Next year I suppose I will be waiting anxiously to see if my hometown baseball team can earn a wild card berth in the American League Central division. It will be a strange sensation, like something is out of place in the realm of professional athletics.
Reading box scores with six divisional headings would at first impel me to search for statistics on yards rushed and interceptions thrown, and maybe a few articles about the misfortunes of the Buffalo Bills or Dallas's omnipotent Emmit Smith.
Then perhaps I'd notice that the Colorado Rockies and Florida Marlins were listed, and I would think I had missed the advent of a new sport. Sadly, however, the realization would finally arrive that it required only two years to significantly disfigure the appearance of Major League Baseball. So much for dynamic institutions.
Here at Dartmouth, where the rise and fall of precious tradition is the stuff of daily debate, this quick and considerable mutation of the sports world should be received without seriously convulsing the community. Lest we express any solidarity on this campus, there might yet be a universal sense of loss, a mourning over 162 games that were robbed from us.
Yes, Major League Baseball has "spread the wealth around" and, in doing so, diminished its overall value. More cities get to revel in extended playoff expectations, while the prized pennants are no longer as rare nor hard fought. More teams get realistic aspirations, while at the same time aspiring to a lesser goal. And baseball gets richer.
More pennant races, more playoff games, higher attendance rates, higher television ratings. The Sporting News' Peter Pascarelli, a proponent of the new league organization, says that he waits in anticipation of "balance of power shifts" as a result of better, more equitable competition.
He then states that over a dozen teams have notified their 1994 rivals forbidding them to televise from their home fields until a revenue-sharing plan has been worked out. It is difficult to imagine fans as the beneficiaries of baseball business when most "enhancements" are in some way self-remunerative to franchise ownership.
Pascarelli also highlights other prospective features of this new system. As it now stands, there are four divisions with five teams and two divisions with four, ultimately meaning that every night one team would be off. Now introduce regular season interleague play, which would solve this problem. This alternative is currently being considered, so fans themselves should currently consider watching the Atlanta Braves play the Toronto Blue Jays in the middle of May.
In addition, Pascarelli points out, we could add a couple more teams and even out the divisions. However even he admits that Frank Thomas and Barry Bonds would set new hitting standards at the expense of pitchers who belong in farm organizations. This is quite a headache for a change in baseball which has dubious value to the baseball fan.
For fans today it seems as natural that the New York Yankees are an American League team and the St. Louis Cardinals a National League team as it is that Abner Doubleday invented the game of baseball with four bases.
There exists no horrible competitive imbalance, and any alterations in the spirit of balanced competition are certain to have a negative influence on the game itself. Would the next step be to require every stadium to have standard outfield fences?
Well, maybe Colorado's should be a little longer because of the altitude and Florida's a little shorter because of heat exhaustion.
