Realignment Lunacy

(Warning, this is going to be a little bit of a rant.)

So, apparently the Houston Astros are going to move from the National League to the American League, negating the impact of the 1998 move of the Milwaukee Brewers from the American League to the National League in order to allow for the two new expansion teams, the Arizona Diamondbacks and the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, to reside one in each league without having, uh, fifteen-team leagues. Oh well, even-numbered leagues were nice while they lasted. Which was from 1871 through 2011, apparently. Meanwhile, we're apparently about to have ten-team playoffs, five in each league.

Look, do you people just not get how numbers work in this context?
Inter-league play every day! There are, in other words, no actual leagues anymore. I would be shocked if this doesn't amount to a decision to introduce the Designated Hitter in the NL next year, and honestly, if we have interleague play every day, I don't think we should continue with split rules. I'd prefer to just ditch the DH, but of course that ain't happening. Meanwhile, five-team playoffs? Really? Is the concept of powers of two really that hard? There's some sort of craze recently for making bracketed single-elimination tournaments not have a power of two number of entrants. It's bizarre. You have to do all sorts of unnatural things to account for it.

I see people on the internet saying "let's just have two 15-team leagues, no divisions, and the top-5 from each league get into the playoffs." The desire here is to do away with the frequent occurrence that some teams that miss the postseason have better regular-season records than teams that get in. Okay, if you want to change that, fine. But to my mind the only benefit of 15-team leagues is that it's a nice multiple of three, so you could have three neat five-team divisions. If we're going to abolish divisions anyway, then why the hell do we care whether we have 14, 15, or 16-team leagues? Except, of course, that there is still and will always be a damn good reason to have even-numbered leagues. And there's just no coherent argument presented for why the postseason should depart from a power of two. That's a big change. Big changes are often for the worse, especially if you're starting from a pretty decent place.

And is the current system so bad? Do people remember Wednesday, September 28th, 2011? It wasn't that long ago. People called it the greatest day in the history of baseball. Under any of these new systems, it would've been meaningless. The Phillies and Yankees lost their LDS's. So? Would those of us who aren't in it for the money really consider it a virtue of the system if the biggest-market teams were always guaranteed to win? That Milwaukee and Detroit and Texas can advance through the post-season is emphatically good. So why are we in such a rush to change it?

I hear Bud Selig considers 10-team playoffs to be part of his legacy. The Commissioner of Baseball shouldn't have a legacy. Baseball is awesome. It's been awesome for a really long time. It does not need any visionary Commissioners coming along and messing with things so they can have a legacy. Greatness might consist in finding something that's badly broken and fixing it, but goodness can often consist in finding something that's not broken and not fixing it. Every commissioner should be good. I'm not sure it's really an office that asks for greatness, and if you shoot for great and miss, you might end up somewhere a lot worse than good. Now, this isn't going to ruin baseball; nothing can ruin baseball, because it's just so inherently great. But this does not sound like a change for the good.


(As an aside, it does sound very much like a change to the benefit of the Mets, who tend to do well in interleague play historically and could get a lot of short-term mileage from a DH spot in their lineup right now. Add a DH, and next season becomes very simple offensively: resign Reyes, and your lineup is either Reyes/Pagan/Wright/Davis/Duda/Bay/Murphy/Thole/Tejada or Reyes/Murphy/Wright/Davis/Bay/Duda/Nieuwenhuis/Thole/Tejada, depending on whether you retain Pagan. Either way, that's a nasty lineup.)