The Pecan Park Eagle

Relief Pitching? Realignment or not, we don’t need no stinkin’ relief pitching in Houston! … Guess why!

From a purely selfish standpoint, the 2013 left a lot of us Astros fans with our blood running cold for the American League and it wasn’t just the “DH” rule that did it. What got me the most was the quality of our team’s play and the nuisance fact that I couldn’t even follow the team on TV to look for signs of hope in the future. Throw in the fact that I don’t care a rip for the teams in the American League West, or staying up to listen to radio broadcasts of losing baseball from the west coast and 2013 added up to little more than a psychological reconditioning exorcism for the mental illness of “fandom rabidity” (DSMR Diagnostic Manual Code 463.64 – or something like that.)

It’s the kind of negative development that always leads me back in fool’s hope that MLB could, at least, rearrange the league alignments back to something that returns all the inter-league scheduling options back to the two leagues and removes it from the Commissioner’s Office and vests it in two reborn strong league presidents. Look – I know that’s not going to happen, but do like to bring it up as the prime example of what has been destroyed on the watch of Commissioner Bud Selig.

How long do you seriously think that the NL could hold out against serious pressure from Selig’s forces if Bud, or a like-thinking successor, ever decides he wants to force the DH on the NL? Remember the coercion that Selig put on Jim Crane as the condition for approval on his purchase of the Astros? Selig made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. It was either move to the American League for a few million less purchase price dollars – or “for-ged-aboud-it”!

They may as well realign the game along the same lines as the NFL. Only, in baseball, the new big name would be “American League Baseball” (ALB), and the two leagues would then melt into the no longer distinctive American and National Baseball Conferences.

Realistically, the two leagues may never again have the individual power they each once enjoyed. Any hope they have for same is locked away by that Astros forced move to the AL. That one gave us two 15-club leagues and took away all practical options to inter-league play. Now there has to be an inter-league game built into each schedule change in the season because of the uneven matching 15 membership numbers in each league. Add to it the desire of each league to operate with three even-numbered divisions and it means that each league would need to either downsize  to 12 clubs each or expand up to 18 clubs each to achieve an even-numbers balance for attractive fair competition that could restore the option, to play or not to play, inter-league ball during any given season.

With some help from the 2010 census data, I came up with six new areas that minimally matched the kind of populations and locations that might work to serve the needs for MLB expansion. I did not try to analyze all the political factors that could work against, at least, one of the new locations, nor did I deal with the fact that one of the new sites (San Jose) is currently being eyed by Oakland as their new home. And except for moving Houston back to the NL and taking Texas with them, I did not attempt to wholly realign the major leagues.

The six new franchise areas I selected are noted in bold type in the chart below and they include: Orlando, FL; Las Vegas, NV; Portland, OR; Sacramento, CA; San Antonio, TX; and San Jose, CA.

Chart Showing One Possible Realignment of MLB into 36 clubs in Two Leagues with 18 Members Each:

Happy New 2014 Wish # 1, Everybody!