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If the West Coast teams all stay together and the western Midwest teams all stay together, then the 6 East Coast/Northeast Corridor teams damn well better stay together too. Toronto can go into a division with Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and possibly Detroit.
Why? In the NBA and NHL the Washington team is in a south division which does not include Philly, NY or Boston. In the NFL, the Baltimore team is likewise not in a division with those other teams.
Personally, I would like to see divisions done away with period. Keep the teams where they are and just have a National League and an American League. Play a balanced schedule within the league and keep interleague, and the top 4 teams from each league make the playoffs. That will never happen because Fox and ESPN like having 20 Yankees/Boston games every year but my solution more than anything levels the playing field and gives more teams a chance to win.
Why? In the NBA and NHL the Washington team is in a south division which does not include Philly, NY or Boston. In the NFL, the Baltimore team is likewise not in a division with those other teams.
Well, in most sports leagues they like to have a certain number of teams in a division. Sometimes the number of teams in a division prevents all the teams that are close to one another from being in the same division. Sometimes the geographical alignment of the entire league makes it difficult to put teams in close proximity to one another in the same division (as is the case with the Northeast Division in the NBA where Toronto doesn't fit in any other division that has 5 teams and to fit them in somewhere Washington needs to be bumped to the Southeast Division, even though Washington would fit better geographically in the Northeast Division than the Southeast Division).
My comment above is really based on the fact there was a proposed baseball division with 6 teams (the Pacific Coast division) and if there is going to a division with the California teams plus Seattle, then there should be a 6 team Northeast Corridor division as well.
I would leave them pretty much the same, but flip Washington or Atlanta to the NL Central and Pittsburgh to the East....it stinks that the Phils only play against an in-state rival for one home and one away series a year. In the AL, I would move the Rays and Blue Jays to the Central and the Tigers and White Sox to the East.
I can understand your concern about Phil-Buc matchups, but wouldn't it be safe to say that out of all the states with at two major cities, Pennsylvania has arguably the two with the least in common. Or at least is very high up that list.
Philly is the heart of the northeast corridor and the heartland of colonial America. Philly literally is the keystone city. It's reach is Atlantic and New York, Baltimore, Washington, and even Boston are its sphere.
Pittsburgh is so far transappalachian that, short of the hills that cover the entire region, it is more joined with the Midwest than the east. It gravitates more to Cleveland than any other city with a downriver connection to Cincinnati, as well.
It is a very non-eastern feel to central and western PA that made Penn State feel so comfortable joining the Big Ten.....something that could not be said of Philly or the Main Line.
That Wall St Journal article about getting rid of the AL and NL last week was pretty interesting for those who saw it. The Chicago guys were talking about it and this is how our local division would break down
WhiteSox
Cubs
Twins
Brewers
Cardinals
Obviously, that would be awesome. Rivalry city.
I'd hate to see it. I've always thought we benefitted by having the interleague rivalry as well as bringing in a different set of teams to the North and South sides.
The nice thing for the Cub is that they already have strong intraleague rivalries with the Cards and the Brewers. The Sox, somehow, were never able to have the same relationship with the Brewers when they were in the AL. I'm not sure why. Could be a holdover from the old Milw Braves days or all the Cub fans in southern WI.
As for the Sox, I think it is important to maintain their own AL identity. In the long run, I would hope that the Sox-Tiger rivalry would heat up.
Here's something interesting based on the discussion here:
I'm not sure exactly when it happened (although I'm fairly sure it must have been in the last 15-20 years), but the National and American leagues fell out of existence.
They no longer exist. Their is no corporate NL or AL, both being merged into MLB just as the NFL and AFL were merged into a greater NFL. While the NFC and AFC have "conference" names, the AL and NL's "league" designation is now meaningless. It doesn't exist.
So why is this interesting to me?
Because short of a DH, NFC and AFC have more meaning than NL and AL. Why?
Because you have the luxury of redesigning MLB into whatever configurations you wish with only (and this is a big only) tradition being an issue.
Not so for the NFC and AFC. Network contracts require a balance between the two that would not be a factor in MLB which has no such joint broadcasting set up.
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