KevFu
Registered User
#1 - I'm just telling you that when the MLB originally did its 16-14 thing, and people asked, they said that scheduling interleague play season long is more difficult.
Yup. But the “difficulty” in scheduling year-round interleague wasn’t actually making a schedule.
Scheduling with symmetrical groups is easier than asymmetrical groups. Scheduling with 5x6 is easier than it is to 4-5-5; 5-6-5, even including interleague.
Getting everyone to ACCEPT Year Round interleague was the difficult part. MLB simply wasn’t there. Interleague was sacrilege when they voted to expand and were trying to figure out the future alignment. They’d gone 93 seasons where AL and NL only met in the World Series.
When Houston was for sale, it was a good opportunity to say “Ok, it’s been 17 years, you’re fine with interleague now, we can have year-round interleague and no one is going to freak out.”
#2 - Having 5-6-5 in one league and 4-5-5 in the other IS unfair, unbalanced, or non-competitive, no matter whether you think so or not. It's not the 16-14 that's the problem. It's the 4-team division and the 6-team division. But a 4 against a 6 is DEFINITELY in some way not fair balance.
I don’t disagree with that specific point. I merely believe it’s moot.
This is a “you’re talking squares and I’m talking rectangles” thing. It doesn’t matter if divisions are four equal sides or four unequal sides if the only “Fair” situation is a CIRCLE (or straight line).
For example, the 4-team division and 6-team division are in different leagues. The argument that “It’s not fair to Cincinnati that they’re in a six-team NL division while Texas is in a four-team AL division” is moot.
Cincinnati is an NL team (in leagues with different RULES), making it 5-5-5 doesn’t make Cincinnati’s division assignment “Fair” compared to Texas.
You still have two groups in separate leagues based on A CENTURY OF HISTORY, and then smaller groups based on ZIP CODES within the history.
The only way to have it based on competitive fairness is “One table, balanced schedule” like Premier League Soccer.
Or maybe you could divide divisions by even distribution after indexing the teams by “historical goodness and financial resources.”
For example:
NYY-WAS-DET-BAL-TB / CWS-TOR-ATL-PHI-MIN / SFG-LAA-ARZ-SEA-SD
BOS-NYM-CLE-CIN-MIA / CHC-HOU-STL-PIT-MIL / LAD-TEX-OAK-COL-KC