AL EAST
New York Yankees
Boston Red Sox
Toronto Blue Jays
Baltimore Orioles
Tampa Bay Rays
Cleveland Indians
Florida Marlins (Moved from NL to AL)

AL WEST
Chicago White Sox
Minnesota Twins
Kansas City Royals
Texas Rangers
Oakland Athletics
Los Angeles Angels
Seattle Mariners
Detroit Tigers

NL EAST
Philidelphia Phillies
New York Mets
Atlanta Braves
Washington Nationals
Pittsburgh Pirates
Cincinatti Reds
Houston Astros

NL WEST
Chicago Cubs
Milwaukee Brewers
St. Louis Cardinals
San Francisco Giants
Arizona Diamondbacks
Colorado Rockies
Los Angeles Dodgers
San Diego Padres

This way, for the most part mlb would preserve the grand majority of their historical rivalries and it would make the greatest sense geographically. It’s likely that with divisions this large, a more of a balanced schedule would be able to take place as well. then, each division winner would get an automatic playoff berth at the 1 and 2 seed, while all other playoff spots would be dictated by overall record so all teams would have a better chance, i think this would help attendance as well.

The ideal league size for the 162-game schedule is two six-team divisions. You play 18 in-division games and 12 out-of-division games, all three game series, except as situations warrant, it’s pretty much perfect. Since we’re already at 30 teams, why not go nuts and expand all the way to 36 teams and add a third league. So we’d have three leagues with two divisions of six teams. The realignment works pretty nicely, using pre-1976 league set ups, with some division adjustments, and add all the expansion teams from 1977 on to our newly created Federal League (it almost worked once!).

With that, your leagues:

NL East – Mets, Phillies, Pirates, Nationals, Braves, Reds
NL West – Dodgers, Giants, Padres, Cubs, Cardinals, Astros

AL East – Yankees, Red Sox, Orioles, Indians, Tigers, Brewers
AL West – Angels, A’s, Royals, Twins, Rangers, White Sox

FL East – Blue Jays, Marlins, Rays, New York, Charlotte, Montreal
FL West – Mariners, Rockies, Diamondbacks, Portland, Las Vegas, Mexico City

The playoffs obviously present some issues. Without having done any serious work on it, my initial thought is for the division winners to play each other in a seven game series, and the two non-division winners with the best records would meet for the wild card. I don’t entirely care for that, so I’m also trying to work out a scenario where the three or four best non-division winners play some sort of round robin, but do so within the timeframe of the seven-game league championship series. The winner of that would play the league champion with the best record, while the other two league champions face each other.

Immediately obvious issues:
-This couldn’t be done piecemeal, so one huge six-team expansion would be necessary, causing fairly significant talent dilution for a decade or so and resulting in less-than-competitive ball being played in the Federal League for a while.
-The All Star Game. No one really cares anyway, so this could easily be rectified by making it Eastern Division teams vs Western Division teams.
-Finding enough markets. I just picked six new markets that have been discussed in some fashion before, but I’m not sure there are six markets out there that could fully support a new team.

I know this is my idea, but I like it way more than the idea of 15 team leagues, interleague play every day, and no divisions.

I have no idea where the MLB would expand, but using two of the more common possibilities, Portland and Charlotte, I came up with the following divisions:

NL East – Mets, Phillies, Pirates, Nationals
NL North – Cubs, Brewers, Reds, Cardinals
NL South – Marlins, Braves, Astros, Rockies
NL West – Dodgers, Giants, Padres, Diamondbacks

AL East – Yankees, Red Sox, Orioles, Blue Jays
AL North – Indians, White Sox, Twins, Tigers
AL South – Royals, Rangers, Rays, Charlotte
AL West – Mariners, Angels, A’s, Portland

If you wanted to go with The Common Man’s idea of expanding to a third NY team (which is fairly brilliant), the Orioles could easily be moved to one of the other divisions.

As for scheduling, I would eliminate interleague play and have each team play in-division rivals 14 times and out of division rivals 10 times. I realize it will end up with a lot of 2 game series, but, as a fan, I’d rather see the Mets go to Chicago, St. Louis, Houston, and every where else twice a year, even if it means they end up playing 24 2-game series during the season.

For the playoffs, with no wild card, the impetus for a fifth team is eliminated.

Los Angeles

Los Angeles

San Francisco

Oakland

San Diego

Central Division:

Chicago

Chicago

Milwaukee

St Louis

Kansas City

East Division

New York

New York

Boston

Miami

Tampa Bay

West Division:

Colorado

Seattle

Arizona

Houston

Texas

Central Division:

Cincinnati

Cleveland

Detroit

Toronto

Minnesota

East Division

Philadelphia

Pittsburgh

Baltimore

Washington

Atlanta

Divisions with teeth!!!!

Craig’s concern about the lack of late season races would be lessened with the addition of expanded play-offs. This is almost certain to happen in some format. So I say let’s try and make the most of it. With 5 teams in each division advancing to the play-offs, the division winner gets a bye, thereby rewarding division winners with a significant advantage, plus they get the winner of a 3-game first round match-up between 4 and 5, hopefully with little rest between the start-up of round 2. The second-place team, is rewarded with home-field advantage over the third place finishers in a best of 7 series. Winners would play for the division crown, with the home field determined by the season’s best record.

The one question that still confounds me is how to determine home field for the 3-game 4/5 matchup. All three games in #4 seems a little unfair and creates a situation where it is likely that a play-off team gets no home games. The ideal 1-1-1, with first and third games in #4 would be fine, except for the travel and delays, too impractical. The other alternative is the first game at #5 and then the following 2 at #4. Most likely this will become the answer, but it isn’t much of a penalty to #5, and one could argue, like is the case in basketball’s 2-3-2, that it is not advantage enough.

All change has certain detractors. But if inter-league play is going to be kept at the current level, play-offs expanded, and balanced leagues a priority, then the above scenario is an answer that may be the most liveable.

But in a system with multiple rounds of play-offs in both leagues, I don’t think the proposed “uni-league” arrangement eliminates the modest drama the current set-up can offer.

- Under the current set-up the last day “pennant races” for 1st place already result in little or no jeopardy, because the teams battling for 1st within a division are often also in contention for the wildcard. Sometimes the losers will be shoo-ins for the wildcard, and in those cases I’m already yawning.

- Of course under the current set-up there are annual late-season battles for a divisional title in which the losers are eliminated, but these occur only in the weaker divisions. So the question is, how much a divisional title really mean, if the risk and reward for postseason berths are exactly the same, among teams with the 4th-8th best records in the league?

For example, the 2006 Cardinals make the playoffs by the thinnest of margins either way, and I doubt their fans’ experience of the late-season “race” would have been much different if the proposed league-wide set-up had pertained.

(The Cardinals won their “divisional crown” that year with the 5th best record in the NL, the 1997 Astros and 2007 Cubs with the 6th best, the 2005 Padres with the 7th best, and the 2008 Dodgers with the 8th best. At least with the uni-league plan no one could make the postseason without a finish in the upper 3rd in the league.)

So, to put the question another way: which last-day “pennant races” for 1st place in a division, in the wildcard era, held a lot of drama for you that would have been lost or at least severely reduced under the proposed arrangement (ignoring, of course, that with balanced schedules teams’ records may have been different)?

I’ll grant you last year’s NL West was one of the better ones during the era of the current set-up: the Padres had a chance to tie for the 2nd best record in the league on the final day but by losing were eliminated. Even so, if the proposed arrangement called for 4 postseason teams instead of 5, I don’t think the experience of the race would have been meaningfully different under it. As above, I don’t think it’s really about the name of the title the winners are given; I think what makes a pennant race interesting is the risk of elimination for the losers.

Baseball doesn’t have to be basketball, hockey or football. Too many teams make the playoffs.

Now, I know this expands the number of interleague games, but it allows the natural rivalry aspect to stay in place, all the teams in each division would have virtually the same schedule, outside of those last 6 games); it keeps the majority of your games played in your time zone; and it’s a method that lends itself to easy tweaking (before implementing). Is that too many IL games? OK, take away a series (or two) from your IL rival division (say you finished 2nd last year, take away one of the series against the 4th place team from last year and add an extra series to your in division games). So in that way you can sort of induce a bit parity NFL-style (if you felt that needed to be done)

NL North
Brewers
Cardinals
Cubs
Reds

NL South
Astros
Braves
Marlins
Rockies

NL West
D’backs
Dodgers
Giants
Padres

AL ESPN
Red Sox
Yankees

AL East
Blue Jays
Orioles
Rays
Tigers

AL Central
Indians
Royals
Twins
White Sox

AL West
Angels
A’s
Mariners
Rangers

4 Division Winners and 1 Wild Card, if MLB wants an expanded postseason. Keep playing teams in your division as the majority of your schedule and it’s a win-win for ESPN. Red Sox-Yankees every Sunday night.

With the ecomony being what it is, why not look at a re-alignment throughout baseball, pitting teams close together in the same divisions, then play more divisional games?
For example, why is Pittsburgh not in the same division as Washington, Philly and the Mets?
This would give Philly (as an example) fans another close city to travel to to watch their team
The same could be said if Washington shared a divisions with Baltimore and Boston – makes more sense than Tampa Bay, does it not

By making divisions of teams in close(r) proximity, better long term rivalries could be made (see Boston/NY, Cubs/St Louis as examples)

We can live with unbalaced numbers in the leagues, as long as each team has a even chance of winning their respective divisions.

The best thing to do is to get rid of the DH so the AL/NL thing does matter!

As for the AL, well I think its stuck in place with the 3 divisions and a wild card. I don’t think 15 teams in each league makes any sense schedule wise.

1. The South teams really get screwed over on the travel. I can’t think of an alignment that really fixes that, but it’s really bad – you’re darn near coast-to-coast.

2. What about the AL?