anybody taking much advantage of this, though it may be that roster-tuning to one’s home park and getting a big effect from it is possible. The biggest thing that home parks seem to do is hurt or help the health of pitchers. Since it is easier to keep position players healthy and rested than to keep pitchers healthy and rested, playing in a low-scoring home park confers a durability advantage over time. Safeco Field helps the Mariners relative to other teams, while the weather (and inexplicably sadistic day games on the schedule) in Arlington melts the Ranger pitching staff every July and August. At a day game in the Ball Park at Arlington’s outfield bleachers, fans can experience everything a 200+ degree heat index has to offer. Don’t be concerned that the players are too busy to enjoy such a nice day, though–the temperature is usually much higher on the field.
You know, while we’re freely throwing around absurd proposals that have no chance of being implemented, I’ve been mulling an idea of having the rosters expand to, say, 30 players immediately after the no-waiver trade deadline expires — or even immediately after the all-star game. But the kicker would be: only teams with records below .500 on that date would get the benefit of more players; the other teams would have to wait for September when all teams would have their rosters expand exactly like they do now. Not so much to tighten up divisional races (though in cases like the NL West recently where all the teams were skating around .500, it would) but to give those losing teams more opportunity to experiment with an eye towards next year, and maybe give their fans one more reason (however slight) to come out and watch the new kids.
Yeah, it might make for an interesting quandry for the management of a team right at the .500 mark as that date approached, but I really don’t think anybody would lose even one game on purpose (especially since you’d be asking very competitive individual players to “throw” a game for a benefit that doesn’t mean much to them personally no matter how much it might help the team as a whole).
You’re kidding, right? Four additional home gates every year is what, another ~$2.5M of revenue every year just from ticket sales. Less than that back when they instituted the longer schedule, of course, but in relative terms worth at least as much. Plus concessions, etc.
I do like the symmetry of two 81 game season halves, each in turn a square of squares involving those particularly and peculiarly baseballish numbers of “3” and “9”….