While he’s at it, MLB Commissioner Bud Selig should take this opportunity to realign all six divisions and allow National League teams to use the DH (allowing for traditionalists, at a competitive disadvantage, to continue allowing pitchers to hit).  The discrepancy between the AL and the NL would essentially disappear and bouncing a few teams from league to league would not be such a big deal.

Geographically, the MLB is heavily weighted by teams on the East Coast and in the MidWest.  There is another nice cluster of teams out on the West Coast, but Between Kansas City and California there is pretty much a baseball wasteland.* I know there are a lot of reasons why there are no teams out there, but it seems like a missed opportunity to add two more teams and have two 16 team Super Conferences, but I digress.

  *If a metro area of at least 1.5 million people is what’s needed to support a MLB franchise (That’s what they have in the Milwaukee area, the smallest metro area that is home to a team), then you should add a team in Portland, Oregon and Las Vegas, Nevada; maybe even stretch to get a team in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; and Salt Lake City, Utah; if you were really trying to expand to “western markets.”  

In the unlikely event that Bud Selig and the owners adopt such a strategy, here are the 6 new divisions they should adopt.  (more…)

The game must have felt like a hot dagger to the heart of every Washington fan. Just four years before, the perennially futile Senators had left town, only to be replaced by an even less effective collection of players. And now, as Washington Post writer Bob Addie lamented, “fickle fate ordained that the old Senators, now known as the Twins, should win the pennant by beating the new Senators.”

With a 2-1 victory over their former selves in front of a pitiful Washington crowd (8,302 fans), the Twins punched a ticket to the World Series for the first time since moving to Minnesota, and the first time in franchise history since 1933. Meanwhile, Washington endured a 72-90 record. It was the best performance so far by the new Senators, but still a forgettable one. The team left town four years later, and playoff baseball hasn’t returned to the nation’s capital since.

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