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Filed under: MLB Playoffs Major League Baseball’s current alignment and scheduling plan is a problem. The league seems to have acknowledged as much internally based on the SI.com report last week that Bud Selig’s special rules committee is considering a “radical” realignment plan. The full details of the plan are currently unclear, but the basic idea is that divisions and leagues would become vaguely fluid on a year-to-year basis to prevent three good teams from being trapped in the same division — the way the Rays, Red Sox, and Yankees are right now — for an extended period of time. As crazy as this plan might seem at first glance, it does go a ways toward addressing the biggest current problems with baseball’s division and playoff structure. As currently constructed, each team plays a heavily unbalanced schedule weighted towards the 18 games played with division opponents. Unfortunately, the talent isn’t evenly spread across the divisions and so some teams play a much more difficult schedule than others. This creates at least two major problems. The first has played itself out in the American League East over the past two seasons; the Yankees, Rays, and Red Sox have all had excellent teams the last two years, but have only two playoff spots to share between them. The Rays may well have been a better team than the Twins last year, but they had no real chance of making the playoffs. In the National League, three of the last four wild-card teams have been trounced in the first round. Because they played such widely varying schedules in very different divisions, it’s impossible to say that 2009 Rockies or 2008 Brewers were better teams than the 2009 Marlins or 2008 Mets, respectively, even though they finished with better records. With talent more evenly distributed across divisions, these sorts of hypotheticals wouldn’t necessarily have to be unanswerable. But the floating realignment plan raises its own set of questions. How do teams become eligible for realignment? How are the divisions chosen? What happens to teams in the Western time zone, who can’t be aligned as easily due to the rule that prevents teams from playing division games more than two time zones away from their home stadium? Most importantly, if one of the stated goals is to keep the Yankees and Red Sox in the same division, does anything actually change? How far would floating realignment go to fix the league’s problems? Over the next few thousand words, I’ll try to answer those questions by exploring a handful of realistic (and not so realistic) potential solutions. ? Permalink ?|? Email this ?|? Linking?Blogs ?|? Comments

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