First things first: let’s talk nomenclature. We’ll still have two leagues, only now with sixteen teams each. The leagues are split into conferences of eight teams each, and the conferences are split into 4-team divisions. The divisions would be arranged strictly geographically, though out west proximity is sometimes an elusive concept. (Denver, hello? Are you really close to anywhere?)

Next things next: the point of small divisions built of mostly neighboring cities. For me, there’s something very appealing about knowing the opposing team as well as you can. I really enjoy games when I know the other team’s roster, their manager’s style, their rookies, their ballpark’s quirks as well as I know my own. I wish I truly lived in the time of each big league having only eight teams. (Technically, I did, but I spent most of those years learning how to pee properly and how to tie my Keds.) When your team has only seven opponents whom you play over and over, I imagine you get pretty familiar with each team’s roster.

In 2015, though, that’s all gone. Nowadays, when other teams come into my ballpark, the first question I ask myself is "How many players on this team could I pick out of a police lineup?" and very often the answer is a sad "0."  Maybe an opposing player or two played for my team in a previous season, or for a close rival, but I’m often left wondering who the vast majority of the other players are, especially if this is a team that I haven’t seen in a few seasons.  And I enjoy knowing this stuff—how the player broke into MLB, what his special skill set is, what his personality is. Learning all this for 29 opponents is too much like work.

Personally, seven opponents is about all I can handle, or want to.  I’m capable of memorizing seven rosters, in a way that I’m totally incapable of even getting roughly familiar with 29 opponents, their roster moves, their minor injuries, their hot prospects, and their slumping and streaking players.  I prefer knowing fewer opponents intimately to knowing more opponents vaguely. 

Almost as much as a greater familiarity with the game happening on the field, though, would be the convenience to the fans—now instead of being mostly restricted to home games, most away games would be fairly  easy, sometime very easy, to attend. In fact, for some people away games would actually be more convenient to attend than home games.  There are many, many fans in Chicago, in L.A., in New York who live closer to the ballpark of their team’s hometown rival than they do to their own team’s ballpark. Even if this doesn’t apply, the distances to travel to your furthest divisional rival’s park is not prohibitive. Mostly, we’re talking a few hours in the car. (Again, except Denver, which is several states away from everywhere.)  I can easily imagine fans in Chicago and Milwaukee selling out all three stadiums as fans come in from all over the region to watch a Cubs-Brewers game or a Brewers-White Sox matchup. Under this set-up, three-quarters of the schedule, if not much more, would be easy for most fans to attend games.

This brings up the subject of Inter-League Play, which would die its inglorious death under my plan. I-LP was introduced in 1997, as I recall, to allow NL fans a rare sighting of that mythical beast, the AL player,  and vice-versa, whom they could previously view only during the World Series, All-Star game, and solar eclipses. But now, since 2002, we have MLB-TV subscriptions. If you have a subscription, now you can watch any game you damned well please. And if you don’t have a subscription, like me, that pretty much means that watching a late-night game between the Mariners and the A’s if you’re an east-coast NL fan, like me, probably isn’t the most crucial event on your calendar.  I-LP may have been a good idea in its time, but we’ve since made its purpose obsolete—time to consign it to the dustbin of history, as Hal Trosky famously put it.

So let’s explore the concept of divisional play, which reduces even the old-fashioned eight-team leagues to 4-team divisions.

Notice how you could divide each league geographically either on a North-South (vertical) or an East-West (horizontal) basis. I’m not sure which is preferable—probably the East-West, because of time zones, and also because as a culture we don’t really need to create additional conflicts between Northern and Southern Culture  which are fraught with tension right now. ("Right now" being any time in the past 250 years or so.) Speaking of cultural issues, though, notice too how I’ve introduced two expansion teams, the Louisville Redbirds and the Havana Sugar Kings.  You could argue (and maybe I will, elsewhere) which cities are truly the most deserving of expansion franchises. I just picked these two because they allow my geographic argument to proceed neatly, but any two you pick could, by re-arranging the divisions slightly, form geographic rivalries that work.  For my realigned 16-team leagues, Louisville and Havana work just fine, and that’s sufficient for explaining purposes.

So how would the seasons and the playoffs work?

Each team would play 22 games vs its three divisional opponents (66 games), another 16 games against four conference opponents (64 games); and two home-and-home 2-games series (i.e. four games) against its eight opponents in the other conference (32 games), which comes to—ta-da!-- 162 games.

The most interesting wrinkle here, to me, involves the playoffs. I want to make each division truly worth winning, so obviously each of the eight divisional winners makes the playoffs.

But not equally. I would retain the Wild Card, both of them in fact, in each league, making a playoff system that begins with six qualifying teams in league, the four divisional champs and the two Wild Card teams, but only the three divisional winners with the best records get a bye in the first rounds. The weakest divisional winner must play an extra game in the Wild Card round to qualify. This means a fierce competition during the regular season, compelling each team not only to win its division (with which it might be running away by early September) but also to win it decisively, in order to avoid having the weakest record of the four divisional champs and thus having to play the extra elimination game.

This is probably best illustrated with some hypothetical examples. Take the Eastern of the two leagues, and let’s make up some final Won-Lost records for each team, capitalizing the names of all the teams making the post-season:

So the Sox, the Pirates and the Nats all get a bye in the first round of the playoffs, which is a grueling round of do-or-die one-game eliminations. In the first round of the playoffs, the two Wild Card teams play, in this case the Yankees (90-72) vs. the Orioles (89-73), at Yankee Stadium (because the Yankees have the better record).  Note the Yankees, though blown out of their own division, still have to play their hardest for the final weeks of the season to gain this not-inconsiderable advantage, which is one of the virtues of the Wild Card system, making coasting rarely to your advantage.  The Yankees benefit from having a one-game edge over the Orioles, but the Orioles very likely have had to try to win their last few games even more than the Yankees did, because they had a real shot at their division. Now, instead of sitting pretty and waiting for the Wild Card round to be over, as the Nats are doing, the O’s go straight from playing tough games to a one-game elimination round on the road.  Immediately. As in "the day following the last day of the season." That’s very tough.

You may be curious, in the above scenario, about what would have happened if the Indians had won one more game, tying the Orioles’ record.  Or if several teams finished in a tie for the final Wild Card spot. Wouldn’t we need several confusing scenarios of round robin games, taking a few days?

No.

I would set up a system of tie-breakers before the season starts to settle ties.  This "Tie System" (abbreviated T.S., which is what I’d say to teams complaining about this arbitrary-seeming way of settling ties) might be the Pythagorean W-L record of each team, which would be fair in that it incentivizes teams in the regular season not only to win games but to win them decisively. Or maybe just the largest difference between the tying teams’ Runs Scored vs. Runs Allowed. Or if we need further levels of tie-breakers, as theoretically we would, just think of ways we want to improve the game anyway.  For example, do you want quicker games?  Then we could let the teams know at the beginning of the year that ties are going to be settled in favor of the team with the fewest total minutes of play. Or maybe it’s more important that we eliminate throwovers to first base? So we announce that the tie-breaker is going to be fewest throwovers. Or maybe we want to eliminate all these one-pitcher appearances to gain dubious platoon advantages: we make a tie-breaker out of the fewest pitcher appearances in the season. The point is, we incentivize changes in the game by making them into tie-breakers. They’re probably not going to be used, so managers can choose to ignore them, but you’re giving each manager an incentive to change the way he plays the game more along the lines we wish to encourage.

The beauty part of all this seeming arbitrariness is saying "T.S." to complainers. You don’t like this stuff being decided by such small, petty things? T.S., win your friggin’ division, and you don’t have to bother with this stuff. I can imagine a Wild Card round that’s  even more grueling, specifically to give teams real incentives to avoid the Wild Card round altogether.

So the day after the season ends, the Yankees play the O’s in Yankee Stadium in Wild Card Round One. Let’s say the Yankees win the game. They must fly down to Tampa to play the Rays, who finished "last" among the four division-winners, in another elimination game. Again, the Rays have several advantages, all of which they’ve earned by winning their division—the Rays get to play at home, the Rays get a little rest (the day off while the Yankees play the O’s), and all that goes with that day off: time to strategize, a more rested pitching staff, recovery time, etc.

Of course, the Rays would prefer not to have to play this game at all, having won their division, but—T.S. You want to avoid this game, you’d better win enough games to finish in the top three.

Let’s stipulate that the Yankees win this elimination game as well. (If you care, I despise the Yankees, but I don’t see any harm in giving them imaginary victories.) So after playing down to the wire to clinch their Wild Card, then playing the O’s the day after the season ends, winning and then flying immediately down to Tampa Bay to beat the Rays in a second one-game elimination, they then have to fly up to Boston for their third straight game (at least), this time a road game against the Sox who have had two straight off-days following the regular season, and by dint of their winning the league championship, have been resting their players pretty comfortably for about a week or more. To beat the Sox, they’d have to win a seven-game series, four of which will be played in Fenway, with the back of their rotation, probably, pitching most of the games facing the Sox’ front-line pitching, with their closer very likely worn out, and with their entire team gassed. Good luck with that.

Meanwhile, the equally well-rested Pirates and Nats face off in Pittsburgh for a seven-game series. Unlike the Sox-Yankees, this is a pretty even match: both teams are equally rested, and have a roughly equal chance to set up their rotations and lineups the way they want them.  The winner of the Pittsburgh-Washington series faces the winner of the Sox-Yankees.

Most likely, that winner will be the Sox, given all the advantages they’ve earned coming in to the series, and most years the Sox will be able to able to polish off the Yankees handily, leaving them somewhat better prepared to face the Nats-Pirates winner. Not always, but a team that finishes first in its division and first in the league does have a large advantage over the next-best division winners.

Again, let me stress how unlikely it is that the Wild Card team will make it through this daunting gauntlet alive: a team like the Orioles in this scenario has to beat out the other competitors for the last Wild Card slot, then beat the other Wild Card team on the road, then beat the fourth-best division champion again on the road the next day, and then beat the strongest team in the league in a seven-game series, just for the chance to play in the World Series. 

In other words, they’ll need to go at least 10-6, while playing no more than six home games out of sixteen, against four of the best teams in their league. If they can do that, they deserve the chance to play in the World Series, in my view. That’s a very good performance. I can’t imagine a Wild Card team will make to the Series very often. That’s fair, and it’s fair that their fans should be able for root for them to triumph over these long odds.

The Sox, in my example, have it pretty cushy: they have only to beat an exhausted, weaker opponent while playing 4 of 7 games in Fenway, and then beat one other team, also 4 out of 7 games in Fenway. But they’ve earned that cushy schedule, by finishing with the best record in their league.

This isn’t so different, of course, from the way we do the Wild Card and Division Winners right now—the biggest change I’m proposing is to have most of the regular-season competition take place between geographically proximate teams, and the next biggest is to maximize the advantages of finishing first, not only in each division, but in each league. I’d be interested in hearing any further ways you could suggest the strong division-winners be advantaged over the Wild Card teams. I believe in giving these weaker teams a chance, but I want that chance to be slim enough to motivate each team to play its best ball and gain the most advantage in the post-season.