Baseball Premiership?

Let me dream for a bit.... Major League Baseball splits into two divisions - call them whatever you want, but I'll call them "top" and "bottom". The top division is made up of 16 teams, the bottom division is made up of 14 teams. Each division has their own playoffs and champion (maybe 2 rounds of playoffs instead of 3 as there are now). At the end of each season, the worst team (by record) in the top division is replaced by the champion of the bottom division. There is revenue sharing within each division, but not across divisions.

To start, the top 16 teams in terms of payroll make up the top division. Yankees, Red Sox, and so on. The other teams (Pirates, Royals, etc) are in the bottom division.

Think about it - teams that are in the top division want to stay there, so even if you're having a bad season you don't want to tank it because you'll be dropped - incentive to win every game for the entire year. If you're in the bottom division, you would want to win to make it up to the top to take advantage of the better revenue sharing - the "pie" would be a lot bigger to begin with and I would think that the gap in revenue sharing between the two divisions would always be large. Teams in the bottom division would have a chance to win something - right now, there are at least 10 teams at the start of every year with absolutely no chance of winning the world series, and in the new structure I doubt that any team would be out of it on day 1.

Who's with me??

Comments

  1. Tim FranzJanuary 8, 2010 at 8:37 AM

    Some of what you say makes sense, but here are a few problems.
    1. Some teams would bounce back and forth between divisions quite often - teams like Florida.
    2. Ball clubs like KC, Baltimore, etc survive by ticket sales for when they play Boston, Yankees, and other high profile teams. The bad teams would be playing bad teams - I see a lot of empty stadiums.
    3. The rich would get richer - it would be tought to coax free agents to come to those small market teams (although it is hard to do that even the way it is set up now).

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