Bud Selig's 'special committee for on-field matters' are talking about a "floating realignment" idea:
teams would not be fixed to a division, but free to change divisions from year-to-year based on geography, payroll and their plans to contend or not.
I don't know, sounds pretty strange to me.
One example of floating realignment, according to one insider, would work this way: Cleveland, which is rebuilding with a reduced payroll, could opt to leave the AL Central to play in the AL East. The
Indians would benefit from an unbalanced schedule that would give them a total of 18 lucrative home dates against the
Yankees and
Red Sox instead of their current eight. A small or mid-market contender, such as Tampa Bay or Baltimore, could move to the AL Central to get a better crack at postseason play instead of continually fighting against the mega-payrolls of New York and Boston.
So we are asking teams to state to their fans that we aren't going to try to make the playoffs, the pay off for the team is a few games of good attendance. Wouldn't the other games have no attendance at all?
The teams would only be able to move one division over, the Jays couldn't suddenly become part of the AL West., to keep travel from becoming too expensive.
I don't know about the idea of letting teams move back and forth. Teams would have to agree to the idea of moving, what if none of the want to be on the AL East one year. How do you decide which team you are going to anger?
I understand the point of it all, with us in the same division as the Yankees and the Red Sox makes it tough to get to the post season. If we have been in the AL Central the past ten years, we would have at least been contending just about every year.
I guess my worry is that they are trying to solve a temporary problem. The Yankees have had runs of being dominate before, I'm not sure that just because the Yankees and Red Sox have been great the past 10 years or so, that they will be forever. They might, they have the money, but that doesn't mean they will always use it well. The Red Sox being dominate is something quite new, we don't know how long it will last.
The other problem I see is that they would have educate the casual fan each year. For those of us that follow baseball closely it wouldn't be hard to keep up but if you are someone that doesn't follow baseball at all in the off-season it might be tough to catch on to changes.
Anyway what do you think?
