How to Fix MLB

On the one hand, baseball is so rooted in traditon — MLB has by far the most longevity of any major North American sports leagues, dating back to 1869 — it’s hard to rationalize making wholesale changes to how they operate. On the other hand, recent attendance numbers — less than 56,000 people were in the stands for the three perfect games* thrown this year — would suggest baseball could use — to torture their own cliche — a shot in the arm.

*Okay, so officially it’s only two, but you can’t tell me Armando Galarraga didn’t throw a perfect game.

These problems become even worse when you get to playoff time — which doesn’t have enough teams and runs too far into a time of year, on the east coast especially, where inclimate weather is likely — but the symptoms can trickle throughout the regular season. To begin, the season is far too long, but I’m not going to pretend that the league will cut games. Besides, that can probably create more problems than it really solves — small market teams would have even less revenue to work with.

So the solution itself is very simple and can be broken down into five basic and easy steps.

Step 1: Send the Milwaukee Brewers back to the American League. Did it ever really make much sense to unbalance the two leagues in an era of Inter-league play? I didn’t think so either.

Step 2: Realign the divisions. With Milwaukee back in the American League, you can continue by scrapping the Central Division in both Leagues. Milwaukee along with Minnesota, Kansas City and Chicago are now in the West Division; Detroit and Cleveland are in the East. In the National League St. Louis, Chicago and Houston are in the west; Cincinnati and Pittsburgh are in the East.

Step 3: Give post-season access to six teams in each league. Instead of one wild card and three Division winner, there will now be four wildcard teams and two Division winners. To offset the problem of not having balance in the playoff schedule, the two Division winners in each league will receive a first round bye.

This is important for a couple of reasons. First it gets two more teams into the post-season than are in now and, perhaps more importantly, it ensures that the regular season and pennant races still mean something. In fact, it may actually make them more important.

The first round series’ will all be a best of five in the traditional 2-2-1 format, though there will be as few off days in between games as possible. Once it gets to the league championship series’ — in order to cut down on travel time and costs — it will be a 3-2-2 format. That’s right, the Division winner gets to host a maximum of five games in the series, while the visitor gets only two.

Step 4: Install a hard salary cap and salary floor. This isn’t that complicated and perhaps a bit overdue. Not only does it serve to balance things out for the teams — the total player payroll of the 10 highest spending teams is roughly $1.3-billion, while the total player payroll of the remaining 20 teams barely clips that total at $1.4-billion — but it will also bring player salaries to a more managable number — there are 22 players making at least $16-million per year.

Step 5: Install a pitch clock. Similar to the shot clock in basketball, the pitch clock is designed to keep the proceedings moving. Pitchers will have a pre-determined amount of time — somewhere between 10 and 20 seconds — from when they receive the ball (returned from the catcher after another pitch or a fielder after a ball has been put into play) until they must make a pitch or attempt a pick-off.

None of these ideas are guaranteed to make a difference. But they would at least be more than what MLB — the winning team in the All-Star game gets home field advantage in the World Series? — has done.