An insane baseball proposal: Dual league restructuring

MLB will never make structural reforms without Congress forcing the issue. The labor issues always come down to mental gymnastics one must do to justify and work around the government granted monopoly the major sports leagues have (de jure for MLB, de facto for the rest). The leagues should be structured much more similarly to European Football with relegation, promotion and league cups. That structure eliminates tanking, salary issues, service time and arbitration, deflates some of the power of TV and marketing budgets, and a whole host of other issues. It also gives smaller American cities a shot at seeing major league teams play locally, which for baseball at least, seems like a no brainer thing that should happen.

If you are going to restructure the leagues, it should be done geographically - West, Southeast/MidAtlantic, Great Lakes and East. With the elimination of the DH, it makes exactly no sense for LA teams to each play 50+ east coast games and only 6 against each other. That would also allow for some expansion as cities like Nashville, Portland and SLC could easily fill out some of the regions.

Interesting thought experiment, but as is often the problem in North American sports, it hurts small market teams. What free agent is going to willingly join a small market team out of the champions league that has less capital to expend than large market teams. You end up with a negative feedback loop in which small market teams have an even tougher time affording to compete or incentivizing free agents to join. This is already a problem and a structure like this (namely, the 3-5 year qualification period) only compounds it. If a smaller market team hasn't had any qualifying seasons in 5 years it essentially pits them into purgatory.

Personally, I'd like to see the season shortened (in # of games) to give each game a more outsized impact. Give teams a bit more rest to enable shorter rotations (star pitchers get more game time) and expand the playoffs slightly (via play-in games) to lessen the soul crushing nature of missing the playoffs by a single game after a grueling 162 game season. Not that any of these ideas are novel or perfect, but it's clear baseball has engagement issues that are not improving any time soon.

A change like this would never happen. But it is a fun thought exercise. The current system in North American sports rewards losing. Between getting better draft picks helping to improve the roster and revenue sharing agreements minimizing any financial impact of losing, it is better to be a bad team than a mediocre team. Over the past 10 years or so, the result is that there are the teams that are trying to win championships, and the teams that consist of replacement-level talent. The current rules only make sense when everyone is trying to win with similar effort every year.

This is interesting but I think this fails to add the excitement that the other leagues have and baseball doesn't. It is true that the one problem is that there is this assumption that there have to be 162 games that all mean the same. We can throw out a lot of the records after two divergent years of playing

I'd rather see something where the regular season is shortened to like 140 games and have it end around Labor Day. Then have a full 8 teams per league make the playoffs with FULL 7 game series with the World Series still finishing at the end of Oct / beginning of Nov.

Then if you wanted to have something like this relegation setup for the teams that don't make it in, go ahead. They can all play each other and their minor leaguers still get to have all the "call up" time that the playoff teams don't get.

I also think we need to get rid of the nonsense of pitchers hitting, fans want more scoring, not less. Additionally, we can address some of the length with a simple rule that any pitcher that enters the game must face 3 hitters. If the pitchers are injured, they can bypass this rule but must go on the DL.

My understanding is that promotion/relegation systems tend to lead to more lop-sided leagues where the winners keep winning because of the virtuous cycle of: more money from the TV rights from being in the "champions" league -> buy better players -> the better players keep you in the "champions" league.

That said, there are no American sports with a promotion/relegation system (probably because those systems evolved organically in Europe from local teams just becoming good and gaining a following, and the American way of having billionaires owning one of a small, fixed set of teams means that they want to protect their investments and wouldn't accept a chance of being relegated and losing their valuable TV money), so it would be interesting if one of them picked it up. From an outsider's perspective, though, I think it'd probably be better to bias towards simplicity instead of trying to fix every problem. E.g. instead of having the "must win 86 games in two/three seasons to make it to the champions league", fix the number of teams in the top league and promote the top of the bottom league and relegate the bottom of the top league. Making the system more complicated to prevent teams from tanking probably isn't a worthwhile tradeoff, since 1) it sucks when teams tank, but it's very exciting when a bad team starts to do very well (e.g. the Bengals at this year's Super Bowl), and 2) that system still doesn't stop the teams at the bottom of the second league from tanking, since there's no punishment for them and they can get better draft picks.

Though my 2c to improve baseball as someone who just started watching football and tried to follow baseball when I was younger:

1. Reduce the number of games. In football, there are so few games that each one matters a lot. In baseball, there are so many that it's hard to be invested.

2. Find a way to make games more fun to watch on TV. Going to a ballpark in person is always a fun, chill experience as long as you bring a friend. That atmosphere doesn't translate when you're watching on TV, so the game itself probably has to be made more exciting in some way (add more time pressure, or let the players take steroids /s).

Seems to me to be extremely biased towards teams like the Yankees who spend their way into success. I'm pretty sure you'd create a situation like college football where you have the same small handful of teams who are always in the championship, which is pretty boring. (The focus on the Astros is interesting, especially given it would have stacked the odds against them in that infamous 2017 season)

I think that this article looks to European football as a model, whereas it would do better to look to the NFL.

I'd implement a few economic reforms:

- Decent wages for minor leaguers - Hard salary cap and floor per team such that players take home ~55% of revenue

And a few gameplay reforms:

- Pitch clock, to speed up pace of play - Tweak the baseball and/or mound placement, to discourage the home run / strikeout style and incentivize more balls in play - Cap the number of relief pitchers per game

This would make the game faster, more visually appealing, more equitable between teams (so every team will be forced to spend / have a good shot to keep their best players) all without any extreme changes.

I'd be happy if they would just get rid of blackouts. I subscribe to the MLB service and the blackout rules are so annoying.

It all comes down to wasting stars on bad teams. That's the underlying problem.

Maybe there should be some negative/positive weight on draft picks based on how "moribund" a franchise is over time. Calculate a running average of the pick quality and project a statistical estimate of how good your team should be. If it sucks over a long time (I'm talking a rolling 10 year average and as a somewhat fan of the Detroit Lions... yeah) then the team shouldn't get the cream of the crop, they should lose 5-10 positions in the first round.

And that's the real rub: at some point bad franchises aren't bad luck, bad players, bad coaches, or even bad GMs. They are failures because of ownership which is far more entrenched.

Relegation in soccer is really the only mechanism for this.

I also think there should be an exclusive "national signing day" for pro football where each team gets 1 player a year they can sign regardless of their draft position in the first round (assuming they can get a player wants to sign with them) and they forgo their first round pick. That would counteract tanking in the NFL because the really good players will avoid the crap teams. Of course there is a pay scale in the first round so they would take less money...

Baseball has strange levels of collusion among the owners, I think from generations of labor strife, which the NFL has avoided for some reason.

College athletics are kind of a multi-tier league like the article. And I'm not talking D-I/II/III. There are the Power5, and then even within the Power5, there are established powerhouses. Preferential placement, games that change in importance and estimation in the "rankings".

Of course college doesn't have the draft, which this entire proposal revolves around: preventing tanking for the draft. College has forced 4-6 year turnover that prevents decade-plus star careers from overtilting the advantage and seems to be a sufficient "chaos monkey"... although the 4 team CFP in football seems to have concentrated power in only a couple schools.

Is this "good"? Eh. It does make name brands. It makes for lazy reporters in an otherwise cacophonous landscape of a 100-odd schools who only follow five or ten schools.

interesting proposal from the competitive aspect of the game and as a fan this would likely be more exciting. However, a proposal like this is quite incomplete without factoring in the draft, salary cap and most importantly, IMO, the revenue share.

For a small market team, not spending on player salary to be competitive is simply a profitable proposition due to revenue share from the entire league. There is little incentive to spend a ton of money and be profit negative in the hopes the team may win and experience a transient increase in popularity. So much of the money comes from TV contracts and a team becoming good might get them a few more primetime games per year but their local TV contracts which broadcast half of their games are based on viewership which simply isn't that elastic - are people going to move to an area if a team is good for 2 or 3 years? Are complete non sports fans going to be compelled to learn a myriad of rules, player names, league competition scenarios, etc. out of the blue? Are there local demographic changes (population, age) which would negate any positive momentum in the preceding issues?

i'm not naïve enough to think there is a simple answer to any of this; MLB has presumably known and been working on this for close to 30 years. Is the game of baseball simply reaching the end of its place in time?

Maybe I'm missing something here, but does this proposal essentially say that half the teams will be playing something like a 70 game season as they're only part of the "Standard" league? How is the revenue sharing agreement going to work, you only get a cut of the rev from the leagues your in?

The issue right now is that the Yankees and Dodgers each get one vote, while the Marlins and Pirates also each get one vote on any matter like this. Most of the teams are not located in NY, CA, or Chicago where there's major fan bases and ownership that's willing to spend to appease these fan bases. At best, I could see about half a dozen owners benefitting from this, a dozen actively harmed by it, and the rest in a grey area of "being motivated to do better at baseball" by it.

I can see how this idea serves the fans and players, but how does it help billionaires fleece local governments for stadium subsidies/cozy up to local politicians to help grease the wheels of their ACTUAL businesses? I'm very anti-owner class, but I'll still admit you need to propose an idea they would actually like for it to be considered serious. This does not help the majority of owners fulfil their actual goals, which is acquiring currency at the greatest rate possible.

So pro/rel for baseball? It’d be amazing if it happened for baseball before soccer in the US.

I think the biggest problem with baseball is you can buy your way to greatness. Not always mind you, but teams with seemingly unlimited payrolls like the Dodgers, Giants, Phillies, Yankees have a huge advantage over smaller market teams in terms of attracting top talent and they are perennially "in the hunt" which makes the chances of smaller franchises all the more smaller. I know they implement revenue sharing to the smaller teams but restricting the top teams salary would make for a more compelling product.

Compare that to NFL football which has a very restrictive salary cap and you get a scenario where any team in 1-2 years despite how bad they are in a given year with great coaching and a smart draft can get to the superbowl or win it all(see this years Cincinnati Bengals, or last years Buccaneers).

Baseball has a rapidly-dissolving semi-religious status in the US (losing some ground to the NFL), and its owners definitely don't get it. I think it's mostly gone after '94 anyway. My personal guess is that its popularity is correlated with family size.

I'm only a casual fan at best, but my impression is that there are already informal tiers, and things like the draft and (attempts at a) salary cap are designed to counter that hierarchy. So I don't think this would go over well.

What problem is the proposal trying to address? From what I see, the two things it will "fix" are already non-issues.

1. Better TV slots for good teams – this already happens in every American sports league. Teams with popular star players, teams in big markets and teams performing well get the prime time slots.

2. Easier path to the playoffs for good teams – playoff eligibility is contingent on regular season performance. Why should it be any different? If you are a good team, play like it and earn your spot.

This is an interesting idea and would be something to consider if we were building MLB from scratch. I think it's a non-starter as a modification of the current system, though.

It's a great idea for an OOTP simulation. (OOTP is a highly detailed baseball management simulation game that accommodates things like this)

We should introduce a new type of basketball league for players under 6 feet tall for males and under 5 feet 9 inches tall for females. While slam dunks will disappear, we will see new types of tactics and shots.

the XFL missed an opportunity to focus on baseball instead. NFL is too strong on the marketing front and dynamically changes their rules to meet new needs.

Baseball is poorly marketed and is extremely slow to change (not always a bad thing). But an XBL, or something like it, would have been a stronger challenger to the MLB than the XFL was to the NFL.

Another insane idea, invite Japanese teams to play. Many Japanese people love baseball!