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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I guess the WSox are gambling that 2007 wasn’t a career year for him?
That was his age 26 season, though, so it could very well have been his peak.
If MLB insists on having four teams from both leagues advance to the post-season I would advocate for the old, pre-1969 style standings. Have a 14 team AL and 16 team NL, no divisions. Top four from each league go. This also makes for a more balanced schedule. Of course, this doesn’t artificially create pennant races amongst the mediocre teams in the nation’s heartland, so it won’t happen.
A wackier idea that I would also endorse would be to randomly group or pool teams every year, much like the way that World Cup groups are determined. Every year, teams are in new divisions or pools with different teams.
What wild card standings?
2008 was actually Rios’ career year, as he was worth 5.5 WAR thanks to a ridiculously good year defensively. With a below average BABIP, Rios is a good bet to rebound soon. Here’s hoping he doesn’t make it to town this series, I’d rather face Scott Podsednik.
A wackier idea that I would also endorse would be to randomly group or pool teams every year, much like the way that World Cup groups are determined. Every year, teams are in new divisions or pools with different teams.
And the M’s would probably have to travel more then they do now, especially if they end up in a division with some east coast teams.
I don’t any problem with the current wild card system. Playoffs in general are a bad way to determine who had the best season (12-21 games can trump a 162-game season, see 2006 Cardinals), but sometimes fun and excitement trumps fairness.
Concerning divisional alignment, although it benefits the Ms to be in a smaller division, it definitely makes more sense to me to go 15 AL / 15 NL, and then have one inter-league series going at all times and make that the extent of inter-league play.
Tek I couldn’t agree more about the top four teams from each league going to the playoffs. Getting rid of the balanced schedule was the most unfair thing Selig has done.
To make the Schedule even more fair I say do away with interleague play alltogether. Or stop the rivalry series every year or go to fifteen teams in each league keep the rivalry series and base other interleague opponents on record from previous year. Poor teams playing poor teams and good playing good. Sort of like NFL.
At least our division only has four teams in it.
Don’t look now (go look), but cool standings actually has our WC chances higher than our DIV chances for the first time this year.
As for division alignment, you could just add two more teams and have four divisions of four in each league. And those 4 teams go to the playoffs. Less travel for a lot of teams under that scenario as well.
That can’t happen. You would have to leave one team in each league unscheduled every single day.
But yeah, divisions are stupid.
Carson you would have to have one interleague series going on at all times instead of all the interleague series all at once.
Why can’t MLB go NBA style and eliminate the AL and NL?
Have a West League and East League. Put Chicago and everything East in the East and St. Louis and West into the West.
Less travel, more economic parity in the leagues, more rivalries, etc.
East-
Northeast (Boston, Toronto, New York x2, Phily)
Southeast (Atlanta, Washington, Florida, Tampa Bay, Baltimore)
Central (Chicago x2, Cincinnati, Pittsburg, Cleveland, Detroit)
West-
Southwest(LA x2, San Diego, Arizona)
Northwest(Seattle, San Fran, Oakland, Colorado)
Mid-West (Houston, Texas, Minnesota, Kansas City, Milwaukee, St. Louis)
Not perfect, but it does a number of things:
- highest payroll teams are concentrated in Northeast, Central, and Southwest
- reduces travel distances
- gives ESPN Yankee/Red Sox or Yankee/Mets more often
Even one bye series out of 15 is not that bad right?
They have byes in football. Why not baseball?
I’ve always thought this was a great idea, they could call it the interleague game of the day or something. Hype it, televise it, whatever. Unless it was the Nats versus Royals.
It is when you have to fit a 162 game schedule between April and September.
Dave already did an article at Fangraphs about the value of Rios vs his contract. It’s a reasonable deal if you assume this is a down year (as his unlucky BABIP indicates). The crazy thing is that Ricciardi himself seems to think Rios is just having a down year: in the press interview he gave in NY immediately after this was announced he said as much and predicted Rios would be better in the future. And while he denied it was a pure salary dump he did talk about “financial flexibility” — all of which suggests this was less about making the Jays better than it was about freeing payroll (especially since Travis Snider continues to languish in Las Vegas).
The most charitable interpretation of this may be that they’re trying to set things up to make it possible to re-sign Halladay (or perhaps to make the team look better if it is going to get sold, as has been rumored… or, if you’re in Canada, rumoured).
Of course, Ricciardi could just be a Bavasi-ish GM, always a day late and a dollar short on this stuff. Between the Wells contract, not trading Rios at the height of his value last year (so what if you couldn’t get Lincecum, JP, so what?)… or Halladay this year, for that matter, that’s an easy interpretation to believe.
Fangraphs has more coverage of this “deal” now as well, which tends in that direction. FWIW, it looks like Rios won’t be in a pale hose uni earlier than Wednesday, which limits the damage he can do to the M’s.
Well, if you want to get all wacky and soccerish on us, why not divorce the minor leagues and have relegation, so that a minor league team that’s doing well can get bumped up into the majors and perennial also-rans like the Pirates and Royals can go down to a league where they actually have a chance of posting a winning record?
Yes, I know there’s less than zero chance of that. Just being wacky and soccerish (oh, wait, Futballish). (I would like to see a system like that in NCAA Div 1 football, actually, but I don’t want to hijack this with people’s predictable BCS opinions).
I really don’t have any problems with the divisions, the wild card, the unbalanced schedule, or interleague play. But there are some tweaks I’d suggest. Beyond the true natural rivals (NY, Chicago, LA, etc) I’d like to see the other interleague home-and-home series rotated around. So the M’s don’t play SD for six games every year, but get the Rockies some years, say, and Arizona in others.
A little harder to schedule, but worth doing IMO, is to make the Wild Card a tougher road than it is at the moment, so that you don’t have the second place team in a division coasting because its record still assures it of a post-season spot. A 3-game play-in series between the top two wild-card teams in each league would be exciting (and would mess up their rotation order for the subsequent division series, rewarding the divisional winners). But it would push the postseason out a few days towards November, alas.
The problem I would have with this is that payroll is not a fixed amount, so making a division based on it is not a good idea. Look at the Rangers payroll from 2001-2004.
* 2001: $ 47,735,167
* 2002: $105,726,122
* 2003: $103,491,667
* 2004: $ 55,050,417
*idly goes over to CoolStandings.com*
Damnit.
The Ms are 27-14 in 1-run ball games this year. That’s the games played most in the league and 6 more wins than the next most (LA Dodgers and LAA Angels). Is this good/bad/indifferent/indicitve of our less than desireable offense that we have played so many 1-run games?
And, we’re gonna be the Wild Card team this year, right? That would be soooo sweet.
And what about doing some sort of home field advantage for playoff teams based on, I don’t know, some sort of wins formula or runs differential so if you absolutely dominate in the regular season (like, say, 116 wins) then you have earned a more favorable playoff schedule chalk full of home games (incidentally, 927 runs scored in 2001!… oh baby!!). Unfortunately this kinda rewards teams like the Yanks who commission pinball table designers to build their new ball park…
CoolStandings is more favorable to the Mariners than PECOTA, which projects the team to go 21-29 the rest of the way.
I would guess that a poor offense and good fielding would tend to result in a lot of one run games.
It’s fun to ponder where two theoretical AL expansion franchises might call home. I like the thought of having a team in Brooklyn again. Portland, Oregon would be cool but not sure about the fan base. Same with Vancouver, BC. Indianapolis? Memphis?
Oklahoma City?
Buffalo
Sacramento
Las Vegas
How does it benefit the M’s to have only 4 teams in the division? They still have to be #1 at the end of the season, so it shouldn’t matter whether they are competing against 2, 3, 4 or 5 teams in the division.
I know that with 4 teams you technically have a 25% chance of winning the division vs. a 20% chance with 5 teams, but so what?
You still have to be #1 at the end of the year.
To follow your logic, what if the M’s were in a 3 team division with the Yankees and the Red Sox?
The’d technically have a 33% chance of winning the division, right?
It doesn’t matter how many teams are in your division, it’s WHO is in your division that really matters.
I do not want MLB to emulate NBA in any way at any time ever. Anyone suggesting that pretty much just forfeitted their MLB fan card. NBA has meaningless seasons and 2/3 of its league in the playoffs which are the only games that matter. You seriously want that for MLB ?
I could see top 1-4 getting into a playoff, I could also see leaving things just how they are now and moving Milwaukee back to the AL and picking one of Milwaukee / Minnesota / Kansas City and moving them to the AL West.
I could definitely see doing away with interleague. Dumb idea thats wholly played itself out. Don’t care about Chicago / Chicago or New York / New York. Play a preseason series if it is so important. It has resulted in an unbalanced schedule, and huge discrepancies in schedule strength, which in turn as ruined the value of the pennant races.
It like most of what Bud did ruined baseball.
You answered your own question.
It’s much easier to beat 3 teams than 4 teams.
Joe, I like your idea of having a 3 game series between the top 2 WC teams. I would like to see some kind of disadvantage towards the WC teams in the playoffs, and something like messing up their pitching rotation could cause that.
As far as expansion teams… I’m a little OCD and odd numbers of teams bother me lol. Therefore I’d like to see one more Canadian team (or zero), because having the entire country of Canada rooting for Toronto is annoying to me. Maybe Vancouver, and they can be in the AL West… That would cut down on the M’s travel schedule and give us a real natural rival. ANd then maybe Vegas or OK City, but unfortunately they would probably end up in the AL west as well, making it 6 teams…
If we’re going down the road of fantasy expansion scenarios, I’d be happy to see four 4-team divisions in each league like the NFL and dump the wild card. Unbalanced schedules would then be more acceptable, but unfortunately the geographical distribution of baseball teams doesn’t lend itself to such an alignment, and that matters more in baseball scheduling than football.
…talk about your “natural rivals”!
Unfortunately, as we have seen recently the two (and sometimes three) best teams can often be in one division. Doesn’t this plan just increase the reward for winning a weak division?
Consider factors beyond the team’s control. In the wild card, Atlanta needs Florida, Chicago, San Francisco and Colorado to lose so they can gain ground. In the division, they only need Florida and Philadelphia to lose.
Aubrey Huff has cleared waivers, also, and is rumored to be in the process of being traded.
His BABIP is far lower than expected, and he’s also a “rent-a-player”, seeing as how contract runs out this year. But for only about 2M, you can get a left-handed who “should” post about a .800 OPS for the rest of the year.
He could DH, or play LF/1B/3B against left handers.
I don’t know that the M’s need another LHB, but he’s out there. Floating.
Arizona should be in the AL and then Houston goes to NL West. Each team plays four three game series against the other league and there is enough interleague games to have one every day.
As far as expansion goes I’m thinking one team in New York and one team in New England (Hartford,Providence) to help with competitive balance. A coin flip can decide which one goes to the AL although in fairness it should be the third NY team.
I’m not a baseball purist so I know I’ll get flamed but I LIKE interleague play.
Prior to interleague play, I always thought it was dumb for a professonal sports league to have half of its teams NEVER play each other (except in the WS).
Until interleague play, M’s fans never got a chance to see the LA Dodgers or any other NL team play at Safeco Field — unless we made it to the World Series.
I like to be able see ALL of the MLB teams play at Safeco, not just the ones that happen to be in the AL.
I also like the DH and I think the NL should use it. I think it’s dumb to have half the teams in the MLB playing under different rules.
I know it’s a matter of history and tradition, but no other professional sports league operates that way. Move baseball into the 21st Century.
Interleague play fixed one of the traditional inequities, now it’s time to fix the DH discrepancy.
What’s wrong with every team playing one another and everybody playing by the same rules?
Sorry if I offend baseball traditionalists.
Let the flaming begin!
Both teams would go to the American League. If you put one in each, then you have an odd number of teams, which has already been mentioned. The AL has 14 teams compared to the NL’s 16, so that’s why they would go to the AL.
If speculating about player acquisitions and dream teams is rosterbating, what does this thread count as? Leaguesterbating? Teamsterbating?
Keep the leagues, keep the divisions, keep the wild card format. Just rebalance the schedule. Teams should be rotating their way through various towns and divisions like clockwork over the course of the season. Start the year in domed stadiums or warm climates and gradually migrate north.
None of this strangeness where you get e.g. the Ms playing Oakland 7 times over a 2-week span, 10 times overall in the final month or so.
Okay, let me just figure this out.
30 teams.
6 divisions.
30/6 = 5 teams… Right?
But there are really only 8 teams in the “west”.
Which does lend itself to 4 teams per division, at least out here.
But then you have a bunch of 6 team divisions.
But the solution is easy… First off, Florida doesn’t deserve to baseball teams. Period. Seriously.
Baltimore and Washington. Same thing.
Suddenly you have 28 teams. Two 4 team west divisions, and four 5 team east and central divisions. And all is fixed. And the Florida Marlins can become the minor league affiliate of the Detroit Tigers that they already are, and the Washington Nationals can well, just go away.
In regard to the expansion, you gotta remember that both Portland and Vancouver are getting MLS teams in the next 2 or 3 years.
And this is yuppyville. Kids probably played more soccer than baseball growing up, nowadays.
No, teamsterbaiting is wandering around the dockyards, loudly saying, “I think I need some stuff moved,” when really you don’t.
While we’re taking away teams, Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, Tennessee and Texas: You don’t get hockey teams. LA, you definitely don’t get two.
I’m in the minority, but I like the playoff setup as is. Makes certain matchups/series that much more important.
And really, all it would do is make things even worse for a west coast baseball fan. Rather than having 3-4 east coast teams(counting AL and NL) a year in the playoffs, we could get five or six teams. I can imagine this quite easily(note: I’m not saying this is how it would be this season. I’m just saying hypothetically somewhere down the line). Boston, New York, Tampa Bay, and maybe the Angels representing the AL, and the Phillies, Braves, Cubs and Cardinals representing the NL.
Part of the reason why the playoff system works is because it distributes the wealth, so to speak. Any given season, two teams(AL+NL) from the ‘west coast’ have to make it to the playoffs. If it was just any eight teams from wherever, you’d see certain regions(IE: The Tri-State/New England area probably being one) do extremely well, while other regions(probably Seattle included) would rarely get a play off shot, so baseball would suffer in the area.
Whenever I re-notice that the NL Central has 6 teams, I feel bad for Brewers fans. To them Bud Selig is not just evil, but *incomparably* evil, as if his highest Villainy Similarity Score is only 783. He did that to his own team, while he owned it! That is evil.
Unfortunately for the quality of the product, MLB’s customer base is not particularly savvy, so MLB doesn’t need to appeal to them by making the schedule fair or making the interaction between the playoffs and the regular season more interesting. The connoisseurs are few and don’t really give MLB that much money, in part because MLB is inept at monetizing the activities surrounding the sport. Changing things to appeal to the connoisseur isn’t an obviously good idea for MLB.
There are a few really cool pipe-dream modifications I’d love to see:
1. Balance the schedule and get rid of the 2-league format. And yes, make the only non-DH pro league in the world adopt the DH. Occasionally in sports we get to see someone way outside their role, and it’s entertaining when it’s unusual. I don’t want to watch defensive tackles kick field goals, I don’t want to force punters to play left tackle on every 9th play from scrimmage, and I don’t want to watch pitchers bat, at least not routinely.
2. A deep (16-team) playoff on a very tight schedule. No guaranteed days off until the day before the World Series. Let’s see how good your pitching depth and bench actually are. How good are your 4th and 5th starters? Is your backup catcher a stiff? Do you have one or more excellent “starting” position players who need 2 days off every week? Are their replacements any good? Do you have more than one quality multi-inning relief pitcher? What is your plan in case of a major injury at each position (i.e. with this playoff schedule the 2001 McLemore-at-shortstop plan might have been disastrous instead of merely harmful)?
3. Home field advantage in baseball is weak compared to other sports, even in the postseason. One proposal I saw a few years ago that I liked was to institute a “6-game series” format for playoff rounds other than the World Series. It’s a best-of-7 format except the team with the better regular season gets a one-game advantage (it starts as if they’ve already won game 1 of a seven-game series). If you’ve looked at series comeback odds at all, you know that this is a large advantage. That’s okay with me because I want the regular season to really mean something, especially down the stretch. If 16 of 32 teams were going to make the playoffs and be seeded 1-16, the differences between finishing 8th and 9th, or 4th instead of 5th, would be very important. A vastly greater number of September games would have playoff effects, as top teams kept fighting hard to improve their position and teams with lower playoff spots fought to reach #8 and gain advantage in the first round.
If they implemented both #2 and #3, it seems like the best two teams would reach the World Series an overwhelming majority of the time. Many of the playoff series and games would be less interesting than early playoff rounds are today, especially if the advantage team won the first game. On the other hand, heavily favored teams would be highly motivated to win early and be rewarded with rest days before the next series, which adds some interest. I would enjoy this format more, but someone who watches the postseason to see star players (or for almost any of the usual reasons people watch) probably wouldn’t. Because more players on each team and more aspects of each team would matter, there would be many more individual story angles for the media to cover. As a media consumer that sounds great, but media producers might disagree. Covering a new story is expensive and hard, while aggregating and reissuing content from one of a few existing stories is cheap and easy.
4. Relegation/promotion would be amazing, but is practically impossible given the financial arrangements already in place. Change that would require people to throw billions of their dollars out the window seems unlikely.
I wonder: why does it have to be 162 games?
Sorry to burst that bubble (and be nitpicky), but the NPB is just like MLB. The Pacific League does use the DH, but the Central League does not.
Well, if you want to get all wacky and soccerish on us, why not divorce the minor leagues and have relegation, so that a minor league team that’s doing well can get bumped up into the majors and perennial also-rans like the Pirates and Royals can go down to a league where they actually have a chance of posting a winning record?
Yes, I know there’s less than zero chance of that. Just being wacky and soccerish…
I prefer a slight twist on relegation. Teams don’t change leagues, but any team that wins fewer than, say 60 games, is siezed by the league and auctioned off to new ownership.
I know it’s complete wishful thinking, but here’s hoping the Royals claim Carlos Silva off waivers.
No, because to make the schedule even more fair than that, we should abolish the leagues altogether, as Ferocious_Gentleman suggested. No more weak teams in the weak league (Cardinals 2006) sneaking into the World Series.
Not that I’d necessarily go as far as Ferocious_Gentleman suggested. I agree with SeasonTix: I *like* interleague play, and always thought it was stupid that we Mariner fans never got to see Barry Bonds, Mike Piazza in his prime, Ozzie Smith, etc. etc. etc. That’s just dumb, and unfair to the fans of both leagues (NL fans never getting to see Edgar hit, Roy Halladay pitch, etc. etc.). Just dumb.
That would only make a bad situation worse. How would the Tigers have been helped by being forcibly sold in 1994, 1996, 2002, 2003?
Look at the Mariners, they would have just missed the cutoff last year at 61-101. Today, we have one of the best run front offices in baseball.
Why? The whole fun of the playoffs is that the best team doesn’t always win. The 2000 Mariners “sneaked” in to the playoffs and then beat the Chicago White Sox with the best record in baseball. Was there anyone commenting on this blog who didn’t like that?
Maybe I’m missing something here…but it seems like, even with Rios’ declining numbers, Ricciardi could’ve at least gotten a prospect or two for him from somebody out there.
Personally, though most of the reasons for the Expos leaving Montreal were pure BS (which we’ve discussed at length on here before), if they were to have moved anywhere else in Canada, I would’ve like to have seen them wind up in either Vancouver or Calgary. No offense to the Hated Friars of San Diego, but it would’ve at least given the M’s a true regional rivalry for interleague games, if nothing else.
Vancouver yes, Calgary no. Anyone ever try to drive up to a Cannons game for the afternoon back when they were the M’s AAA team? It’s a long way to Tipperary.
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″….