Why Major League Baseball Needs Realignment

Major League Baseball is currently plagued with a number of factors causing a competitive imbalance - the lack of a salary cap, for instance, puts small market teams at a severe disadvantage.

But there's one massive imbalance in baseball that nobody seems to care about. It's the fact that one of the league's six divisions, the American League West, has only four teams, while the others have at least five (one has six).

It's much easier to win a division and make the playoffs when you're only competing against three other teams. Why isn't there outrage over the fact that the AL West teams have it so easy?

Recent Major League Baseball realignment history
When Major League Baseball added the Tampa Bay Rays and the Arizona Diamondbacks in 1998, it decided that having two 15-team leagues was not practical, since that either meant teams would have too many days off or interleague play would have to be expanded.

Neither of those consequences is particularly serious, but MLB, in its infinite wisdom, decided on a course of realignment with the Milwaukee Brewers moving to the NL, putting 16 teams in the NL and 14 in the AL.

The Rangers, Mariners, Angels and As got lucky by being placed in the four-team AL West, while the Cardinals, Cubs, Astros, Pirates, Brewers and Reds got stuck in the six-team NL Central.

Since 1992, only one AL West team has advanced to the World Series, the 2002 Anaheim Angels, who won the wild card.

Consequences of Major League Baseball's poor realignment
A Harvard blogger calculated that an AL West team has a 31.8% chance of making the playoffs in a given year, while an NL Central team has only a 23.1% chance. Consider the cumulative effect over years and years, and you see just how unfair it is that the AL West has only four teams.

This doesn't just affect the teams in the AL West and the NL Central. It affects all 30 major league clubs. Because of this bizarre alignment, AL teams have a 1 in 14 shot of reaching the World Series while NL teams have only a 1 in 16 shot. Where's the uproar over this blatant competitive imbalance?

Solutions for Major League Baseball realignment
The obvious solution is to move a team from the NL Central into the AL West. The Houston Astros are a prime candidate because they're the most westward team in the division.

However, teams are reluctant to switch from one league to the other, due to existing rivalries, and the Astros have been in the NL for their entire existence. The solution I'd like to see is the Brewers moving back to the American League, from the NL Central to the AL Central, with the Kansas City Royals being bumped from the AL Central to the AL West.

The Brewers already have a history in the AL Central and the Royals used to be in the AL West so it wouldn't be a big deal to move either. That would put five teams in each division and restore some level of competitive balance.

Major League Baseball realignment: Summary
Any other sport with 30 teams would split them into six divisions with five teams each. The math is so simple, it's impossible to screw it up. Unless you're Major League Baseball.

Unfortunately, no proposals currently exist to deal with the issue of unbalanced divisions. The only talk of realignment lately is a "floating realignment" plan designed to split the Yankees, Red Sox and Rays into separate divisions so they can all make the playoffs. That's insane. It's crazy that the bigwigs only begin discussing realignment when it can benefit the Yankees or Red Sox.

Major League Baseball realignment needs to happen because the AL West has an incredibly unfair advantage with only four teams, not because the Red Sox might miss the playoffs once in a while.

Major League Baseball realignment: Sources
http://harvardsportsanalysis.wordpress.com/2010/03/29/should-mlb-realign-its-divisions/
www.mlb.com
http://msn.foxsports.com/mlb/story/rosenthal-realignment-proposal-022510