Namely, 154 games, every Monday off after the third week of April, more early season games in warm weather cities or domes, traditional double-header days, and early-season international series. Jayson Stark wrote a good piece at the Athletic about expanding the schedule, and I’m going to take the suggestions he got from Dan O’Dowd and run with those. And with division set, we can look at the schedule. The divisions aren’t perfect (the NL North sure seems like the NL Midwest and Kancas City is only “south” in the way Missouri likes to think it is southern), but this system bunches the teams together best geographically. (And, yes, to get ahead of the comments, since some teams will have to switch their league I think the designated hitter should become a universal position.) We can try to maintain current connections and rivalries as much as possible, but some teams will simply have to realign. With that established, how do all 32 pieces fit best together? Two eight-team divisions are a terrible idea (because the old two-division setup sucked and I don’t want to lump the Indians in with the Yankees and Red Sox, selfishly), so four four-team divisions seems perfect. I like these two because Portland already has backers willing to buy land for a stadium and Raleigh has the distance from other teams and demographics to best support a team. Mitchell also broke down where expansion could work best, but I’m going to use my preferred sites in this exercise: Portland, Oregon, and Raleigh, North Carolina. population growth.” Population growth hasn’t stopped since 1998, which means there are more fans and, more importantly, more potential players out there. If you’re wondering why baseball would expand, well, Chris Mitchell wrote it best in the Hardball Times Annual 2018: “Baseball averaged one multi-team expansion every 6.2 years between 19, which kept pace with U.S. Expanding to 32 teams and reducing the schedule to 154 games have been discussed widely and loudly in recent months, and I think they could work and be good for the game.īut how would it work? I’m glad you asked. Not the Rob Manfred BS, but changes to the league writ large.
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