The Pecan Park Eagle

My suggestion? Send Milwaukee back to the AL.

Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig and some members of the MLB ownership family apparently would like to see the American and National Leagues equalize their membership numbers, for the sake of easier scheduling and symmetry, we suppose.  As you probably know, the NL now has 16 member city teams and the AL only has 14 clubs. The result of that spread over three divisions per league i that the NL operates three units of 6, 5, and 5 teams while the AL squeezes by with three divisions of 5, 5, and 4 teams.

Without tearing everything up that now defines historic league boundaries and starting over, or adding two teams and then doing some minor shifting of franchise for the sake of creating two 16-club leagues that could schedule games without creating the need for some inter-league play on any everyday basis, the short answer, for now, would be to move one NL club to the AL.

But which club?

Houston? One fairly locally opposed suggestion has been to move the Houston Astros from the 6-team NL Central to the 4-team AL West. That move would place Houston in the same division with Texas and theoretically help generate a more competitive rivalry between the two intrastate clubs. Why not? Well, for one thing, Houston is traditionally an NL town. I don’t have any surveys to back me up here, but I don’t think you will find many Astros fans who want to see their club swooped up by the DH rule that governs the brand of baseball they play in the AL. Our other big local complaint is that such a move would involve moving Houston to all those late starting (9:00 PM) series in three cities on the west coast.

Arizona? Some say that Arizona is the most probable pick of the commissioner. Arizona would move to the AL West, but then, here comes the Houston penalty again. The Astros would move from the 6-team NL Central to the now depleted NL West 4-club division to restore its total to five members following the loss of Arizona to the other league. From a Houston perspective, this choice is almost as bad as the first suggested option. The club gets to stay in the NL, but still moves to the red-eye schedule of playing all those divisional rod games on the west coast.

My pick? How about Milwaukee! If Commissioner Selig really wants to make this move, why doesn’t he look no further than the club he used to own (or still does, in trust?), the Milwaukee Brewers. The Brewers were born in the AL and only came to the NL in the late 1990s s part of an earlier balancing move. WIth their natural history and affinity for the DH, the Brewers and their fans would most likely be the least affected by a change of leagues. It might even feel like a homecoming.

The first result of the Milwaukee move would be to reduce the NL Central to a 5-club division, After that extraction, it’s a two-move jump to what I think is our best solution: (1) Move the Kansas City Royals from the 5-club AL Central to the 4-club AL West Division; and (2) place Milwaukee in the now depleted 4-club AL Central to bring it back to five clubs – and creating two leagues, each now functioning with three 5-club divisions.

I realize that Kansas City fans might have most of the same problems with a transfer to a west coast division, but Houston is a bigger market and, as such, a bigger potential loss to both turnstile and television advertising revenues.

Here’s how the major leagues would then look with the return of Milwaukee to the American League under this plan:

American League

East: Baltimore, Boston, New York Yankees, Tampa Bay, Toronto

Central: Chicago White Sox, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, Minnesota

West: Kansas City, Los Angeles Angels, Oakland, Seattle, Texas

National League

East: Atlanta, Florida, New York Mets, Philadelphia, Washington

Central: Chicago Cubs, Cincinnati, Houston, Pittsburgh, St. Louis

West: Arizona, Colorado, Los Angeles Dodgers, San Diego, San Francisco

With two 15-club leagues, the door would be open for two clubs, one from each circuit, to play an inter-league series at every scheduling opportunity throughout the regular season. In fact, the change to two unevenly numbered leagues virtually removes the option to cancel inter-league play without serious consequences to the creation of a regular season schedule. Without inter-league play, one club from each league would always have an unwanted three days off while the other 14 clubs were playing each other.

So, one has to ask: What would be the real purpose of balancing the two leagues at 15 clubs each? Would it be to wrap up inter-league play as a necessity?  I really don’t know. I’m just asking.

What do you think is behind this movement?

Tags: baseball realignment

This entry was posted on June 16, 2011 at 12:03 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.