Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Realignment #1

Realignment was a big baseball topic a month or so ago.  I'm just now getting to it.  I believe realignment needs to happen and there are a number of ways to accomplish it that are better than the current alignment.  As I've written before I'm for balanced divisions and an unbalanced but symmetrical schedule.  I'm for an unbalanced schedule because with a balanced schedule, divisions make no sense whatever.  I AM for a symmetrical schedule because it gives all teams the same level playing field as it were.  Baseball has always had an unbalanced schedule.  From 1901 to 1996, there were two leagues of teams that never played each other at all.  Many games against your own league, zero against the other.  Unbalanced.

Here are some ways to realign, and I will give the first one here.

Realignment #1:

Move an NL team to the AL and have 15 teams in each league, with 5 teams in each of the six divisions.  This would almost guarantee an interleague series always happening throughout the year, but this could be done in a simple way.  Series at the beginning or end of the year could be played between teams that finished last or near last from the year before.  In this format, each team could play the other 4 teams in their division 18 times each (which is a traditional number easily divisible by 3)(for a total of 72 games), each other team in its own league six times (3 home and 3 road, for a total of 60 games), and each team in one division in the other league six times each (3 home and 3 road) for a total of 30 interleague games.  This totals 162.

More in a coming post...

Thursday, August 4, 2011

The Best Team

The best team doesn't always win the World Series, but I would say that the best team did win it the last four years running.  The Giants were arguably the best team in baseball last year in 2010 - and certainly in the second half - while the Yankees were the year before.  The 2008 Phillies lived up to expectations and the 2007 Red Sox ran away with it.

In 2006, the Cardinals barely had a winning record, the 2005 White Sox were very good, the 2004 Red Sox were a wildcard storybook team, the 2003 Marlins and 2002 Angels were WC teams, too.  The 2001 D-Backs had a great 1-2 rotation built for October and I'm not positive they were the best, but the 1998-2000 Yankees were.  So, it had been a while since the best team won, now four in a row.  Will the best team win again?