I was reading somewhere that the NL was originally looking to make their two divisions equal in strength (as in, each would have about the same number of good, mediocre, and crappy teams.) The divisions would be rebalanced every so often as needed. You could periodically realign EL 1, 2, & 3 as well as WL 1, 2, & 3.

I think you need to balance any "balance" requirements with a tilt towards natural rivalries. And you also have to realize that there are but a tiny handful of teams that are perennial winners or losers year in and year out---and then over time look what happened to the Cubs after 1945, the Braves after 1990, the Indians after 1956 and again after 1993, the Red Sox between 1952 and 1966, and even the Yankees on several occasions. Dynasties can come and go.

For the life of me, I can't see why anyone would want to see six interleague games a year between the White Sox and the Cubs, or the A's and the Giants, instead of twelve to eighteen games a year with a division race at stake. And as someone old enough to remember the old Dodgers-Giants wars in New York, the thought of the Yanks and the Mets playing nineteen times a year along with the Red Sox would be like a dream come true. I can't see why a geographic realignment would produce divisions any more or less imbalanced than they are today.

It's not as if the dropoff from a team's (2b, ss, c, cf, wherever the weak bat may reside) to its pitcher is by some order of magnitude---if it were I would agree with the anti-hitting-pitcher crowd.

Actually, I've always seen mentioned in DH threads that the aggregate pitchers' hitting numbers have a larger gap in OPS to the next lowest position than that position has to the highest OPS position.

I am unable to state it clearly, but hopefully you get the gist.

From 2008 ML splits:

Pitcher OPS: .368
Shortstop OPS: .699
First base OPS: .800
Difference between P and SS: .231
Difference between SS and 1B: .101

So, yeah, the gap is about 2.3x larger between Ps and the second weakest position than it is between that and the highest.

Pitchers have a tOPS+ of 1. 1! SSs run at 89, 1Bs at 116. That's a 3.25x bigger gap.

I could agree with tigers roaming around behind the center field wall.

For the life of me, I can't see why anyone would want to see six interleague games a year between the White Sox and the Cubs, or the A's and the Giants, instead of twelve to eighteen games a year with a division race at stake.

As a White Sox fan, I want to see zero games against the Cubs. The "rivalry" with the Cubs is by far the most annoying part of White Sox fandom.

Oh, and aligning the leagues totally geographically might have made sense forty years ago. Nowadays, with modern technology, people don't have to root for the local nine - they can root for a team based thousands of miles away. Go to an A's game when they're playing the Yankees or Red Sox or White Sox - you'll find hundreds of people in the stands rooting for the visitors. If I was a Cubs fan, I could check them out the next time they're in San Francisco. Why take that away?

Jerry, I agree that for a relatively small number of fans, it'd be a tough transition, but I'd also bet that for far more fans than that, you'd gain more with the added regional matchups than you'd lose in interregional games within the current league setup.

If you're a Cubs fan in San Francisco, or a White Sox fan in Oakland, they'd all be in the NL anyway. You wouldn't lose a thing. The AL (or Eastern League) would be made up solely of teams within the Eastern Time Zone. And if you're a Yankees or Red Sox fan in the Bay area, there's always Extra Innings. You can see them 162 times a year if you want.

Just think of the intraleague (and in many cases intradivision) rivalries you'd create with the stroke of a pen:

Yanks-Mets
Red Sox-Mets
Yanks-Phillies
Red Sox-Phillies
Phillies-Orioles
Nats-Orioles
Marlins-Rays

Mariners-Giants
A's-Giants
Angels-Dodgers
Angels-Padres
Rangers-Astros
White Sox-Cubs
Cardinals-Royals

These teams would play each other 12 to 19 times a year, plenty of time to build up some real feuds, and affording many more opportunities for division races among closely based teams. This can only be a benefit to baseball, as would the vastly greater numbers of opportunities for fans everywhere to see nine innings of nearly every game without having to adopt the sleeping or work schedules of adolescents or the chronically unemployed.

Again, I don't see the point of regional rivalries. Rivalries are organic - they can't be forced. I don't see the Cubs as any sort of "rival" simply because they're geographically near my favorite team. Rivalries come from competition - any two teams that are competing for the same prize are going to be rivals.

Pitcher OPS: .368
Shortstop OPS: .699
First base OPS: .800
Difference between P and SS: .231
Difference between SS and 1B: .101

I would consider this an order of magnitude.

Thanks for the work, salajander.

--
Little Stein to file lawsuit

For satire, that wasn't very funny.

It's wasn't very funny.

My attempts at humor have gone limp.

Again, I don't see the point of regional rivalries. Rivalries are organic - they can't be forced. I don't see the Cubs as any sort of "rival" simply because they're geographically near my favorite team. Rivalries come from competition - any two teams that are competing for the same prize are going to be rivals.

This is true, but....

-----Interregional rivalries are far more dependent on both teams being competitive. And even when this is the case, they're almost never considered more important than the intraregional variety if both teams there are equally competitive. The only real exception that comes to mind to that general rule would be the Redskins and Dallas, and that's not baseball. Even the Celtics and LA took a championship round to renew that rivalry's intensity.

-----Regional rivalries, especially when they're intracity, have fans of both teams living in the same area, which makes the promotion and escalation of those rivalries much more "organic" (as you put it) and easier to sustain, even when both teams are mired in mediocrity.

Good example: While you can't compare college sports to pro sports too precisely, almost every school has a nearby rival whose defeat is, for its fans, always "the most important game of the season," even if their team advances into postseason play. Carolina-Duke, Michigan-Ohio State, Lehigh-Lafayette, Alabama-Auburn, etc., etc., etc.

Granted, the entire "without a ring the season is a failure" mentality temporarily wins out among fans of a few of the elite teams (mostly the Yankees), but even with that, listen to WFAN and you'll see that the most hardcore Yankees and Mets fans would almost rather see their team beat their interborough rival (or the Red Sox) than win the World Series. I don't think you'll ever see that kind of intensity surrounding any interregional rivalry, not in baseball anyway.

Put the White Sox and Cubs in the same league and division, and I guarantee you that within a year or three you'd have a least a few good old bar brawls, and with luck even a killing or two involving a pair of lawyers. What more could a true sports aficianado ever ask for?

Pitcher OPS: .368
Shortstop OPS: .699
First base OPS: .800
Difference between P and SS: .231
Difference between SS and 1B: .101

I would consider this an order of magnitude.

Thanks for the work, salajander.

Fellas, I think I've been unduly influenced by years of watching the Cardinals---I just checked their pitchers' OPS against the league average for pitchers, and year in year out, they're consistently well above the average---for 2008 their sOPS (OPS vs. league for position) is 170; the last five full seasons it's been 154, 162, 128, 107 and 188 (where, again, 100 is average).

And after watching them hit alongside the likes of Aaron Miles, Adam Kennedy, Gary Bennet, etc., all of a sudden they seem like they're holding their own pretty well.

I'd imagine if the rest of the league's pitchers hit as a group as well as the Cardinals pitchers have (think an additional 80-150 pts. of OPS) then people wouldn't feel as much the way the do about having to endure them in the batter's box.

Put the White Sox and Cubs in the same league and division, and I guarantee you that within a year or three you'd have a least a few good old bar brawls, and with luck even a killing or two involving a pair of lawyers. What more could a true sports aficianado ever ask for?

This is exactly the aspect of sports fandom I least like. I don't want to see more of it.

Well, obviously that was tongue in cheek, but lots of us do like the added intensity of local rivalries, which would be greatly enhanced under this proposal.

Sandy Alderson had some great comments about this today. He called Hanks comments "off the wall" and wondered "who made Hank King of Baseball".

he further added that the majority sentiment amongst the powers that be in MLB, was to get rid of the DH.

interesting. I like it