Facts? Data? Who are they?
Hate to break up LeBrongate 2.0 for a baseball post, but Kevin Kaduk absolutely loves the idea of divisional realignment in baseball. Loves it. Loves it so much he’s even willing to make up nonsense reasons why it would be great. Such as:
Best realignment possibility? Astros and Rangers sharing a division
Yeah, that’ll be exciting. All twelve of their fans would be thrilled.
ESPN’s Buster Olney stirred things up a bit over the weekend, reporting that Major League Baseball is considering a realignment that would leave each league with an even 15 teams and completely wipe out the divisions. The top five teams would make the postseason and, with an odd number of teams in each league, interleague play would be a constant on the schedule.
I still think that’s pointless and short-sighted, but it’s nice to see somebody finally noticing that two fifteen-team leagues would have to play a ton of interleague games. Even if it is just Olney.
The Houston Astros would be the one team calling the figurative moving vans as it’s presumed they’d be plucked from the six-team NL Central and placed into the now-skimpy AL West (which currently only hosts four teams).
That would be a weird choice, especially since, you know, once they’ve wiped out the divisions there’d be no need to thin the NL Central or pad the AL West, right? Am I the only one who’s noticed this?
Initial positive reaction: Evening out the leagues is a great and necessary idea, though MLB’s schedule-makers are probably already waking up in a cold sweat over the mere thought of reconfiguring the standard road trip.
People love to make this claim. Evening out the leagues is great and necessary why? So the moribund Cubs can be in fifth place in a five-team division instead of a six-team division? Oh, wait, but we’re getting rid of divisions, huh. So it’s really for Great Justice; what we’d be accomplishing is saving the Astros from the indignity of finishing in sixteenth place by moving them into a different league so they can be in fifteenth place instead. Which is obviously more fair. How do you baseball fucks live with yourselves knowing that you’re unfairly depriving the Astros of this privilege?
And as Fox Sports’ Jon Paul Morosi writes, the Astros are the only logical candidate to switch stripes, even if their fans and players say they prefer to stay in the NL.
What? No, that’s wrong. Arlington — where the Rangers play — is only FF miles from Houston. That puts two teams in the same league very near each other and leaves no teams in the other league in or even very near Texas. Milwaukee is the obvious choice (they were in the AL until rather recently, in fact). Though, frankly, if the fans and players really do prefer that they stay in the NL, why don’t we do that instead of smoothing out the aesthetics to suit journalists?
(The one point where I sympathize with their gripe is the time zone conundrum: Those games in Oakland, Anaheim and Seattle will start awful late, though fans of the Texas Rangers have been doing it for years.)
Kevin. Listen to me slowly. This plan involves getting rid of divisions. The Astros would not be playing more games on the west coast, because dummy sportswriters care more about the theoretical unfairness of the unbalanced schedule than about what fans or teams want. That is the whole point of the arbitrary rebuild. Please try to pay attention.
Initial negative reaction: Hate, hate, HATE the idea of nuking the divisions.
Oh. I see. So you like everything about this plan, except for the plan itself. That’s good. Good thinkin’.
While Rob Neyer thinks we’ll soldier on just fine with a "first division" of five teams, I will submit that there’s nothing quite like saying you’re on your way to watch a first-place team. Why would baseball eliminate six races for first and opt for two races for fifth instead? No matter what you think about the value of a division title, we can all agree that no one is going to raise a flag saying they finished fifth one year.
This. This exactly. Fans do not care about the (actually very tiny) element of unfairness in the divisional system. They do care — a lot — about their team being in first or second place as opposed to fifth or seventh place. It’s more fun. Gets people more interested in the game. Rockies fans can be interested in the team — they’ve had a rough start, but, hell, they’re still in third! Only five games out, right? In the "divisionless" NL, they’d be eleventh. And everyone would stop paying attention.
At any rate, combine both of those takes above and we’re left with my ideal situation and a very underrated dynamic that would be created by placing both Texas teams in the AL West.
Oh. I see. So your "ideal situation" would be to get the NL the hell out of Texas, mash the Astros into a league they don’t want to be in, make their fans stay up really late because most of their games would start two hours later, eliminate the Astros-Cubs and Astros-Cardinals rivalries entirely and just hope Astros-Mariners would catch on, and the payoff would be… what, actually? Cui bono?
Think about this for a second: By pairing the Astros and Rangers, baseball will finally create a great regional rivalry in that gaping hole between St. Louis and the West Coast.
Houston: 95°22’W
Kansas City: 94°58’W
Pretty sure Kevin Kaduk just gave a big f-you to the Royals right there.
The two teams are located about 250 miles apart from each other and handcuffing them together would give the Lone Star State — long considered an outpost by the rest of the league — an increased relevance and focus.
To the American League, maybe. It would close it off from the National League altogether.
Dedicated baseball fans in Texas often don’t get enough credit,
They have a hard time getting credit these days given how often they’ve wrecked the truck and then defaulted on Jimbo’s loan.
but a close race between the teams would give them a bigger spotlight, plus an opportunity to needle opposing fans in the flesh. That’s just something that doesn’t happen right now with both teams being the geographical anomaly in their current divisions.
2011 Texas rangers: 36 – 31, 1st place
2011 Houston Astros: 24 – 42, 6th place
That’s something that wouldn’t happen right now regardless.
