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Tuesday, August 11, 2009
Geographical division alignment is stupid
As Derek notes:
The White Sox claimed him on waivers, picking up his massive (though not that unreasonable) contract as part of their effort to capture a division title. The M’s, you have no doubt noted, are a couple games ahead of the White Sox in the wild card standings.
Geography? The reason that the Redsox, Yanks, and Rays all can’t be in the playoffs is because of geography? Or the Angels, Rangers, and Mariners? Really? That’s the reason? Because, well, we can’t have the Angels, Rangers, Mariners, and Yankees all in the playoffs. Who will represent the Great Lakes? Geography? That’s the solution? In this day and age of ultraspeed travel, and daily national broadcasts, and 24/7 coverage online? Physical geography?
And of course, having 4 teams from the “Big 14” conference and 4 teams from the “Second Bananas 16” conference is the icing on this geographical cake.
Let me offer a better solution. And by better, I mean “stupider” if you already like the geographical alignments (*):
1. World Cup of Soccer style: every 4 or 8 years, have a draft of 5 or 6 new divisions. The top 5 or 6 best teams over the previous 4 or 8 years head each division, and then they “draft” the team they want out of the next 5 or 6 best teams. And so on. There’s precedence on this in the World Cup, as well as the constant changing of division in the NHL.
2. Put the top 4 big-market teams in one division, next 6 in the second division, next 8 in the third division, and bottom 12 in the fourth division. Top 2 in each division advance. Again, precedence in World Cup and NCAA, in recognizing that the “bigger” clubs deserve a better chance of making it. This split also happens to mirror the big/small market teams that actually have made the playoffs in the last 15 years.
3. Promotion/relegation. We all know about it, we all love it. Except for those people who don’t like it because they think everything should be fair. As if what we have is fair.
(*) You can also think it’s stupid because you abhor any change in baseball that you would gladly accept in other sports.
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