I would probably have more vitriol now over the Yanks' most recent spending spree if I hadn't used up so much of it last offseason. For whatever reason, the media is no longer willing to talk about what a disadvantage all of the sub-$100M payroll teams are at. Hell, the Twins could have enacted the Brian Cashman Plan last year and still had money left over this offseason to sign CC and Tex, maybe even Burnett (or failing Burnett, Lowe.) Had we held on to Bartlett and Garza on top of that, it's difficult for me to comprehend how much better our team would be right now. At that point we would have a real honest-to-god surplus of starting pitching and we could then either convert them into awesome relievers or make some trades to upgrade at positions of need. There is no problem the Twins have right now that a $200M payroll couldn't solve.
So how do we stop the Yankees and the Mets? It's expansion time! Give Brooklyn and Manhattan one team each. Maybe move one of those teams down to New Jersey, depending on what the market research says about the geographical extent of the Evil Empire. Then, since I'm wielding this obviously ridiculous power, I'm going to announce that everyone has to decide on the same set of rules--I don't care too much which way they choose--and when we expand, we're undergoing wholesale geographic realignment into four divisions.
In the Eastern League, we have the East Division and the Atlantic Division:
| East | Atlantic |
| TOR | BOS |
| CLE | NYY |
| DET | BK |
| PIT | MAN |
| TB | NYM |
| FLA | PHI |
| ATL | BAL |
| CIN | WSN |
In the Western League, we have the West Division and the Midwest Division:
| West | Midwest |
| SEA | MIN |
| COL | MIL |
| SF | CHW |
| OAK | CHC |
| LAA | KC |
| LAN | STL |
| SDP | TEX |
| ARI | HOU |
14 games against teams in your division and 8 games against teams from the other division in your league.
The geographic realignment serves a number of purposes. It will lower transportation costs, and in general lower the amount of time that teams have to spend on the road. If the Twins go to Chicago, they can stay there for an entire week. They could even make a reasonable drive up to Milwaukee without having to take an extra flight.
More importantly, it will be easier for fans to see more of their team's games. Every team in the eastern time zone always plays in the eastern time zone until the WS. Every team in the central time zone plays 130 out of 162 games in central time. Teams in the mountain time zone are kind of screwed because there aren't enough teams there, but 130 out of 162 games in west/mountain is pretty good--certainly better than having to deal with Sunday games that start at 9am local.
I'm no businessman, but it seems that it would be a good business idea to give the customers greater access to your product, and this would do just that. It also seems like it would make your employees happier to deal with less travel.
Also, under my plan, we get rid of the ridiculous sham that is interleague play. If it is a good thing to have local rivalries, then we ought to have more of them, and my plan incorporates that. I don't think there's any especially good reason to have the occasional game against a roster that fans are totally unfamiliar with. If adding variety to our schedule was important, we shouldn't be playing the Royals 19 times per year.
If New Yorkers want to continue to support the Yankees, they'll have their chance--the Yankees would play 102 games in New York under this plan--but the other NY teams would at least benefit from increased ticket sales.
Anyway, I'm sure there are other ways that MLB could deal with this without instituting a salary cap, but they ought to do something, and the media ought to quit acting like this isn't an issue simply because the Yankees haven't won the WS in a while.
While I endorse the idea of adding team(s) to NY, I think your realignment plan is...not well thought out. The result of the above scheduling/division plan would be, I think, to reduce the Midwest division to essentially a minor league. It quarantines them away from the biggest markets, which is a mistake.
You are essentially cutting off significant revenue from the Midwest teams by not giving them dates against the big market East coast teams, and limiting them against the west coast teams. What are the Twins' biggest home dates in any given year? Their games against the Yankees and Red Sox. Under your plan, those are gone. In addition, the Twins' TV rights are now worth less, because they aren't playing the most popular teams anymore, home or away. All of this to solve what is really a non-problem--travel.
I agree that the disparity in..what...market size?,,,spending?...revenue?...is a problem. But the solution, it seems to me, is continue to try to even out the revenues. I think your realignment plan would actually be a regression.
You could supplement this with revenue-sharing, ala the Zumsteg Plan from many moons ago if you want to do a little bit more to help competitive balance, but I still think that this realignment would be a good idea. Mainly, I don't think that the Twins rely nearly as much on the Yankees and Red Sox for attendance (or viewership for that matter) as you think they do, and I think that it really is a big deal to have teams play more games at times when their fanbase can watch them.
You are essentially cutting off significant revenue from the Midwest teams by not giving them dates against the big market East coast teams, and limiting them against the west coast teams. What are the Twins' biggest home dates in any given year? Their games against the Yankees and Red Sox.
Road attendance averages by team:
38,367 -- Red Sox
36,328 -- Cubs
35,944 -- Mets
35,798 -- Padres(?)
35,192 -- Yankees
34,709 -- Dodgers
34,285 -- Reds
34,105 -- Braves
33,945 -- D-Backs
33,700 -- Pirates
Of those 10 teams, the Twins had 2 of them on the schedule for 12 games. Adding games against the Cubs and Dodgers would essentially offset that. On top of that, the Twins drew just as many fans against the Brewers as they did against the Yankees the second time that the Yankees came to town. The 4th game against the Red Sox drew a measly 18K. And right now I think that the best draw in the Dome is against the White Sox, because they are our rivals and we've been competitive with them. (Though I think that 9 home games against any one team is too many.) We ought to spend more time creating rivalries--which will drive attendance far better than costal largess--and less time diluting the schedule with non-rival interleague games that no one really cares about.
Hell, three mid-season games against the Rangers (July 18-20) drew better than the Aug. 11-13 series against the Yankees. The Rangers series had the advantage of being a weekend, but still...it's not like the Yankees are filling the Dome these days.
Most of the east-coast games that we get are against the Blue Jays, Rays, and Orioles. Attendance will get better against the Rays now that they are decent, but as long as there are decent teams in our league--and there certainly would be--that's going to be true of any team that becomes competitive.
I honestly don't think we stand to gain much--if anything--attendance-wise from keeping the Yankees and Red Sox around. People will quickly get over it and they'll come to see different teams.
All of this to solve what is really a non-problem--travel.
Admittedly the time-zone issue is not as severe in the midwest as it is on the coasts, but it is still a problem. If we want to talk about the value of TV rights--try selling TV ads in Tampa Bay for a game that starts at 10pm and ends at 1am or later. Tampa had 16 games this year against west coast teams, and whenever a west coast team plays an east coast team, the game is nearly unwatchable by the away team's fans. That's not so bad for Tampa, but look at, say, the Mariners. About half of their away games were in the eastern time zone, which means for a typical weekday night game that by the time a lot of people get home and settled in, the game is already over. You can completely forget about watching away day games on a weekday, and even on the weekend you might miss the majority of the game by going to church. (Weekend games that start before noon get such bad ratings that I have never seen the local FOX station pick up a game-of-the-week matchup that starts before noon and you don't even have to compete with most churches on a Saturday.) 22 of Seattle's away games were in the central time zone, which is a fairly significant improvement, pushing the last hour of the game from 6-7 to 7-8. The Mariners already get a pretty sweet TV deal, but they could get a much, much nicer deal if you move more of their games into prime time.
Also, by having more road trips where we get to play two teams in the same city--or at least stay in the same time zone--teams can play more night games, which will give teams more revenue at the gate and more viewers on television.
To me, this is a much bigger problem than a few thousand people per game that may or may not show up to watch the Yankees. Things are easier in the midwest because west coast games aren't quite as late (though I know that attendance gets pretty thin around here for west coast games) and east coast games aren't much of a problem, but there's a good reason that prime time is called prime time. FOX wouldn't air new episodes of 24 at 4pm on a Tuesday, 11pm on a Wednesday, 9am on a Thursday, or 10am on a Sunday, and I'm sure that they'd rather not be airing baseball games then, either.
Another problem with the current alignment is that there are 6 teams in the NL Central for one playoff spot and 4 teams in the AL West for one playoff spot. Assuming competitive balance, over a 24-year period, an AL West team gets 2 more playoff appearances than an NL Central team--which is a non-significant difference considering all of the extra revenue attached with a playoff spot. This is a much bigger deal than most fans give it credit for. (Not to mention that NL Central teams play 95 out of 162 games within their division against only 5 distinct opponents. I would have 98 games within each team's division, but I think that would be fine as long as it is spread out against 7 different opponents and it is the same for each division.)
People got all offended about the Twins having to play on the road for Game 163, but no one complained that we got to play the White Sox 10 times at home against 9 times on the road. If we'd played 9/9 or 9/10 there may not even have been a tie. Or if the White Sox had played the Brewers 6 times instead of the Cubs 6 times, there might not have been a tie. Issues like that are much, much bigger problems in fairly determining a division champion than assigning home field advantage in a one-game playoff by flipping a coin. The schedule as it stands is a complete and total joke.
One more note about attendance. Assume for a moment that the home team is a much bigger influence on attendance than the road team (which is quite clear from looking at the attendance data) and that the four NY teams split the NYY/NYM attendance (which is not totally fair, but I have no idea how to estimate how much the total NY attendance would go up.)
Average home attendance per game per team would be roughly the following, based on 2008 totals:
East--26.5K
Atlantic--29.8K
Midwest--32.4K
West--33.3K
It's not clear at all to me that the Midwest division would have a hard time drawing lots of fans or lots of dollars and in fact, the East division would almost clearly be in the worst spot, with the two Florida teams, Baltimore, DC, and some teams in the "midwest" who are still in the Eastern time zone. If anything, those are the teams that need the NY/BOS interest more than anyone else. (Also, with the A's and Twins moving into new ballparks attendance could go up in the two western divisions.) Even then, with 9-10 Yankees games and 9-10 Red Sox games at home, Tampa Bay still had a significantly worse attendance than the Twins this year and Toronto had essentially the same attendance. We tend to notice when those fans show up, but overall I don't think it is a very strong force on attendance.
Measuring the same thing under the current alignment:
AL East -- 33.5K
AL Central -- 29.2K
AL West -- 28.7K
NL East -- 34.1K
NL Central -- 33.5K
NL West -- 35.1K
If you look within the divisions, though, it seems to me that having the Yankees/Red Sox or Mets/Phillies in your division--or even league--actually drives your home attendance down because you have no perceived chance of making the playoffs. Relatively speaking, attendance is pretty bad in Bal, DC, Tor, Atl, TB, and Fla compared to other parts of the league.
Really, though, it's more fair and complete to say this: What drives your attendance down more than anything is losing, and the big market teams in the East have a large enough competitive advantage over the other teams in their division that they will consistently beat them down and the small market fan bases become discouraged. Putting them in the same division makes them beat the crap out of each other, there will be more wins out there for other teams, and fans will be happy to pay to see those wins. Look at the NL West this year--those teams sucked. I would argue that there were four teams in the AL East better than every team in the NL West. But the NL West sucked competitively, so fans came to the games and the teams benefited financially from those fans.
With fans come money, and that money brings the power to sign stars on the free agent market or at least keep the stars that you develop instead of watching them go to NY, which is what happens now. It seems like it would at least be worth a try, since the current situation drives me crazy.
There's no question the current alignment, and the resulting schedule, are abominations. For the life of me I've never understood why Selig would willingly move the Brewers to the NL Central. Yes, the Braves represented the city for 13 years in the NL, but from a competitive opportunity standpoint the Brewers' move was extremely shortsighted. Even from an attendance standpoint, the Cubs-Brewers rivalry might generate decent ticket sales, but the Brewers' next nearest NL rival is in St. Louis. I doubt many Cardinal fans make that trip. On the other hand, tickets for games against the Twins or White Sox would be a pretty hot item in Milwaukee, with a decent number of fans likely to make the short drive from MN or IL to the Cream City.
The one problem I can forsee with expansion is the expansion draft itself. The Yankees and Mets can rely on free agents/mercenaries subsidized by their revenue streams to the neglect of their farm systems, but the majority of the teams in MLB would be disproportionately hurt by an expansion draft. I don't see a way around that drawback unless large-market, high-revenue teams were singled out by increased draft exposure, but you might already have anticipated this problem. Any thoughts?
There would seem to be other ways of controlling the more mercenary teams. One would be to address the fluidity of the labor pool. This could be done by increasing arbitration years prior to free agency, though the MLBPA would probably never allow that. A more competitive-minded solution would be to expand on the exclusive negotiating window for free agents gradually. Following the 15-day post-World Series window for the former team of the now "free" agent, why not expand to a 45 (or even 60) day window of intra-divisional exclusivity. This could keep some talent from fleeing the division while also serving to increase pressure on teams notorious for low-ball offers [ahem]. Imagine the uproar if a popular Twin signed with Chicago because Carl wouldn't cough up a couple extra million. To expand on that for a moment, with the Red Sox "already salivating over Mauer," it's nice to think that the Twins would be more motivated to resign him before Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland could enjoy their own semi-exclusive chance to secure his services.
Finally, there's the matter of the draft itself. Why not make signing a Type A free agent an automatic forfeiture of a first-round draft pick? I'm thinking of how the Brewers got stiffed when the Yankees signed Teixeira. I don't mind ranking free agents if the ranking system makes sense, so if Tex is more valuable than Sabathia, award the Yankees' first round pick to the Angels this year and to the Brewers the next.
New York absolutely needs another team. I was in favor of Montreal moving there -- that's not happening now with a new stadium in Washington. Maybe if Tampa Bay doesn't build a new stadium, it eventually ends up there. But, a couple of new teams in New York would solve a lot of problems.
So, how many teams make the playoffs?
I'm in favor of a return to the 4-team playoff, but add wildcards if you must. (Even then, wildcards don't make sense since not everyone plays the same schedule. Right now, teams play such drastically different schedules that having a wild card is fairly insane.)
I was in favor of Montreal moving there -- that's not happening now with a new stadium in Washington. Maybe if Tampa Bay doesn't build a new stadium, it eventually ends up there.
I was also in favor of moving Montreal to NY instead of DC, but you're right, at this point you can't move them again. I would have suggested moving TB there as an easier fix, but now that they have an AL championship, they at least have a little bit of history, so I'm a little more hesitant to move them. Plus, I don't think we really have any idea how well Tampa can draw just yet. They've averaged something like 97 losses/year before this season, and even the Yankees would have trouble drawing fans if they performed like that on the field. There are a lot of people in Florida, and there's always a ton of amateur talent coming out of that state, so I think that both Florida franchises could eventually do well if they have reasonable management and ownership. (The way the Marlins are being run is absolutely disgraceful.)
It's a great plan unless you're a Yanks/Mets fan, which is basically the point, and it sure wouldn't be banned in Boston, but I'm not sure if you could sell a 4-team playoff again to the owners or the networks.
I wouldn't mind putting a team in Cambridge either.
The point of playoffs isn't necessarily that they're fair, it's to make the season more exciting. Even just having 4 divisions and having the winner of each division make the playoffs isn't necessarily fair because the winner of one division might be considerably worse than a 2nd place team in another division. The fairest thing to do is just to have every team play every other team the same number of times, then at the end of the season, declare the team with the best record the champion. Of course, this is quite boring and anybody who starts the season 20-30 is basically already out of the running.
That's true to an extent, but if you follow that line of reasoning far enough, all games would be more interesting if they were played against a handicap. Not many people are interested in watching OKC get beat down by the Lakers, so why not give them a few points at the beginning of the game to make things more exciting?
Under the current system, teams within the same division don't even play the same schedule, so the idea of there being a division champion (as determined strictly by won-loss record) seems rather silly to me. If everyone within the division has the same schedule, you can plausibly claim that everyone has an equal shot at becoming division champion. The quality of competition within each division will vary, certainly, but that's not anywhere near the problem that having different numbers of team in each division is, or having different schedules for teams within the same division is.