With 30 teams in Major League Baseball, it would make sense for there to be 15 teams in both the National League and American League.
But for that to happen, interleague play would have to be used all season, and many baseball fans and enthusiasts would be opposed to this happening.
Because of this, the National League has two more teams than the American League at 16 to 14. This causes an unfair advantage to the American League teams and players in three main capacities.
They are: It’s easier for AL players to win awards and make the All-Star teams, it’s easier for AL West teams to win their division and harder for NL Central teams, and it’s easier for non-division winners to make the playoffs as the wild card.
With 50 fewer players in the American League, weekly, monthly, and yearly awards are much easier to win as an AL player. I’m not saying that the competition is weaker in the AL, but since the amount of players is lower, a greater season in the NL may not win an award such as the MVP or Cy Young as compared to the AL.
Also, the difference of players is apparent on the All-Star ballot. With only 13 players to compete against for infield positions and 39 for outfielders as compared to 15 and 45, it is easier for players to make an All-Star appearance as an American League player.
Major League Baseball also requires that every team must be represented in the All-Star Game, another unfair disadvantage against the senior circuit.
The same logic applies to this as the awards argument, as a great season by an NL player might not warrant him an All-Star berth due to great seasons by his counterparts throughout the league.
However, baseball is a team game, and that’s where the big issue with the current system applies.
Thirty teams should mean six divisions consisting of five teams each. However, since the AL has only 14 teams, one division only gets four teams. This division is the AL West, where the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, Oakland Athletics, Seattle Mariners, and Texas Rangers only have to compete against the other three teams in their division to win said division and make the playoffs.
And since that division only has four teams, one division in the NL gets six: the NL Central.
The Houston Astros, Milwaukee Brewers, St. Louis Cardinals, Chicago Cubs, Pittsburgh Pirates, and Cincinnati Reds each have to compete against five other teams to win their division. This is totally unfair to those six teams and could potentially cost one of the teams a playoff berth.
Not only is this unfair in the divisional race but also in the wild card race as well. The three teams that don’t win their division in the AL only have to beat out ten other teams to win the wild card compared to the NL having to beat out 12 other teams.
Now to solve this problem, there are three main solutions that can be done in order to achieve equality in the game of baseball.
Option No. 1 would be to simply move one team from the NL Central to the AL West, which would most likely be the Astros or Brewers. Houston because they would have an in-state rival in the Rangers, or Milwaukee because they were originally an AL team.
However, if this were to happen, the scenario that I mentioned in the beginning would have to happen: interleague play all season long.
I, for one, would not be opposed to this, but many people believe that too much interleague play would be a bad thing. Many think that interleague play in general is a bad idea and even more of it would be a worse idea.
However, of the three options, this would be the most logical one because it wouldn’t have to add or subtract teams, like my next two.
Option number two would be to add two more teams to the American League and give the MLB 32 teams. Divisions would then be split like the NFL’s are, with four divisions in each league, each division consisting of four teams.
However, with the economy the way it is right now, that is most likely not a viable option as the funding for these teams would be hard to come by. New stadiums would have to be built along with more player’s salaries, etc.
That leaves contraction, which was discussed in the early 2000s but never came to be. It was rumored that the Minnesota Twins and Montreal Expos would be contracted, leaving Major League Baseball just 28 teams. Instead, the Twins went on to have a great run in the early part of the decade and ended up getting funding for a brand new stadium that is currently in its inaugural season
The Expos moved to Washington, DC, became the Washington Nationals, and got a new ballpark as well.
The most likely candidate for contraction would be the Florida Marlins as they barely draw crowds at Sun Life Stadium and usually have the lowest payroll in the league.
But the Marlins have a new stadium currently being built that is scheduled to open in 2012. And with the new stadiums of the Twins and Nationals, they aren’t going anywhere either.
With the abundance of new stadiums being built and the parity in the game right now, retraction is highly unlikely to occur any time soon.
So that leaves option one as the most likely option to help make baseball fairer for the senior circuit. Hopefully, Major League Baseball would look into a re-alignment of their divisions so the NL teams aren’t given the short end of the stick in the future.
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