Time to get cranky!
Jeff Passan is up to his ass in weird solutions to problems baseball doesn’t really have. Today he’s going to solve the massive lack of competitive balance in baseball by — can you guess? Did you guess salary cap? I wouldn’t blame you, since Jeff has a giant killer bee in his bonnet on the subject of salary caps. But today he’s actually proposing a different, equally crazy idea, which is: eliminate the divisional system, the idea being — I think — to return baseball to the 1960s, when lord knows it was ultra-competitive and we didn’t see the exact same teams in the World Series year after year.
If Major League Baseball is serious about competitive balance, it needs to scrap divisional realignment and embrace something far more drastic.
Unalignment.
Get rid of divisions. Get rid of unbalanced schedules. Get rid of inequality.
One of these things is not like the others! Get rid of inequality? Fucking get on that, Bud. And when you’re done with that, why don’t you get rid of cancer and starvation and the Huffington Post, too.
It’s quite simple.
See? It’s simple! Just wave your magic pope sceptre or whatever it is they give you when you’re the king of baseball and it’ll be done.
Make two leagues, the American and National, with no geographical split.
I think you can skip this step, though, since somebody else did that a hundred years ago.
The AL has 14 teams and the NL 16 or, for true equitability, each league goes with 15 and baseball turns interleague play into a season-long event.
Or to make it even more equititable, we could make thirty different leagues of one team each, and we’d get rid of unfair bullshit like weather conditions and injuries and unbalanced schedules by just having them all play a round of Peggle. Highest score wins the World Series.
Short of a salary cap, to which the players’ union will never agree, bringing socialism to alignment is the clearest way.
The clearest way… to what? Appeasing your desire to solve problems that don’t exist? Or just bringing some kind of socialism to something, when lord knows we’re desperately lacking these days?
Also, nice job holding off for this long without carping about salary caps. I’m proud of you.
Treat every team as equally as possible when it comes to scheduling, travel and pathway to the postseason.
They pretty much try to do that now, but it’s impossible because teams are not all equidistant from one another, and sometimes vagarities of weather and injuries interfere with the plan anyhow. Your plan deals with none of this.
This is not a novel concept. ESPN’s Buster Olney floated something similar.
Buster Olney is a special-needs student at the University of Stupid who co-wrote — with John Kruk — this piece declaring famously mediocre shortstop Larry Bowa the best pitcher — not shortstop, but pitcher — ever. So maybe pointing out that Olney also thinks so doesn’t help your argument.
NBC’s Craig Calcaterra agrees with the concept.
Who? For fuck’s sake, Jeff, if you’re going to default to appeals to authority right off the bat like this, at least appeal to good authorities. Tell me Bill James or Jonah Keri or Peter Gammons or even goddamn Bob Costas agrees with you. If you’re digging this deep, it can only be because there really isn’t anybody better.
It has support – albeit silent – from players, managers and executives throughout the game.
Very convenient that this huge body of support — from "throughout" the game — is silent, thereby making it impossible to falsify. You know what I do with arguments that are impossible to falsify, Jeff? I feed them to Bizarro Barney.
It’s a significantly better idea than the so-called floating realignment that allows teams to change divisions based on their predicted competitiveness.
100% entirely undeniably so. That idea is so completely fucking wack I haven’t even bothered to write a histrionic smear piece about it yet.
It’s better than simply adding another wild-card team, which creates two problems: a postseason that could stretch closer to Thanksgiving than Halloween, and a less meaningful regular season.
It creates a third problem as well, which is: ten playoff teams. Single-elimination brackets — like we’re using — will require a bye if the number of competitors isn’t a power of two. There is a reason they added a third division along with the original wild card, and it was because they wanted to have 8 playoff teams rather than 6. Do you see?
The plan takes the best part of the NBA and NHL’s postseason structure – the rewarding of the best-performing teams, division be damned – and applies it without the interminability of those leagues’ playoffs.
For my money, the best part of the NBA’s postseason is when it ends. And anybody who likes anything about the NHL is either dangerously stupid or just drunk.
Best of all, it rids baseball of what is best called the Tampa Bay problem, the impetus behind all this realignment talk anyway.
What problem? Tampa Bay is fucking 10-4 right now. They have almost the best record in baseball. Are you going to blame easy schedule? Because they’ve played New York and Boston.
Granted, the problem isn’t much of a problem this very minute.
Right. This problem only exists when other teams are better than the Rays. When the Rays are better than other teams, this problem goes away. Isn’t that, like, the way it’s supposed to work? Kind of seems like it.
At 10-3, the Rays sport the best record in baseball. They have won seven in a row, including their last four at Fenway Park, in which they made the Boston Red Sox look like a small-market collection of compost. The Rays are a brilliantly constructed, deftly run, shrewdly managed, overflowingly talented team.
Fuck. Let’s solve them.
And yet their standing above the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox, even a dozen or so games into the season, looks odd. The Yankees are a $1.6 billion franchise, the Red Sox an $870 million behemoth and the Rays worth just over $300 million, according to the latest numbers from Forbes. Though the revenue streams aren’t quite proportional, they illustrate that the Yankees and Red Sox live in penthouses and the Rays operate out of a one-room efficiency.
So — wait just a minute here while I wrap my head around this — your problem is not that the Rays can’t compete (which they clearly can, since they’re winning right now and are one season removed from the damn AL pennant), but that it looks funny to you when they do? And we should redesign all of baseball so it doesn’t look as funny to you?
This is genius. Let’s take this idea for a test-drive, shall we?
Current system:
New York Yankees (10 – 3)
Tampa Bay Rays (10 – 4)
Toronto Blue Jays (9 – 7)
Boston Red Sox (5 – 9)
Baltimore Orioles (2 – 13)
New system:
New York Yankees (10 – 3)
Tampa Bay Rays (10 – 4)
Minnesota Twins (10 – 4)
Oakland Athletics (9 – 6)
Toronto Blue Jays (9 – 7)
etc.
Wow. Jeff, I have to hand it to you. That’s… a whole lot of fucking bollocks. What difference did that make? You see how the Yankees are still at the top? How the Rays are still tangling with that? Fun fact: were the season to end right now, your AL playoff teams would be New York, Tampa Bay, Minnesota, and Oakland. If we switch to your system, the AL playoff teams are New York, Tampa Bay, Minnesota, and Oakland. Not exactly a world-beating revolution, Jeff. (NL, for the record, is Atlanta, Philadelphia, Ft. Louis, and a playoff between San Diego and San Fransisco. The only difference in Jeff’s system? That playoff becomes a three-way playoff, and we mix in the Marlins. Catch me, because I am fainting from excitement!)
The Rays shouldn’t be damned to always chasing the Yankees and Red Sox because they play in a stadium on a particular coast.
Earth to Jeff: The Rays are not chasing the Red Sox. The Rays are 10-4. The Red Sox are 5-9. And your cockamamie system, as we’ve seen, wouldn’t fix that issue even if it existed.
Excellent management deserves reward, not an impossible-to-sustain situation.
Like the AL pennant they won in 2008? That kind of reward? Oh, no. You mean the dubious reward of competing directly with the massive payrolls in Chicago, Detroit, and LA also. Bonus fun fact: of the five AL teams with $100M+ payrolls, only the Yankees are any goddamn good right now. Detroit and LA are right about .500, and Chicago and Boston are in the .300s. Tampa Bay’s winning percentage? .714.
Following my column on the inevitability of the Rays losing talent, I engaged in a friendly debate with Jonah Keri on the team’s long-term viability. He is writing a book on the Rays and believes they’ll continue to thrive. I’m a tad more skeptical.
Jonah Keri knows a lot about baseball, and you have a giant boner for salary caps that simply will not go away. Remember after 2008, when you said the Phillies couldn’t repeat as NL champions because their payroll was too small?
All I’m saying is I’m more inclined to believe Jonah on this one.
This entire debate is unnecessary. A solution stares baseball in the face, and as the end of the current labor agreement approaches in December 2011, the conversation about distribution of revenue-sharing money may get ugly.
A solution to what? Really. What problem is it that you want solved? The problem of teams like the Rays and the Rockies and the Marlins not being able to compete?
The Yankees and Red Sox are tired of supporting the welfare system that props up the Rays and other low-revenue teams, and any suggestion that rich give more to poor will widen the rift.
They should be tired of that. It’s awful.
It’s going to be owners vs. players – and, perhaps, owners vs. owners, too.
And, if we’re lucky, everybody vs. this crazy system of yours.
So blow it up. Start over. Unalign. Allow teams to keep the current sharing agreement while addressing the balance problem.
Wait — how is "allow teams to keep the current sharing agreement" any kind of solution when the problem is that the current sharing agreement is horribly unfair and doesn’t accomplish anything? Or is your whole plan to tell New York, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, and LA that they can just fucking cope or you’ll kick them out of the league?
Sacrifice the bonanza of Yankees-Red Sox 18 times a year – sorry, ESPN – for a schedule that evenly spreads games against them and gives every AL team a substantive piece of the New York-Boston ticket spike.
You ever focus so hard on something you’ve decided is a big problem that you totally lose any kind of perspective? That’s called tunnel vision. Jeff has that. He’s just told all the fans to go fuck themselves, and that the schedule should not be arranged to highlight meetings that people actually want to see, because that’s contributing to an imaginary problem that offends his head.
He also doesn’t seem to have noticed that, if it is in fact the truth that the oppressive Yankees and Red Sox are ruining baseball with their unbeatableness, having them play each other lots of times will mitigate that.
The schedule is a gimme: AL teams would play everyone in the league 11 times a year, with 19 interleague games. Those in the NL would play eight teams 10 games each and seven teams nine games each, plus the 19 interleague contests. If a team goes somewhere twice one year, it would host that team twice the next season. The interleague games would rotate yearly.
So much for equality of schedule. You notice how that rallying cry got dumped in favour of "play some teams 10 times, some teams 9 times, and then you won’t play everybody in interleague play?" Equality of schedule means every team plays every other team an equal number of times, Jeff. That isn’t what you’ve done here.
And if baseball prefers 15 teams in each league, it could move Milwaukee (or another willing participant) to the AL and use a schedule with at least one interleague game every day instead of confining them to two blocks a year.
And if there are no willing participants? What then? Keep in mind that you’ve just designed a system that — by your own admission — forces all AL teams to compete against two teams that you believe to be unbeatable due to their payrolls. Wouldn’t teams not want that?
Also never mind that the salary gap at the top end is rapidly closing — the Yankees aren’t outspending everybody else by so much anymore. Eight teams have $100M+ payrolls these days. Eight!
Either way, it’s a significantly simpler schedule than the one baseball currently uses to encourage rivalries and limit travel. Baseball is a $6 billion industry and can easily cover extra travel costs – and stop subjecting the world to Kansas City vs. Cleveland for 11 percent of the season.
Newsflash, Jeff: you’re an asshole. Travel costs are not the problem (though it’s none of your fucking business telling MLB how much money to spend on it). The problem is that it’s pretty rough on the players to be travelling constantly just to appease schedule designers who haven’t thought this out very well. That’s exactly the reason why the schedule is organised into long homestands and favours games played nearby. And, for one, I’d rather see the Cubs play a lot more of the Fatinals, Brewers, Reds, Pirates, and a lot less of the Padres and goddamn Nationals.
Is there still a team in Houston? I don’t really know. If there is, the Cubs can play them too.
Ten or 11 games is enough to stomach bad matchups and enough to savor good ones.
According to whom? You? Okay, then. Don’t watch more than ten games you don’t want to watch. And then… don’t watch more than ten games you do want to watch. I, myself, would rather see the Cubs play the Fatinals a fucking lot. And if there’s a bad matchup — like, one I don’t want to see, which your crazy plan creates more of — I can always not watch it. Do you see?
Baseball is preparing for realignment, according to one source debriefed on negotiations, particularly if the revenue-sharing chasm persists. No shocker there. Baseball realigns as often as a chiropractor.
That’s not a bad joke. I’ll give it 7/10. Also, I’m glad you worked some pseudoscientific quack medicine into your pseudoscientific quack baseball article.
Expansion teams want in? Realign! Game’s getting stale? Realign! Bud Selig caught a cold? Maybe realignment will cure it!
That is a bad joke. 2/10. You probably could have bumped it up an extra point by making it an STD.
From 1901 to 1969, baseball was the AL and the NL.
From 1876 to 1901, baseball was just the NL. Should we go back to that, too? Oh, how about this: from 1876 to 1946, baseball was only white players (and light-skinned latins).
Bill James has this metric he calls the Index of Competitive Balance. He writes about this a lot in the New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract. What it is, basically, is a series of standard deviations of team winning percentages, that are then mathed into a percentage representing how good the competitive balance was for any given decade, with 100% being perfectly competitive and 0% being utter domination by one team. Since clearly all these divisions are just fucking with proper fairness, let’s check out the great indices from back when baseball was more purer:
1900s: 30%
1910s: 36%
1920s: 34%
1930s: 31%
1940s: 34%
1950s: 34%
1960s: 40%
Now let’s look at the horrible divisional era, where competition was just ruined:
1970s: 45%
1980s: 56%
And now the wild-card era, during which baseball was completely boring and uncompetitive:
1990s: 57%
Apologies for not having data for the 2000s; the book is ten years old. The point, which should be pretty clear: all these divisions and wild cards have corresponded to massive increases in competitive balance. And here we have somebody telling us to get rid of them so we can return to the awesome fun that was 60s baseball.
When the Rays shocked baseball by going to the World Series in 2008, it highlighted the tenuous nature of their success.
No it didn’t, Jeff. It highlighted what asses everybody was for saying that poor little Tampa Bay could never compete against Boston and New York. Since that is exactly what they did.
They need outside fortunes to align with theirs to make the postseason.
So does every other team, Jeff. Seriously. If the Yankees — either because they’re a good team or because of evil Steinbrenner money voodoo — win 103 games, they still need Boston and Tampa Bay and Toronto and Baltimore all to win fewer games than that, or they don’t win the division. This is not a problem unique to Tampa Bay.
And though it seems excessive to shake up the game on account of one division, that one division is a microcosm of the game’s greater issues.
It does seem excessive, doesn’t it? Glad you agree. Especially since you’ve admitted yourself that the problem you’d be fixing with this shakeup doesn’t appear to exist.
Opponents of this plan will rally against the abolition of division competition.
Yes we will. Because it’s fun. To watch, you know?
Today, the best team in a league could potentially face a wild-card team better than a division winner. Scrapping divisions altogether removes that inequity and guarantees four excellent teams from each league in October.
What? No it doesn’t. First off: that is the tiniest inequity ever, and nothing worth rebuilding all of baseball over. Secondly: what, exactly, is going to guarantee that there are four excellent teams in the league?
The NFL allows 12 of 32 teams into its postseason, the NBA and NHL 16 of 30, and it’s nothing more than a hollow profit grab to which baseball should never dip, even if MLB does love a good hollow profit grab.
8 of 30 teams in the playoffs (27%): Correct
12 of 32 teams in the playoffs (38%): Hollow profit grab
So, I have a question. Is there someplace in the middle where you can optimise your playoff schedule without becoming hollow or grabby? Because lord knows I hate hollowness. I’m curious as to your source here. Was it slashdot? I’m guessing it was slashdot.
Unalignment’s effect would be subtle and preventative.
No, that’s wrong. It would be dramatic and jarring.
Had there been no divisions in the 15 years since baseball went to three divisions, the NL playoff schedule would have changed seven times and the AL’s five.
So what the fuck is the fucking point? Seriously. You’d destroy all the intentionally-heavily-scheduled rivalries, fly the players around the country all willy-nilly in the name of fairness, and for barely any change in the final result? Goddamn it, Jeff, why?
Two of the teams that would’ve been excluded: the 2006 Cardinals and 2000 Yankees, both World Series champions.
Oh. Right. Because it would take a championship away from the Yankees. Who you hate.
Which is fine. They got hot during the postseason. They used a flawed system to get there.
Moonbase Darien calling Starbase Jeff: All systems are flawed. All of them. This is not an accident or coincidence. Adding layer upon layer of additional complexity in an attempt to perfect the system will just make it unbearable.
Better to have the 85-win Phillies instead of the 83-win Cardinals, or the 90-win Indians instead of the 87-win Yankees.
Why? The win percentage of the 85-win Phillies: .525. The 83-win Cardinals: 512. This was a huge injustice? Jeff, those teams were near as dammit to one another. It’d be one thing if you could find any cases of 83-win teams going to the playoffs instead of a shit-hot 103-win team that got squeezed out by tough divisional competition, but the very fact that you can’t demonstrates that the problem you’re purporting to solve doesn’t really exist anyhow.
Another fun fact: third-order wins are a permutation of the pythagorean expectation, which purport to control for luck and for scheduling abnormalities, and tell you the true "quality" of a team. Wouldn’t that be fairer? Just go by third-order wins? That has those 85-win Phillies playing off against an 82-win team — the Houston Astros — in 2006. But isn’t that more fair? And we’re all about fairness.
Just as good to have a one-game playoff between the Cardinals and Expos in ’96 and Toronto and Texas in ’98 as it was to see Minnesota the last two years or Colorado and San Diego in ’07.
Well, yeah. I’m never sad to see a one-game playoff. They’re really exciting. And last year’s — between the Twins and the Tigers — was one of the best games I’ve ever seen. I blogged about it, in fact — thirteen times. What’s your point? Adding two more one-game playoffs every twenty years doesn’t really seem like enough reason to redesign the whole game, either.
The change is major and imperative.
Wait, I thought it was subtle and preventative. I read that somewhere.
It may be difficult for some to accept.
Such as: people who are not idiots.
Of all the solutions, it is the simplest and best.
Jeff, you haven’t mentioned any other solutions except for the crazy floating realignment plan. Are there others? Because they could hardly be worse. Except for the crazy floating realignment plan.
Oh, also, solutions to what? You never did say, you know.
It works in basketball and hockey.
Fuck basketball and hockey. Their playoffs are interminable money-grabs. Didn’t you say that earlier?
It’s how the English Premier League chooses its Champions League participants.
Jeff… I don’t know how to say this. Comparing your plan to something done in European soccer is the most efficient way I can think of to make sure absolutely everybody hates it.
Baseball doesn’t need to share more money.
/sign /sign a fucking thousand times /sign. This is kind of a new attitude, Jeff. I like it.
It doesn’t need to separate New York and Boston.
Which is good, since this act is, I believe, beyond even Bud Selig’s power.
It needs to think radically – and pragmatically.
No, it really doesn’t. It can pretty much stay the course, since everything’s fine right now.
Unalignment is the way.
By which Jeff means "back to that sweet 34% index of competitive balance."
