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By MATTHEW FUTTERMAN
In the mid-1990s, after Major League Baseball had decided to experiment with games between teams in the National and American Leagues, then-Boston Red Sox Chief Executive John Harrington and a handful of colleagues started batting around some radical ideas.
What was the point of having American and National leagues anyway, they wondered. Wouldn't it be more fair to have all baseball teams compete against one another all season, without concern for geography or obsolete contrivances that date to the 19th century?
"We talked about if interleague play was successful we could do that," says Mr. Harrington, who led Commissioner Bud Selig's committee on realignment in the 1990s. "We could just meld 30 teams into one big blob of a league and have them go at it."
From a standpoint of fairness, Mr. Harrington's idea looks better all the time. The American League is clearly the stronger of the two, based on interleague records and the differences in performance of players who jump from one league to the other. Since interleague play began in 1997, AL teams have won eight of 13 World Series and 12 All-Star Games (there was a tie in 2002). They have compiled a .566 winning percentage against NL clubs over the past five years. Now that Mr. Selig has blurred the line between the two leagues—he's abolished their separate league offices and umpiring crews—the time may be ripe to go all the way.
The 75-year-old commissioner has named a new committee to rethink some of baseball's most ingrained institutions, including the designated hitter and league realignments. Baseball has usually resisted radical change in favor of tinkering along the periphery, so the separate-league structure isn't likely to disappear anytime soon. But as former baseball commissioner Fay Vincent says, the separate leagues now only exist "in some vestigial way. It would not be a big step to get rid of them."
Patrick Courtney, a spokesman for Major League Baseball, says the future of the DH and interleague scheduling are on the panel's agenda. He declined to comment on how these issues could or should be resolved.
Under the current playoff system, the 16 National League and 14 American League teams are each divided into eastern, central and western divisions, with the winner of the six divisions and two Wild Card teams—one from each league—advancing to the postseason.
A Wall Street Journal analysis shows that if the leagues were united in one 30-team league, and each team had to play all the others a similar number of games, no more than two National League franchises would have even qualified for the postseason in the past five years.
In 2008, the Toronto Blue Jays finished well out of the playoffs and in fourth place in the brutal AL East, which includes the powerful Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees. But in an adjusted schedule where all teams played one another, Toronto's actual .531 winning percentage that year would have been .564, with the improvement coming from playing the National League teams more often.
That would have put Toronto in seventh place in the 30-team league, good enough to make the playoffs. That year's World Champions, the Philadelphia Phillies, would have finished in ninth place, out of the playoffs.
The 2006 Blue Jays, Chicago White Sox and Los Angeles Angels suffered a similar fate, missing the playoffs despite weighted winning performances that placed them ahead of three National League playoff teams—the Los Angeles Dodgers, San Diego Padres and St. Louis Cardinals.
Mathematical formulas aside, even current National League players say the difference between the leagues is too large to ignore.
Before a game against the Phillies this week, Cardinals pitcher Brad Penny gave his opponent the ultimate compliment. "That's an American League team right there," Mr. Penny said of the defending National League champs. "You put some good National League teams in the AL East and they would struggle. Part of it is because of the DH. Here you get in trouble and before you know it the pitcher is coming up."
In 1973, the American League, which at the time had several struggling franchises, adopted the designated-hitter rule, which lets a team put a player in its batting lineup in place of the pitcher. The National League never adopted the rule. This has meant, effectively, that there is more offense in the AL game; during the past five years, AL teams have scored an average of 785 runs per season, compared with 741 for National League teams.
For pitchers, that difference means the world. Last year, in 24 starts with the AL's Red Sox, Mr. Penny had a 7-8 record and a 5.61 earned run average. After he was released, he signed with the San Francisco Giants of the NL and went 4-1 with a 2.59 ERA the rest of the way. This year, with the Cardinals of the National League, Mr. Penny has won three games with an ERA of 1.99.
"A game with a DH is such an endurance contest, because you're always worried about a three-run rally," said Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa, who for years managed in the AL. "So the teams that survive in the American League have a certain toughness the National League teams may not have."
Before any drastic realignment could take place, the league would have to come up with a uniform DH rule. Getting rid of the DH has long been seen as difficult; the powerful Major League Baseball Players Association has protected the position because it provides lucrative jobs for aging sluggers who may have trouble playing the field.
Brad Lidge, the Phillies' veteran closer who has played his entire career in the NL, said he's ready for the game's fathers to choose one set of rules and schedule more interleague games. That, he said, would promote a similar style of play and even the playing field between the two leagues.
"Right now the AL wins more because they play the home-run game, whereas the National League teams are always bunting guys over and sacrificing," he said. "I don't care whether there is a DH or not, but pick one. Otherwise, it forces this conversation of which league is better."
Mr. Selig's 14-member commission has several members who are outspoken opponents of the DH, including Dodgers manager Joe Torre and Mr. LaRussa.
Atlanta Braves manager Bobby Cox, who like Mr. LaRussa has spent extensive time in both leagues, said he, too, prefers the National League rules. "I'm not a fan of the designated hitter," Mr. Cox said.
One model baseball could look to for combining its teams is soccer's English Premier League, which lumps 20 teams together. In this arrangement, the team that accumulates the most points in its games claims the championship.
There would, of course, be some serious obstacles to trying that sort of system for baseball. "Part of what makes baseball special is its tradition," said former deputy commissioner Steve Greenberg. "The World Series is the champion of the American League against the champion of the National League."
Back in the '90s, the idea didn't get very far when Mr. Harrington, the former Red Sox CEO, was working on it. Though he and Mr. Selig were open at the time to just about any idea that might spark fan interest, they knew that for better or for worse, the traditionalists would cling to the sanctity of the World Series and even the summer All-Star Game.
Says Mr. Harrington: "I guess that stuff is like motherhood and apple pie."
Write to Matthew Futterman at matthew.futterman@wsj.com
In the mid-1990s, after Major League Baseball had decided to experiment with games between teams in the National and American Leagues, then-Boston Red Sox Chief Executive John Harrington and a handful of colleagues started batting around some radical ideas.
What was the point of having American and National leagues anyway, they wondered. Wouldn't it be more fair to have all baseball teams compete against one another all season, without concern for geography or obsolete contrivances that date to the 19th century?
"We talked about if interleague play was successful we could do that," says Mr. Harrington, who led Commissioner Bud Selig's committee on realignment in the 1990s. "We could just meld 30 teams into one big blob of a league and have them go at it."
From a standpoint of fairness, Mr. Harrington's idea looks better all the time. The American League is clearly the stronger of the two, based on interleague records and the differences in performance of players who jump from one league to the other. Since interleague play began in 1997, AL teams have won eight of 13 World Series and 12 All-Star Games (there was a tie in 2002). They have compiled a .566 winning percentage against NL clubs over the past five years. Now that Mr. Selig has blurred the line between the two leagues—he's abolished their separate league offices and umpiring crews—the time may be ripe to go all the way.
The 75-year-old commissioner has named a new committee to rethink some of baseball's most ingrained institutions, including the designated hitter and league realignments. Baseball has usually resisted radical change in favor of tinkering along the periphery, so the separate-league structure isn't likely to disappear anytime soon. But as former baseball commissioner Fay Vincent says, the separate leagues now only exist "in some vestigial way. It would not be a big step to get rid of them."
Patrick Courtney, a spokesman for Major League Baseball, says the future of the DH and interleague scheduling are on the panel's agenda. He declined to comment on how these issues could or should be resolved.
Under the current playoff system, the 16 National League and 14 American League teams are each divided into eastern, central and western divisions, with the winner of the six divisions and two Wild Card teams—one from each league—advancing to the postseason.
A Wall Street Journal analysis shows that if the leagues were united in one 30-team league, and each team had to play all the others a similar number of games, no more than two National League franchises would have even qualified for the postseason in the past five years.
In 2008, the Toronto Blue Jays finished well out of the playoffs and in fourth place in the brutal AL East, which includes the powerful Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees. But in an adjusted schedule where all teams played one another, Toronto's actual .531 winning percentage that year would have been .564, with the improvement coming from playing the National League teams more often.
That would have put Toronto in seventh place in the 30-team league, good enough to make the playoffs. That year's World Champions, the Philadelphia Phillies, would have finished in ninth place, out of the playoffs.
The 2006 Blue Jays, Chicago White Sox and Los Angeles Angels suffered a similar fate, missing the playoffs despite weighted winning performances that placed them ahead of three National League playoff teams—the Los Angeles Dodgers, San Diego Padres and St. Louis Cardinals.
Mathematical formulas aside, even current National League players say the difference between the leagues is too large to ignore.
Before a game against the Phillies this week, Cardinals pitcher Brad Penny gave his opponent the ultimate compliment. "That's an American League team right there," Mr. Penny said of the defending National League champs. "You put some good National League teams in the AL East and they would struggle. Part of it is because of the DH. Here you get in trouble and before you know it the pitcher is coming up."
In 1973, the American League, which at the time had several struggling franchises, adopted the designated-hitter rule, which lets a team put a player in its batting lineup in place of the pitcher. The National League never adopted the rule. This has meant, effectively, that there is more offense in the AL game; during the past five years, AL teams have scored an average of 785 runs per season, compared with 741 for National League teams.
For pitchers, that difference means the world. Last year, in 24 starts with the AL's Red Sox, Mr. Penny had a 7-8 record and a 5.61 earned run average. After he was released, he signed with the San Francisco Giants of the NL and went 4-1 with a 2.59 ERA the rest of the way. This year, with the Cardinals of the National League, Mr. Penny has won three games with an ERA of 1.99.
"A game with a DH is such an endurance contest, because you're always worried about a three-run rally," said Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa, who for years managed in the AL. "So the teams that survive in the American League have a certain toughness the National League teams may not have."
Before any drastic realignment could take place, the league would have to come up with a uniform DH rule. Getting rid of the DH has long been seen as difficult; the powerful Major League Baseball Players Association has protected the position because it provides lucrative jobs for aging sluggers who may have trouble playing the field.
Brad Lidge, the Phillies' veteran closer who has played his entire career in the NL, said he's ready for the game's fathers to choose one set of rules and schedule more interleague games. That, he said, would promote a similar style of play and even the playing field between the two leagues.
"Right now the AL wins more because they play the home-run game, whereas the National League teams are always bunting guys over and sacrificing," he said. "I don't care whether there is a DH or not, but pick one. Otherwise, it forces this conversation of which league is better."
Mr. Selig's 14-member commission has several members who are outspoken opponents of the DH, including Dodgers manager Joe Torre and Mr. LaRussa.
Atlanta Braves manager Bobby Cox, who like Mr. LaRussa has spent extensive time in both leagues, said he, too, prefers the National League rules. "I'm not a fan of the designated hitter," Mr. Cox said.
One model baseball could look to for combining its teams is soccer's English Premier League, which lumps 20 teams together. In this arrangement, the team that accumulates the most points in its games claims the championship.
There would, of course, be some serious obstacles to trying that sort of system for baseball. "Part of what makes baseball special is its tradition," said former deputy commissioner Steve Greenberg. "The World Series is the champion of the American League against the champion of the National League."
Back in the '90s, the idea didn't get very far when Mr. Harrington, the former Red Sox CEO, was working on it. Though he and Mr. Selig were open at the time to just about any idea that might spark fan interest, they knew that for better or for worse, the traditionalists would cling to the sanctity of the World Series and even the summer All-Star Game.
Says Mr. Harrington: "I guess that stuff is like motherhood and apple pie."
Write to Matthew Futterman at matthew.futterman@wsj.com
The BizofBaseball also has an article about realigning and how it would affect the Blue Jays: http://bizofbaseball.com/index.php?o...oms&Itemid=155
I'll stick with my obsolete 19th century contrivances.
However, I think MLB needs to seriously consider a balanced schedule in the current format. Without a cap or further expanding revenue sharing, splitting the leagues into two divisions is just going to cluster the richer teams at the top. Atleast with the E-C-W format certain divisions are made up of middle and small market clubs.
It would be interesting to see how the RSNs would push back at the possibility of doubling their out of time zone telecasts.
The DH needs to go. It's time. It is obsolete.
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