Major League Baseball isn't an organization that is known for its willingness to change.
That's what makes this story by Sport Illustrated's Tom Verducci so surprising. Apparently , Bud Selig named a "special committee for on-field matters" that is made up of 14 people - current managers and executives was all the information we are given - whose job it is to brainstorm and come up with new ideas to help improve the game as a whole. Their first idea is sure to stir more than a few feathers around baseball:
The committee already has made good on Selig's promise by discussing a radical form of "floating" realignment in which teams would not be fixed to a division, but free to change divisions from year-to-year based on geography, payroll and their plans to contend or not
Realignment is something that most Rays fans have been talking about for years, though assuredly not to this degree. This idea is nearly one hundred percent centered around the dominance of the Red Sox and Yankees, as there's no National League equivalent. Here is one example of how this "floating" realignment would work:
Cleveland, which is rebuilding with a reduced payroll, could opt to leave the AL Central to play in the AL East. The Indians would benefit from an unbalanced schedule that would give them a total of 18 lucrative home dates against the Yankees and Red Sox instead of their current eight. A small or mid-market contender, such as Tampa Bay or Baltimore, could move to the AL Central to get a better crack at postseason play instead of continually fighting against the mega-payrolls of New York and Boston.
That all sounds fine in theory, but there's obvious problems that would need to be fixed with such a system. Some of them being:
-What if two teams from the same division want to move and there is only one available space?
-The piece indicates that no team could join a division more than two timezones outside of its own. That would seem to greatly benefit teams in the Central divisions, seeing as how they could move to the East or West while a team like the Rays gets handcuffed by being on the East Coast.
-If I'm a team like the Yankees or Red Sox from a few years ago and I see that the Devil Rays or Orioles want to leave the division, I wouldn't be too happy about those easy wins walking out the door.
Of course this is all speculation, an idea that is fun to talk about while the first week of Spring Training unfolds. Personally, I think there would be too many obstacles facing an idea of this magnitude. But what about you? I'm interested to hear everyone's opinions.