Baseball is unbreakable.

Unlike the US economy, bad governance can't put a dent in baseball.  It has an internal consistency which not even a weak commissioner, steroidal malcontents, clueless owners, addled GM's, and Scott Boras can ruin.

But they do try.

Ignore the 300 pound transvestite at the family picnic that is the designated hitter.

The most ridiculous affront to baseball (and common sense) is the division setup which renders the regular season not meaningless, but not exactly entrancing.  A system by which we spend each September trying to whip up excitement over who will finish second.

The wild card. 

Fail to win more games than your hated rival?  Not to worry.  You can always be the Al Franken of baseball.  "I'm good enough.  And smart enough.  And I won one more game than the rest of those losers."  (Or words to that effect).

As an added bonus, since you've battled down to the wire in a "pennant race" your team has a sharpened edge going into the playoffs and just as much chance as the team which won more games than any other in the league.

Wild card teams have been to nine World Series and won four of them.  They have made the championship series roughly fifty percent of the time.

Baseball's response has been to rhapsodize about the number of teams whose fans have thrilled to the race for second place.  To point out how often "the little guys" get to the playoffs as a result.

Little guys like the Yankees and RedSox, who own nine of the fifteen wildcard (pennants?) in the American League.

Want to know how not to go to the World Series?  Have the best record in your league.  Only four times this decade has the team with the best regular season record in their league gone to the World Series.  And never, not a single time, have to two best teams in the regular season faced each other in the World Series.

So what is the World Series?

Nothing more than the last round of the playoffs. Which is a great thing if you are the NBA or the NHL but not so good if you play 162 games and want to finish the season before the first snow fall.

How to fix it.

You could, but it won't happen.

Simple reason.  Let's say you are the General Manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates.  If baseball had four "leagues" instead of six divisions someone (usually Pittsbugh) would be in 8th place.  Or, call it by it's proper name, last place.

Put a bad team in a small division and you're just two places out of fourth.  Place that same team in a smaller division and you can finish fifth (and last).  But fifth sounds much better than the abject mediocrity of eigth.

The wild card system, and it's occasional Tampa Bay Rays or Colorado Rockies intrusion into post season also allows baseball to ignore the ability of income heavy teams to buy a spot in the playoffs year after year, while fully one third of the teams are out of the running before the season starts.

"What problem.  Look at the Rays.  See, small market teams can compete."

Nonsense.

Which brings us to another reason MLB will never fix the broken division system.

The leagues are unbalanced.  Fourteen teams in the AL and sixteen in the NL. 

Why?

Probably because major league owners are as capable of coming in out of the rain and agreeing to fix an obvious problem as Manny Ramirez is of being a good teammate. Plus, the odds of finding two more suckers to join the club to make thirty-two teams is getting slimmer as the economy worsens.

The best thing for baseball would be four eight team "leagues" aligned geographically.  The Mets and Yankees, Cubs and WhiteSox, Reds and Indians, Dodgers and Angels, Giants and A's should be in the same division and fans should get a full schedule of these matchups instead of the "treat" of "special" interleague games.

Four leagues (and no interleague play) would make the post season matter.  A shorter playoff system would make baseball's postseason mean something again and drive up TV ratings.  As it stands now, owning the rights to broadcast the first round of the playoffs is owning the rights to a whole lot of nothing.

There is only one way things will change.  That is for the TV networks to force the issue.  When the ratings finally get low enough that the networks refuse to pay for the farce the playoff system has become, then something will happen.

Until then, just remember, the 2009 World Series is coming soon.

October 28, 2009.