Changes to baseball

[dkgojackets]

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Can anyone explain why the league has a 16-team NL and 14-team AL? If I'm not mistaken, it has to do with the scheduling, correct?

The way I see it, wouldn't it be easier to have 6 5-team divisions and play X games vs division opponents and 2/3-1/2X games against non-division opponents and eliminate the wild card?

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You have to have an even number of teams in each league so each team can play every day.

[dkgojackets]

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Really, screw PLAYING to decide the winner. They should just have fans and sportswriters vote for the champs. This is a democracy, BTW.

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How bout a system where a bunch of guys pause their Dungeons and Dragons game, put some numbers into the computer, and have it spit out who should play for the championship?

[Dynasty]

If you want the best system to determine who wins the championship, you wouldn't have a post-season at all. You'd simply give the championship to the team who wins the most regular season games (with every team playing each other the same # of times).

[Dynasty]

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I could even live with shortening the regular season by 4 games, making the 1st round of the playoffs best of 7 and the WS best of 9.

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Do that for 10 years and fans will start saying that all series should be best of 9 and not just the World Series. Meanwhile, there will be growing sentiment for a best of 11 World Series.

[agent_fish]

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I could even live with shortening the regular season by 4 games, making the 1st round of the playoffs best of 7 and the WS best of 9.

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Do that for 10 years and fans will start saying that all series should be best of 9 and not just the World Series. Meanwhile, there will be growing sentiment for a best of 11 World Series.

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I think a 23 game series would be best. That way the for real best team would win.

[J_V]

Im pretty sure that the point of postseason is to crown the best team world champions (hopefully). Other sports don't have the extreme parity of baseball, and baseball should deal with this by making the series longer. I'm sure money and unions would get in the way somehow though.

[ethan]

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Im pretty sure that the point of postseason is to crown the best team world champions (hopefully). Other sports don't have the extreme parity of baseball, and baseball should deal with this by making the series longer. I'm sure money and unions would get in the way somehow though.

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If we remove four games from the regular season and add two each to the DS/WS rounds you've removed 60 regular season games and added 10 postseason. That's indeed probably not good money-wise.

[Lori]

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Im pretty sure that the point of postseason is to crown the best team world champions (hopefully). Other sports don't have the extreme parity of baseball, and baseball should deal with this by making the series longer. I'm sure money and unions would get in the way somehow though.

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English soccer gets around this by having two competitions, an all-play-all league and a knockout cup. Winning the cup is awesome, but everyone knows the best team wins the league.

Soccer is pretty boring on the whole, but the setup is pretty good.

Lori

[agent_fish]

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Other sports don't have the extreme parity of baseball

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So the Cardinals win the WS and all of a sudden there is extreme parity in baseball?

[crockpot]

it all depends on how you define parity.

in what sport is it easiest to take a true .500 team and win the world series? baseball, by far. the cardinals are the first team since the '87 twins to win a major sports championship with .500 talent.

what sport involves the most turnover of top teams between one season and the next? almost definitely football.

what sport makes repeating championships the hardest? probably baseball. a football team is hard to keep together, but the best team wins more often in the playoffs.