Major League Baseball won’t be able to hang its hat on its timeless tradition if Rob Manfred keeps mucking things up.
The commissioner hinted during Sunday night’s Little League Classic between the Mets and Seattle Mariners that radical geographical alignment is still an option that could be pursued if the league expands to the 32 that he is hoping for.
“In my mind, I think if we expand, it provides us with an opportunity to geographically realign,” Manfred told ESPN. “I think we would save a lot of wear and tear on our players in terms of travel. And I think our postseason format would be even more appealing for entities like ESPN because you’d be playing out of the East, out of the West…
“I think the owners realize that there’s demand for Major League Baseball in a lot of great cities and that we have an opportunity to do something good around that expansion process.”
That would mean the disbanding of the National League (since 1876) and the American League (since 1901), the divisions that come with it, and the institutions in which the game has been built upon for nearly 150 years.
Just to be clear, there is not much “good” that needs to be done if there is expansion, which MLB has not experienced since 1998 with the arrival of the Arizona Diamondbacks and Tampa Bay Rays.
Wear and tear on players could be completely avoided if Manfred looked within rather than grasping at straws elsewhere. Decrease the schedule back to 154 games, get rid of interleague play that forces, say, the Mets to be in Houston on Opening Day or Sacramento to face the Athletics two weeks later.
Or maybe don’t force the Yankees to make two separate west-coast road trips in May, like Manfred’s schedule makers forced them to do with a trip out to Sacramento and Seattle, only to come home for six games, and then get back on a plane and go to Colorado and Los Angeles.
Instead, if Manfred is so hellbent on disbanding the current divisional set-up, get rid of them altogether, but keep the National and American Leagues intact, as they are.
No divisions, just each team playing every other team in their league 11 times: Three three-game series and a two-game set that alternates the host of that one more game every season. Then, keep the current playoff format, with the top six teams getting playoff berths and the top two getting byes to the Divisional Series.
The result is a more meaningful All-Star Game and World Series — two keystone events that allow baseball fans to see the best of the AL take on the best of the NL, rather than this hodgepodge of chaos that forces us to watch the Mets play the Rangers or the Yankees play the Nationals during a postseason push.
Yes, this is probably an archaic, old-fashioned outlook, especially for the fans in Detroit who want to see Shohei Ohtani come to town or those in Colorado who are desperate for a glimpse at Aaron Judge, but it’s a better avenue to take than this.
National and American League records would be destroyed, and charter members of each circuit would have to switch leagues. Could you imagine the Yankees and Red Sox in the National League, playing the Mets and Phillies eight or ten times a season?
It fosters room for new rivalries, but the appeal of the Subway Series is that it happens twice a season, and even that feels like too many sometimes.
The beautiful thing about baseball is that we have a point of reference for all of it. We’re able to quantify the ghosts of the past with today’s stars. Manfred continues to do everything he can to blur those lines, and baseball’s soul deserves much more than that.
