MLB and premiere leagues idea

[nate82]

I was going to put this in the competitive balance thread but it doesn't really fit in that thread. It does but this is a completely different subject on how to fix it rather than discussing if there is or isn't.

 

I was thinking what if MLB decided to use a premiere league type to balance itself. What this would do is move each team into a division based on their record from the previous season and their payroll for the upcoming season. So this would be a revolving division with teams being added and teams being subtracted each year.

 

There is going to have to be some realignment for this to work though.

 

This years premiere league would have looked like this in MLB:

 

AL Premiere division 1: Yankees, Red Sox, Tigers, and White Sox

AL Premiere division 2: Rays, Angels, Rangers, and Jays

 

NL Premiere division 1: Mets, Cubs, Braves, and Phillies

NL Premiere division 2: Brewers, Dodgers, Cardinals, and Giants

 

AL regular division 1: Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and Cleveland

AL regular division 2: Mariners, A's, and Royals

 

NL regular division 1: Marlins, Nationals, and Reds

NL regular division 2: Astros, Dbacks, Padres, and Rockies

 

This would even the playing field for small market and mid-market teams. This would pin large market teams against large market teams and the only time a small or mid-market team would ever be competing for a playoff spot with a large market team would be if they made it up to the premiere division by winning the regular division.

 

So if you would take this years premiere teams for the NL you would have the Brewers and the Mets dropping out with the Rockies and Marlins moving up. You would then scramble up the regular division for next year so the Mets or the Brewers would be in the same division allowing the other teams with smaller payrolls to compete against teams with close to the same payrolls.

 

So the new 2010 NL regular divisions would look like this:

 

NL regular division 1: Brewers, Mets, and Astros

NL regular division 2: Dbacks, Padres, Reds, and Nationals.

 

This would create competitive balance and a scheduling nightmare also but I would take the scheduling nightmare over having the current competitive balance. Yes the big market teams would still dominate the smaller and mid-market teams but the chances of those mid and small market teams making the playoffs and having an opportunity to win a championship would increase. Anything can happen in a best of five or a best of seven series. Sometimes the best teams don't always win those series example would be the Cubs in 2007 losing to the Phillies and in 2008 losing to the Dodgers you can also add in the year the Cardinals won the world series they were definitely not the favorites to win or to go to the world series same with the Rockies in 2007.

 

This would create more competitive balance in MLB and it will also let the big market teams keep their spending and players earning what they can in the market. The only thing that would need to be fixed then would be the draft and international draft along with the TV contracts becoming MLB property and not the teams property.

 

OK blast away at my idea.

[dadofandrew]

Nonsensical, in my opinion, and also destroys traditional rivalries and creates more travel and more games fans can't watch.

 

I'm not sure what folks mean by a balance problem, unless you are a fan of a team that has been admittedly poorly run (Royals, Nats, Pirates until lately), you've had a decent team to watch of late. TB was the AL champs, and whose at more of a disadvantage than them...no history, no tradition, terrible park, and so on.

 

Even BAL looks to have turned the corner, as they suddenly have a lot of young talent, even in that hellish division, they look to be solid by '11.

[Funketown]

It's always been a farfetched dream of mine to see American professional sports operate the same way that the aforementioned soccer leagues and European hockey leagues operate. Something like 20 teams at each level, 4 levels, with the top four teams at each level moving up each year and the bottom four moving down a level. The idea of mid to small size towns getting to experience major professional sports, if even only once in a blue moon, would be really cool to see. For example, in 1997, the Leksand Stars won the SEL (Swedish Elite League) hockey championship (Leksand, SWE, population around 15,000). Places like Nashville, Portland, Las Vegas, Albequerque, would likely see their teams play about 20-30% of their seasons in the top league, and places like Madison, Des Moines, and Pittsburgh might even once every few decades see their clubs move to the highest level. If nothing else, it would make the Brewers season more interesting right now, as they would be trying to avoid demotion, and I would find myself watching just about every Cubs game down the stretch if they were in the bottom four. I know that this probably isn't feasible as a business, but that would be a lot of fun.

[nate82]

Nonsensical, in my opinion, and also destroys traditional rivalries and creates more travel and more games fans can't watch.

How does it destroy traditional rivalries? The teams that were playing against each other before will still be playing against each other. It would either be more or less games against each other. The Red Sox will still be playing the Yankees and the Cubs will still be playing against the Cardinals. The Mets would still be playing against the Phillies and the Dodgers would still be playing against the Giants.

 

The travel shouldn't really matter there are these things called airplanes that allow teams to get across the country in hours. Travel should be the least of the concerns for the teams and if it is you just shorten the season down to decrease the travel.

 

More games the fans can't watch? What do you mean by that? The fans will be locked out of games? It makes no sense. Nearly every single game is on TV now how would that be changed? Unless you are thinking when I said the TV contracts would be the property of MLB and the games would only be on MLB TV that is not what I meant. I meant that the teams would lose the revenue from the TV contracts and MLB would get 100% of the revenue and dump into the revenue sharing plan.

[Baldkin]

Money, money, money, money and money.

 

The Blue Jays, Rays and Orioles will not be giving up their extra games against the Red Sox and Yankees and the sellouts those bring.

 

The travel complaints are trivial, but it really comes down to the money in the game refusing to allow this sort of thing to happen. They like the imbalance, why would they want it to change?

[dadofandrew]

If teams are in separate divisions, they will not play as much. Tough to have a rivalry if teams barely play.

 

Shorten the season? Contracts have been signed for 5-7 years from now. Economics does not allow for a single decrease in games. Travel time is a real concern, as teams do not perform well when flying all night and get into a city at 6AM, especially if they are playing the Cubs at 1PM on Friday afternoon.

 

If the Yankees are in the same division with the Angels or Mariners, that's a lot of 10PM starts. Meanwhile, for the west coast teams, many games will begin at 4PM...work 'til 5, rush hour, drive home...dinner's on, game's in the 7th.

 

There's a reason teams are separated by geography in every league.

[jeffy]

It's always been a farfetched dream of mine to see American professional sports operate the same way that the aforementioned soccer leagues and European hockey leagues operate.

 

They have an advantage in not having time zone issues. Most of Europe (from Poland to Spain) is in a single time zone.

[Diskono]

I love the single table & promotion/relegation format, mostly because it ensures that every team has something to play for all of the time. Unfortunately, it wouldn't work well in the US for various reasons, the biggest IMO being geography and travel.

 

I do think that this would work really well in arena football, though.

[Invader3K]

It's an interesting and somewhat compelling idea, but it's way too radical for a major US sports league. I do think expansion and further changes to the playoffs are worth exploring at this point...as long as other changes like an international draft go hand in hand. I guess, ultimately, I think something like this shouldn't be necessitated if more obvious changes to the current broken economic system are initiated.