Baseball Floating Realignment
Author: Baseball Bob
Baseball realignment suggestion?
Why don’t they just go back to the old “nl east/west” and “al east/west” play a balanced schedule and keep the current format? Have the two al teams with the best record as your “division champs” have the second best teams as your wildcard. This still gives you 4 playoff teams in each ‘league’ so you can keep the wildcard.
No floating, no inbalanced schedules and no ’85 win’ playoff teams either…
An inbalance of one or two games isn’t nearly as sever as 12…which is what is for every team in the league…
All AL West teams play eachother 18 times, all AL East teams play eachother 18 times. But they only play eachother 6 times.
That creates a huge inbalance.
You might still have 85 win playoff teams. For example the Twins won the World Series under the old East/West format in 1987 with only 85 regular season wins.
Anyway, there’s no real reason to change anything. Baseball teams, players, executives and most fans are perfectly happy the way things are (except for a few people in Tampa who have complained about having to play the Yanks and Sox so much). Most people like the unbalanced schedule because it allows teams to develop big rivalries with each other. For example, a Dodgers vs. Giants game is much more exciting for fans than, say, a Dodgers vs. Marlins game. So why not give the fans more of the exciting games and fewer of the boring ones?
MLB: Just Float It