Actually, the current management of MLB don’t seem to appreciate that much, and have introduced regular season interleague play (it used to be that the World Series was the only non-exhibition interleague play), and have effectively swapped two teams (one of them owned by the current commissioner) between leagues.

Anyway, there is a stronger case for doing away with the divisions, which are more recent constructs and have been tampered with quite frequently already. They are also somewhat too large to really reduce travel.

The two leagues are the historical survivors of a number of attempts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to start professional leagues. With thirty “major league” teams now, I favor creation of a third league, where I would put the ten most recent expansion teams (the teams that came in starting 1969).

This would enable the playoff scheme I outlined in an earlier comment, where you would have six playoff teams that arrived there by having the best regular season record in their six divisions. It also goes some way to solve an perennial complaint in that teams based in small metropolitan areas can’t compete in paying high salaries to good players with teams based in large metropolitan areas. As it happens, the ten most recent expansion teams tend to be “small market” teams (because teams were placed or moved into the larger markets before 1969). With their own league, these teams only compete against each other until the last rounds of the playoffs. If teams from the third league win several World Series, there is now no need to restrain the spending of, well, the Yankees because you only see them and the larger market teams in a couple of playoff series, which can be somewhat random. If the third league regularly falls flat in the playoffs it can be quietly regulated to the status of an independent minor league, of which there were several serving underserved markets in the early part of the century, and MLB will have effectively contracted, for which a strong case can be made anyway.

A good example of an independent minor league for an underserved market was the Pacific Coast League, which flourished on the West Coast at a time when there were no major league teams further west than St. Louis. The Negro Leagues are another example, for completely different reasons. The Japan League is a sort of independent minor league today. The minor leagues teams in the United States have been bought out by major league teams and exist mainly to develop or rehab major league players.

I understand having divisions to reduce travel, but it should be purely geographic.

This would also reduce bad teams making playoffs based on arbitrary divisions.

A team gets a play-in if they have somewhere between the 2nd best and the 5th best record in the league, almost by definition (unless you have a really weak division, the teams with the five best records will be the three division winners and two two wild cards), but of course it can be a weak fifth or a strong second, and with the number of teams qualifying for the sort of playoffs set, at a certain point the regular season just doesn’t matter as much.

The weak division winner problem -its possible for a team in a weak division to finish with barely more wins and losses and make the playoffs, this actually happened at least once with the 1969-93 system- could be solved by requiring a division winner to have to win a certain number of games to participate in the playoffs. If a division can’t produce a quality entrant to the playoffs, then a team with a better record from outside the division would substitute. However, I’ve checked and the weak division winner problem, while it happens, doesn’t happen as much as many people seem to think.

One important point is that at the moment, one third of the MLB teams (ten out of thirty) qualify, sort of, of the playoffs, counting the wild card play-in as a playoff game. This alone is pushing baseball into NHL and NBA territory of having too many teams in the playoffs, to the detriment of interest in the regular season and the eventual finals/ World Series. From a marketing standpoint, you push more of the weaker teams into the playoffs but it drains interest in the regular season from fans of the stronger teams which, short of a Phillies style cascade of injuries, should usually be able to count on finishing in the top third. I happen to be a Yankees fan, and despite a few weeks of bad play in early September when they had their own injury problems, their getting at least to the wild card play in was never really in doubt, though the division title was very much in play.

Historically, before the 1961 expansion one in eight MLB teams made the playoffs (which just consisted of the World Series). This proportion actually fell to one in twelve teams during the 1960s. The 1969 expansion and introduction of divisions put the proportion at one in six, though in the American League this fell slightly to one in seven after 1976. The post-Wild Card one in four and now one in three teams in the playoffs is historically high for the game.

Now check out the final regular season standings and consider what the same records would look like using the 1969-93 two league, four division format. The Yankees and the Orioles in the AL East finished two games apart. The Athletics and the Rangers finished one game apart. In what had been the National League West, the Reds finished three games ahead of both the Braves and the Giants. The American League races would have gone down to the last couple of games in the season, with the losing team sitting at home. This is just one year, but if you go back through the records since 1995 it turns out that there were alot of classic pennant races that never happened.

My own preference would be three leagues of two divisions each, no wild card, with a total of six teams making the playoffs (a one in five proportion). The winner of the championship series of the league with the strongest overall interleague play record would go directly to the World Series, facing the winner of a series between the pennant winners of the two “weaker” leagues.

This would involve cutting the number of teams in the playoffs from ten to six, but you really can’t restore or build more interest in the regular season without a reduction of the number of teams making the playoffs, because you need the chance of good teams not making the playoffs to have decent races.

Did I mention that MLB didn’t think this through?

All I’m really saying is that W-L record does not necessarily tell you which are the best 4 teams over the whole season.