If Major League Baseball is serious about competitive balance, it needs to scrap divisional realignment and embrace something far more drastic.

Unalignment.

Get rid of divisions. Get rid of unbalanced schedules. Get rid of inequality.

It’s quite simple. Make two leagues, the American and National, with no geographical split. The AL has 14 teams and the NL 16 or, for true equitability, each league goes with 15 and baseball turns interleague play into a season-long event. Either way, the teams with the four best records in each league make the playoffs.

Short of a salary cap, to which the players’ union will never agree, bringing socialism to alignment is the clearest way. Treat every team as equally as possible when it comes to scheduling, travel and pathway to the postseason.

This is not a novel concept. ESPN’s Buster Olney floated something similar. NBC’s Craig Calcaterra agrees with the concept. It has support – albeit silent – from players, managers and executives throughout the game. It’s a significantly better idea than the so-called floating realignment that allows teams to change divisions based on their predicted competitiveness. It’s better than simply adding another wild-card team, which creates two problems: a postseason that could stretch closer to Thanksgiving than Halloween, and a less meaningful regular season.

The plan takes the best part of the NBA and NHL’s postseason structure – the rewarding of the best-performing teams, division be damned – and applies it without the interminability of those leagues’ playoffs.

Best of all, it rids baseball of what is best called the Tampa Bay problem, the impetus behind all this realignment talk anyway. Granted, the problem isn’t much of a problem this very minute. At 10-3, the Rays sport the best record in baseball. They have won seven in a row, including their last four at Fenway Park, in which they made the Boston Red Sox look like a small-market collection of compost. The Rays are a brilliantly constructed, deftly run, shrewdly managed, overflowingly talented team.

And yet their standing above the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox, even a dozen or so games into the season, looks odd. The Yankees are a $1.6 billion franchise, the Red Sox an $870 million behemoth and the Rays worth just over $300 million, according to the latest numbers from Forbes. Though the revenue streams aren’t quite proportional, they illustrate that the Yankees and Red Sox live in penthouses and the Rays operate out of a one-room efficiency.

The Rays shouldn’t be damned to always chasing the Yankees and Red Sox because they play in a stadium on a particular coast. Excellent management deserves reward, not an impossible-to-sustain situation. Following my column on the inevitability of the Rays losing talent, I engaged in a friendly debate with Jonah Keri on the team’s long-term viability. He is writing a book on the Rays and believes they’ll continue to thrive. I’m a tad more skeptical.

This entire debate is unnecessary. A solution stares baseball in the face, and as the end of the current labor agreement approaches in December 2011, the conversation about distribution of revenue-sharing money may get ugly. The Yankees and Red Sox are tired of supporting the welfare system that props up the Rays and other low-revenue teams, and any suggestion that rich give more to poor will widen the rift. It’s going to be owners vs. players – and, perhaps, owners vs. owners, too.

So blow it up. Start over. Unalign. Allow teams to keep the current sharing agreement while addressing the balance problem. Sacrifice the bonanza of Yankees-Red Sox 18 times a year – sorry, ESPN – for a schedule that evenly spreads games against them and gives every AL team a substantive piece of the New York-Boston ticket spike. As unfair as life is in the AL East, it’s downright comfortable in the other divisions.

The schedule is a gimme: AL teams would play everyone in the league 11 times a year, with 19 interleague games. Those in the NL would play eight teams 10 games each and seven teams nine games each, plus the 19 interleague contests. If a team goes somewhere twice one year, it would host that team twice the next season. The interleague games would rotate yearly. And if baseball prefers 15 teams in each league, it could move Milwaukee (or another willing participant) to the AL and use a schedule with at least one interleague game every day instead of confining them to two blocks a year.

Either way, it’s a significantly simpler schedule than the one baseball currently uses to encourage rivalries and limit travel. Baseball is a $6 billion industry and can easily cover extra travel costs – and stop subjecting the world to Kansas City vs. Cleveland for 11 percent of the season. Ten or 11 games is enough to stomach bad matchups and enough to savor good ones.

Baseball is preparing for realignment, according to one source debriefed on negotiations, particularly if the revenue-sharing chasm persists. No shocker there. Baseball realigns as often as a chiropractor. Expansion teams want in? Realign! Game’s getting stale? Realign! Bud Selig caught a cold? Maybe realignment will cure it! From 1901 to 1969, baseball was the AL and the NL. It split each league into East and West divisions that year, then went to three divisions in 1994. Four years later, Milwaukee went from the AL to the NL and Detroit from the AL East to the Central to accommodate an expansion team: the Tampa Bay Rays.

When the Rays shocked baseball by going to the World Series in 2008, it highlighted the tenuous nature of their success. They need outside fortunes to align with theirs to make the postseason. And though it seems excessive to shake up the game on account of one division, that one division is a microcosm of the game’s greater issues.

Opponents of this plan will rally against the abolition of division competition. Playoff races would still exist, and seeding would be legitimately important. Today, the best team in a league could potentially face a wild-card team better than a division winner. Scrapping divisions altogether removes that inequity and guarantees four excellent teams from each league in October. The NFL allows 12 of 32 teams into its postseason, the NBA and NHL 16 of 30, and it’s nothing more than a hollow profit grab to which baseball should never dip, even if MLB does love a good hollow profit grab.

Unalignment’s effect would be subtle and preventative. Had there been no divisions in the 15 years since baseball went to three divisions, the NL playoff schedule would have changed seven times and the AL’s five. Two of the teams that would’ve been excluded: the 2006 Cardinals and 2000 Yankees, both World Series champions.

Which is fine. They got hot during the postseason. They used a flawed system to get there. Better to have the 85-win Phillies instead of the 83-win Cardinals, or the 90-win Indians instead of the 87-win Yankees. Just as good to have a one-game playoff between the Cardinals and Expos in ’96 and Toronto and Texas in ’98 as it was to see Minnesota the last two years or Colorado and San Diego in ’07.

The change is major and imperative. It may be difficult for some to accept. Of all the solutions, it is the simplest and best. It works in basketball and hockey. It’s how the English Premier League chooses its Champions League participants. Baseball doesn’t need to share more money. It doesn’t need to separate New York and Boston. It needs to think radically – and pragmatically.

Unalignment is the way.

\http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/news;_ylt=Ar9LjAi8DZ7kt2VgZOaocK0RvLYF?slug=jp-alignment042010

I have a better idea, make the divisions based on salaries. That way all the top salary teams get to play eachother more often

Whatever they do they won't get rid of the big rivalries. Maybe the salary thing (RG's idea) could be interesting. But i'm not sure MLB would like the image it projects.

I don't know who this writer is, but it's probably the worst, least thought out "solution" I've ever heard. It wouldn't solve the problem, would probably make the inbalance worse, and would cost MLB huge money and lost revenue.

That was my read too. Awful idea. Why not just downsize. Teams like the Rays will inevitably lose their talent and that's the real problem with MLB. But if the league has less teams and players the chance to lose talent diminishes markedly and the competition increases. If MLB stays the current course we are likely to see a 120-42 team and a 42-120 team in the same year, possibly in the same division. It's going to be pretty embarrassing to see a team 70-80 games out of first place. Heck it's possible you'll see a team that wins 110+ games and is 5 out of first while 60-70 ahead of the last place team and 25 or 30 ahead of a team that wins another division. Under MLB's run away capitalism we are on the verge of seeing some strange things and they are going to get stranger and stranger in the years to come if they are not curbed.

The problem MLB has with downsizing is that some historic franchises may have to go. But in it's current configuration historic teams like KC can't hold a team together. A player like George Brett would never last in KC in todays era. He'd be a Yankee making 30 mln. a year. Pittsburgh could never hold Clemente, Stargell etc today. The sport has changed because of cable money and MLB had no foresight to deal with that. Perhaps it couldn't. The NFL is a national league because it can play only 14-18 games. MLB is a local league becuse it plays 2-3 series a week and 162 games a year. The only solution I see in MLB is downsizing. Does anyone really want to see the Yankees playing the Pirates anyway. If MLB wants to hold it's current level of teams than Ray's idea of rich league poor league is the way to go. Just tier it the way the NCAA does and have different championships. MLB tier 1 and tier 2, splitting into high and low payroll team makes sense. Heck you can have a draft of the the tier 2 division by tier 1 division teams. We have that now as it is. It's called free agency. I really see no solution for MLB and IMO, this runaway greenhouse effect of rich and poor has just started and will get worse and worse.

Now I understand the arguments of others. Make the low payroll teams spend more. But MLB is a business much more than a sport today. As a businessman would I run my team to be closer to a break even and have a small chance to win instead of taking a niche profit of $30mln or more a year? Heck no. Risk/reward business analysis makes that a foregone conclusion. Expecting that is akin to expecting every label to become a designer label.

The article was written by Jeff Passan from Yahoo Sports. Now, I don't agree with the idea either because I don't know how this would solve the problem. The only clear way to make for more parity in the league is to institute the salary cap, but the Union is never going to agree to one.

But I think the notion of a salary cap is not needed. Why? If you look at MLB, MLB has the least amount of revenue going to player playroll than the other sports. It's about 52% or so, while in the NHL, it's 56.7%, in the NFL, it's 59%, and in the NBA, it's 57%. And if you have a ceiling, you need a floor.

And even if you had a salary cap, and every cent of revenue went to each club equally, you'd still have issues. There is more media coverage in the bigger market cities of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston. Players would still gravitate to these cities, instead of the Pittsburghs of the world, or the Kansas City's, or the Cleveland's. If I was offered the same contract, with the same incentives, from both Kansas City and New York, I'd pick New York in a heartbeat.

The problem with baseball's economics is so complex it is probably not solvable without gigantic impact to the game. The issue lies with the sheer number of games played coupled with the fact that each team has so much ability to generate its own revenue streams. The best way to put it in an analogy is that each MLB team is truly its own business and needs to make investments based upon its revenue. These revenue streams have huge local impact by team. The Yanks are fortunate to tap the NYC revenue opportunity. Kansas City, unfortunately can only tap KC revenue.

The NFL, on the other hand, generates most revenue by a single National TV contract and with National sponsorships. Local revenue is very limited. In that case the NFL is the business and each team works as a contributor to that business.

The NBA is the closest model to in between the two and, I think it is pretty obvious that the NBA is at a very low point. I cannot blame it all on the salary cap, but economics are a contributor. Look at how it put a team like the Knicks in such a dreadful hole for years. They have been damned to the cellar for many seasons because of salarly commitments. You can certainly argue that management has been horrid and NBA popularity is just down due to the antics of the players as well. None the less, there model is not working at all.

If you look at the MLB problem is pretty unique due to the economics, I think you net out in much the same place every time we open this debate. A tiered system, like soccer, which allows A teams and B teams to compete against each other is probably the best answer. The winner of the B divisions move to the A league for the next year or two (while the bottom A teams drop down). That can allow some fresh blood into each group on a somewhat rotational basis. It keeps the economics whole, keeps the travel pretty controlled, and still allows rivalries to exist (you can still schedule across A and B as desired).

Excellent post. Per your last paragraph it also allows competitive games and series in each tier, which might draw better attendance to weaker team cities and be much greater entertainment for the fans of richer/better teams. Like I said in a post last week, there are teams that will never again be on national TV unless they have a superstar pitcher early in his career (ala a Doc Gooden) scheduled to pitch on a national TV day. I just think it's ashame though that a team like Tampa has a star that will be a Yankee next year, and it's pretty much a foregone conclusion already. MLB weakens a potentially great rivalry with the free agent system and any developing allegiance in Tampa gets eroded, preventing it from building LT loyalty.