Over the course of the baseball season, I’ve thought about how to fix some of baseball’s problems.
First, both leagues will use the DH. I want to see pitchers pitch. Maybe see them hit. But don’t want to see them lazily run out a ground ball. Or leg out a hit but pull a hamstring. Traditionalists will hate this idea. They’ll say that you have to be a complete player. I don’t believe that. We dog position players if they don’t run out ground balls, but we give pitchers a free pass to mosey up the base paths on a grounder? We don’t want to see them get hurt? Contradiction! Pitchers can’t be complete players because they’re too valuable to lose to silly, silly injuries. Let them sit and concentrate on pitching. Leave the hitting to the hitters.
Onto free agency and competitive imbalance. Make building a team into one of two ways: free agency or the farms system. To enforce this make the luxury tax meaningful by associating it with draft picks. You go over the median you have to forfeit draft picks to your division rivals. Your division rivals get a draft pick, you lose a draft pick. Go ahead and get free agents, but it will also hurt your farm system.
Realignment. Move Houston the AL West. It sets up a natural rivalry with the Rangers. All divisions balanced. Then make divisional play more important by having 20 games with the rest of the teams in your division. When playing outside of the division, match up with previous year’s rankings. The weak play the weak and the strong play the strong. Keep inter-league games, but again match up by weak divisions versus strong divisions. You can get the sabrmetricians to craft some kind of metrics to determine weak and strong divisions.
Focusing on divisional play makes my playoff suggestion better: the wildcard stigma. You win the wildcard you have to play a game down. In the divisional round, you have to win 3 and your opponent has to win 2. In the league championship, you have to win 4 and your opponent has to win 3. You make the World Series the stigma is gone; it’s the best of seven. The stigma comes from not winning your division. You’re not good enough to win a divisional crown, you should be ashamed to make the playoffs. Of course this doesn’t seem fair for divisional winners of weak divisions — if the wildcard winner has more wins than a divisional champ. But of course if you were really good, you should’ve won it all. At least, the pennant races become more important in the end.
More double headers. More day games End the season before the end of September. Playoffs start the last week of September. No World Series games in November. Who wants to watch baseball in November? Especially in Minnesota. Too cold.
Have a 28 man roster instead of 25, but only allow 25 to be available to play daily.
That’s plenty of ideas. I doubt they will be implemented. I doubt any of them make any sense for the game. I wonder what would happen.
