Proposed realignment could prove quite painful for Cleveland Indians: MLB Insider
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- When MLB realigned the American and National leagues into three divisions in 1994, the Indians were reborn. Owner Dick Jacobs, with the prodding of his baseball people, left the tradition of the AL East and moved into the newly formed, five-team AL Central.
Jacobs had already engineered the opening of a new ballpark. The move to the AL Central was the team's emancipation proclamation.
Freed from their doormat status in the seven-team AL East, the Indians won 66 games in a strike-shortened 113-game season in 1994. Then they turned Cleveland into baseball's version of Disney World by winning six division titles in the next seven years. It was gravy time in Cleveland and the living was easy.
The only thing the Indians didn't do was win a World Series, but they got there twice.
Now there is talk about more realignment. It's connected to the ongoing negotiations over a new labor agreement between players and owners. The current contract ends in December. One proposal reported by ESPN last week has the 14-team AL and 16-team NL dividing into two 15-team leagues.
The top five teams in each league would qualify for the postseason. Under the current system, four teams from each league qualify. Such a plan is still in the discussion stage. It would take a 75 percent vote to approve it. Some say there's less than a 50-50 chance that it would pass.
Eliminating division champions and having the top five teams in each league make the postseason would be an easy way to add the additional wild card team that Commissioner Bud Selig favors. It appears to be a done deal for 2012.
But in what context will the new wild card teams be introduced?
The idea of two 15-team leagues doesn't sit well with me. The freedom the Indians experienced when they escaped the shackles of the old AL East, dominated by the Yankees and Boston, will be gone. How do you think Tribe fans will react when their team is in 14th place in the new AL on July 4th?
History holds the answer. They'll react the same way they did from 1983-93, when the best the Indians could do was two fourth-place finishes. In those 11 years, the Indians topped two million in attendance once. That was in 1993, when fans gathered to say goodbye to Municipal Stadium.
As bad as last season was for the Indians, finishing fourth in a five-team division just sounds better than finishing 14th in a 15-team league.
The Indians' most exciting postseason since winning the World Series in 1948 came in 1997. The Indians struggled through the regular season, winning the AL Central with an 86-75 record. In the postseason, they beat the Yankees and Baltimore before losing to the Marlins in 11 innings in the seventh and final game.
Mlb Playoff Schedule 2007 - News
The Rockies had swept a three-game series against the Yanks in Colorado in 2007. That was the year of the Rockies' late-season emergence and eventual pennant push. Two years later, the Rockies were a postseason team again. They are no longer moving on
It's no secret that baseball's current interleague structure creates an unbalanced schedule, potentially leading to serious implications in the final standings. Though every team at some point has fallen victim to harsh interleague scheduling,
The Royals have come close to mounting a playoff threat just three times in the past 25 years, and they weren't that close on any of them. In 1989, they were the third-best team in baseball with 92 wins, but Kansas City still finished seven games
Two 15-team leagues would require constant interleague games to balance the schedule. Does an AL contender want to be playing in September without a DH? Of course, the DH could always be eliminated. MLB has only been debating that issue for the last 38
It's not like the MLB schedule makers have done the Tribe any favors either. Not only does interleague play at a National League site reduce DH Travis Hafner, the team's best hitter, to pinch-hitting duty, but Cleveland is the only AL team the last two
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In terms of the calendar, since the two competitions run concurrently.
Scheduling
This seems as appropriate a time as any to discuss the schedule. One complaint lodged against playoff expansion in MLB is that the season is already too long. “No more November baseball!” is the cry we hear from some, and it’s a valid complaint to the extent that it’s uncomfortable for everyone to play in 40-degree weather and virtually impossible to play in snow.
One of the beautiful things about a concurrent playoff and regular season format is that, even with the championship series standing alone at the end, there are two extra weeks when can play. That has at least two major implications:
More games can be played by non-MLB Cup Elite teams. There can be more off-days between games during the season.This is huge, because it allows us to make both players and owners even happier, and it gives us as fans more baseball to watch.
My proposal is a 138-game regular season, with all 30 teams in one group for the purpose of determining the final league standings. The MLB Cup allows this to work aesthetically. It’s not as though the 24th-best team has nothing to play for; rather, they can shoot for 20th and make the MLB Cup Contenders tier for the following season, leading to more games against good teams. We’ll get into incentives a little more in a later post, but here’s how the schedule would break down.
Unbalanced Schedule
With 30 teams in MLB, the schedule almost has to be unbalanced in order to work. Otherwise, you end up with teams facing one another just once or twice a year outside the cup format. Instead of the traditional AL and NL, I think the new league should be organized geographically to make the most of regional rivalries in what has become an increasingly-regional game.
I know traditionalists are going to balk at ending the traditional two leagues, but other than the DH difference, do baseball fans as a whole really care about the league championship anymore? At least, do they care about it more than they would, say, an MLB Cup Regional Championship? I think the answer is no. The casual fan especially doesn’t care, and you and I can get over our affinities (mine for the NL), since we’re already used to a heavy dose of interleague play.
I propose that we break the leagues into three geographic regions. We’ll call them Conferences for simplicity’s sake: an Eastern Conference, Central Conference, and Western Conference. These conferences are then broken into two Divisions of five teams each. The final result is below.
Mlb Playoff Schedule 2007 - Bookshelf
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