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Astros to the American League. Reds finally have a 5 team division.

Good bye Houston.

Hello six divisions with five teams each.  Sorry Texas Rangers, you'll have to beat out 4 teams now rather than the three you've beaten the past two years en route to the World Series.

 In addition, MLB apparently decided that more playoffs for everyone would be a good idea - so now the Wild Card has been expanded - a total of ten (out of thirty) teams will make the playoffs.  In other news, my beloved Reds will still only make the playoffs once every ten years or so and the Pirates still won't make the playoffs.

The two leagues will each have fifteen teams in them, which I guess means there will be year round interleague play.  Personally, I hope that means that the idea of a unbalanced schedule goes away.

Here's my ideal scheduled using the Reds as my example.

The Reds could play all 15 American League teams 3 games each.  Each year, the home team would switch for each of the respective series.  Total:  45 interleague games.

The Reds could then play the remaining 14 National League teams 8 times each.   Each series would be 4 games long, one at home and one on the road.  Total:   112 games.

That's a season with 157 games.

However, if we must have a season with 162 games, we could modify the above schedule slightly (which will unbalance the schedule, but not nearly as bad as it currently is).
 
The Reds could play all 15 American League teams 3 games each as before (45 total games).
The Reds could play an extra home (or away) series with the Indians (their AL "rival").
That's a total of 48 AL games.
The Reds could play all 10 non-National League Central teams 7 times (3 and 4 game series).
That's a total of 70 non NL-divisional games.
Finally, the Reds could play the 4 National League Central teams 11 times each (44 total games).

Add up the totals (45 + 3 + 70 + 44) and you get the 162 games that you need for the regular season.  Sure, 48 games is a lot of interleague games but based on a pair of 15 team leagues there really isn't any good way around that.  I'm more interested in having the schedules balanced (especially with more Wild Card berths in the mix) than I am in keeping the NL and AL games only happening on certain weekends in the summer.

Comments

  1. I don't think beating the Astros the last two years would have been too difficult. I understand WHY, but I don't understand why they moved the Astros instead of the Brewers.

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