More Manfred Madness

The two sports that I care about the most are baseball and college football.  And the people in charge of those sports just keep trying to make them worse.  Now we have the Big 10 talking about a 28 team playoff.  What are we doing?  College football had the best regular season in sports and they’re trying to make it into college basketball (which has the worst regular season in major sports).  If you’re outside of the top six teams in the regular season, you don’t deserve a shot at winning the National Championship.  Obviously it worked out pretty well for me last year with Notre Dame making it to the championship game, but I would have been totally okay with the penalty for losing to a bad Northern Illinois team being that you don’t get to play for a National Championship.  Ohio State won the National Championship.  Obviously they earned it in the playoff by beating good teams, but I like the idea of losing two games in the regular season costing you a shot at a National Championship.  They lost to Oregon and a bad Michigan team (post-cheating Michigan) last year and those games just didn’t matter.  They’re already at a 12 team playoff so I’d be okay with going to 16.  I think 12 is too many already, but what’s the difference between 12 and 16 for a college football playoff?  But anything more than 16 would be absurd.  The only good thing would be that maybe if they expanded by that many teams, Lincoln Riley wouldn’t be afraid to play Notre Dame because he’s pretty much taken the position that he wants to keep playing Notre Dame as long as losing to us doesn’t mean anything for USC.  If they could go 7-5 and get the 28 seed, then maybe he wouldn’t be so eager to get rid of the best rivalry in college football.

Now that I’ve gotten my college football rant out of the way, let’s get to Rob Manfred.  I’m convinced the guy just doesn’t like baseball.  He’s ruined exciting extra innings games.  He’s taken away the possibility of great moments like Clayton Kershaw’s Opening Day home run and shutout (unless Ohtani does it).  And now he wants to get rid of the American and National League and go East/West.  I saw this coming when he ruined National League baseball with the DH.  He talked about reducing travel and the wear and tear on players.  You know how you could do that?  Undo another recent stupid Manfred change, having every team playing every other team each season.  I don’t need the Dodgers playing the Blue Jays, Rays, Guardians, White Sox, Rangers, etc. each season.  For a while they were playing 20 interleague games per year.  Now I think they’re up to 48.  That’s way too many interleague games.  Manfred mentioned realignment in connection with expansion.  If you expand, you have to realign.  And I was in favor of that and had my own realignment plan 12 years ago.  I said, “I think the game is in much better shape now than it was [in 1998 when baseball last expanded].”  That was before Manfred was the commissioner.  So it’s not in such great shape now.  With Manfred as the commissioner, I don’t want to expand because he will mess everything up if they do.  For a long time, I’ve wanted the A’s and Rays to get their situations settled so that they could expand.  We know what’s going to happen to the A’s, but the Rays’ future is still very unclear.  I hope it doesn’t get figured out until after Manfred retires (2029 can’t get here soon enough) so that expansion will happen under the next commissioner.

The main reason I supported expansion and realignment was to reduce the number of interleague games.  With 15 teams in each league, there has to be at least one interleague game each day that there’s a full schedule.  With 16 teams in each league, interleague play could be much more limited.  The NFL does all divisional games the last week of the season.  This year the Dodgers are going to end the regular season against the Mariners.  They should be ending it against the Padres, Giants, or Diamondbacks.  My original expansion proposal called four eight divisions with four teams each.  I’m changing that to four divisions with eight teams each.  I’ve seen other geographical realignment proposals with eight divisions where the Dodgers and Giants are split up and the Cubs and Cardinals are split up.  If you’re doing that, you’re doing it wrong.  And I have no confidence in Rob Manfred to not do it wrong.  Anyway, here’s my new proposal:

NL West

Dodgers

Diamondbacks

Padres

Giants

Rockies

Cardinals

Cubs

Brewers

NL East

Mets

Phillies

Pirates

Reds

Nationals

Braves

Marlins

Southern Expansion Team (Virginia Beach, Charlotte, Raleigh, Nashville, Memphis, Louisville, or New Orleans)

AL West

Mariners

A’s

Angels

Western Expansion Team (Portland, Oakland, San Jose, Fresno, Sacramento, or Salt Lake City)

Rangers

Astros

Twins

Royals

AL East

Yankees

Red Sox

Orioles

Rays

Blue Jays

Guardians

Tigers

White Sox

I’ll get to what the colors mean, but first I’ll talk about the playoff format.  I’m trying to address some of Manfred’s concerns without further ruining the sport.  Manfred talked about travel and the TV schedule with the playoffs.  I really don’t care about the TV schedule.  It’s fine.  But he actually does have a legitimate point about travel in the playoffs.  If the Braves had beaten the Padres in the first round last year, the Dodgers would have had to play the Braves, then the Mets, then the Yankees.  That’s a lot of back and forth between the coasts.  So I have two very similar possible formats for the playoffs.  Both would have the division winners getting a bye in the first round.  The second place team in each division would host a three game series.  You could either have them hosting the third place team in each division or you could make it like the NHL.  In the NHL, the top three teams in each division make the playoffs and then there are two wild cards in each conference.  So baseball could have the top two teams in each division make the playoffs and then two wild cards in each league.  So like if the two best records in the NL after the first and second place teams were both from the NL West, then the NL East wouldn’t get any wild cards (four teams from the NL West and two from the NL East would make the playoffs).  So I’m good with either having the top three teams in each division making the playoffs or having the top two teams in each division plus two wild cards in each league.  It wouldn’t make too much difference in terms of travel because the third place teams or the wild cards wouldn’t get any home games in the first round so there would be no back and forth.

So far, the playoffs are not too much different from what we have now.  The second round is where I’m making a pretty big change.  The first place team in each division would host all five games.  The playoff format right now doesn’t do enough to reward the best teams.  The sport is based on playing every day and then they have to wait five days for the playoffs to start for them while their opponent is still playing.  So it’s still a five game series, but the first place team gets all five games at home.  That would definitely reduce travel in the playoffs and it would reward the first place teams.  We would keep the 2-3-2 format for the League Championship Series and the World Series.

Besides the playoffs, we need to figure out how to make the regular season schedule work.  My ideal number of interleague games is zero, but I know they’re not getting rid of interleague play.  I’m going to bend pretty far on this one.  I think my thinking with eight divisions in my original plan was that you would only play one division from the opposite league each year.  So it would take four years for the Dodgers to play every American League team.  With four divisions, I would make it so that you play every team in one division in the opposite league for three games each year.  That’s 24 games.  But again, I’m trying to be realistic.  They’re not going to make it so that the Mets and Yankees only play every other year.  So each team would have an interleague rival that they’re guaranteed to play six times each year.  Each team would play a total of 30 interleague games (way more than I want, but it’s a lot better than 48).  So it’s 24 games against the division in the other league you’re playing plus six extra interleague games.  Like if the AL East was playing the NL West, the six extra games for the Yankees would be the Mets.  If the AL East was playing the NL East, they would play everybody in the NL East except for the Mets three times.  They would play the Mets six times, and you figure out three more interleague games (like maybe if the Yankees and Dodgers finished in first place, they play their last three interleague games against each other.  So you would play every team in the opposite league at least once every two years.  It used to be once every three years, but now you play everybody every year.  So I think I’m making a pretty generous compromise on my hatred of interleague play.  I’ll get to the interleague rivals later (some are very obvious and some are not so obvious).  When they started interleague play, it all happened during one part of the season (it was all done in June and July).  There weren’t as many interleague games back then, but I would go back to doing it all during one part of the season.  Like I would have it start with a series against your interleague rivals in May and end with the other series against your interleague rivals in July.  And the last two months of the season you’re only playing the teams in your own league.

So with 30 interleague games per year, that leaves 132 games against the teams in your own league.  You would play the teams in the opposite division six times each (48 games).  That leaves 84 games to play against your own division.  With seven other teams in your division, you could just play each one 12 times each.  I could live with that, but I think I would prefer my second option.  That’s where the colors above come into play.  You could think of each color in the division as a pod.  You’re all in the same division, but you play the teams in your pod 16 times and the teams in the other pod nine times.  That would help preserve those more traditional rivalries and reduce travel.  So every series of the season would be a three game series except you would play 12 series of four games each against the other three teams in your pod.  But I could live with just playing all seven teams in your division 12 times each.

Interleague Rivals

Dodgers/Angels

Mets/Yankees

Cubs/White Sox

Nationals/Orioles

Marlins/Rays

Brewers/Twins

Cardinals/Royals

Reds/Guardians

Giants/A’s

Padres/Mariners

Diamondbacks/Western Expansion Team

Rockies/Rangers

Phillies/Red Sox

Pirates/Blue Jays

Braves/Tigers

Southern Expansion Team/Astros

The rivalries in the blue and red could be shuffled based on where the expansion teams would be.  Like Giants/A’s made a lot of sense when the A’s were in Oakland, but Padres/A’s, Giants/Mariners, and Diamondbacks/Salt Lake City expansion team would make more sense.  But if the expansion team was in Oakland, Sacramento, San Jose, or Fresno, then they should go with the Giants.  The Tigers don’t have a natural interleague rival.  They could have the Pirates, but then the Blue Jays don’t have a natural interleague rival.  If you put an expansion team in Louisville, then they could go with the Tigers and the Braves and Astros could be rivals.  I guess you could also do Braves/Red Sox (since the Braves used to play in Boston), Phillies/Blue Jays, and Pirates/Tigers.  Or you could just keep the ones that make a lot of sense the same each year (Dodgers/Angles, Mets/Yankees, Cubs/White Sox, Nationals/Orioles, etc.) and rotate some of the rivalries that aren’t as natural each year.

So please don’t get rid of the National League (even though Manfred has already done great damage with the DH) and the American League.  My plan would preserve the NL and AL, preserve and strengthen rivalries, add extra importance to winning divisions, and address Manfred’s concern about wear and tear with travel.  Please Rob Manfred, don’t ruin the great sport of baseball any more than you already have.