The MLB September Drama Solution

Tonight on the Lemur, you have really the perfect storm of Northeast Corridor love: the Yankees win the AL East, and noted Boston lover Peter Gammons, in a column linked right next to the game story, advocates for an expanded baseball playoffs. Because in a year with zero compelling team races, we clearly need to invent something.

(A small moment for the Empire: Woo. You clinched with a sacrifice fly and didn't even really celebrate, because for Empire Fans, a ticket to the playoffs is like buying car insurance. Woo.)

Look, I realize that we're never going to put the toothpaste back into the tube and lose the wildcard. With an odd number of divisions, we'd either need to go to an NFL style East, West, North and South divisions, which would most likely mean expansion and/or making a team switch leagues, a la the Brewers, in a time where baseball is more likely to contract than expand. Realistically, since there are only four teams in the AL West and six in the NL Central, there's a reason to move this way, but as no one wants to either move to California or spend all of their time traveling to California, there really isn't much enthusiasm for that.

Getting back to Gammons, the problem with expanding the playoffs is twofold. First, you cheapen the division races, which has already happened irrevocably with the induction of the wildcard, so maybe it's a matter of being no longer a virgin, but still. The second issue is that unlike in football, the wildcard is really not that big of a disadvantage; home field in baseball is maybe a 5 to 10% boost. Second, there's the not inconsiderable matter of a longer playoff calendar for a sport that should not be played in very cold weather.

And third, you have the specter of just who would go to the dance; in the AL this year, you'd get Texas and Seattle, which is to say, two teams with fewer than 90 wins in a middling division. In the NL, it would currently be the Giants and Braves, which is to say, a team that should be karmically banned from meaningful games for their complicity in L'Affaire Bonds, and a club that spent most of the past two decades failing to sell out playoff games while doing the Tomahawk Chop. For this, we should expand the playofffs?

I get that the Year Without A Pennant Race is a problem, especially when you usually get them. But what MLB needs to look at are the underlying reasons *why* you didn't have a pennant race: revenue sharing that's inadequate, coupled with no real reason for the low market teams to spend money.

If you really want drama in every season, there's a better way. Bounce the worst team out of MLB evey year, and promote a minor league team up.

I've been dreaming of relegation and revolution, complete with an abolition of the slave minor league system, for decades now. It remains likely that it will never, ever happen; the lords of baseball hate uncertainty, and MLB franchises are worth so much more than AAA fiefdoms as to make a swap inconceivable in the market.

But we are also well into our second decade of reality television programming, with people being voted off islands, weakest links being bounced, etc., etc. If MLB really wants to steal back any amount of the thunder that the opening weeks of the NFL, it needs to do something dramatic, and losing the Orioles and Nationals (the current two worst records) for, say, the Charlotte Knights and Brooklyn Cyclones...

Well, seriously. Wouldn't you love to see Peter Angelos removed from MLB by force, along with the final solution for the Zombie Expos? Wouldn't a third strike failure for baseball in the District work on every level? And how many years can this region have the worst possible baseball without consequence?