Improving Major League Baseball With Euro Soccer Spices
Nearly 5 BILLION people watch the Premier League every year.
That number is staggering. That number reveals true health of a sports league and the sport overall.
While we’ve seen the NFL, MLB, and the NBA slide on ratings in spite of maintaining profit, we know that there’s a guaranteed future for the top-level soccer league in the U.K. The same cannot be said for the NFL (injuries, controversial site changes, escalating prices, interest drops), the NBA (being so top-heavy it hurts), and especially, especially Major League Baseball.
Major League Baseball maintains its profits, keeps making money for its owners, but the cracks underneath is structure are growing. We see ownership that continues to try to strongarm their communities (Miami Marlins, Tampa Bay Rays, Miami Marlins—I know I’m repeating), ownership that refuses to spend money to remain competitive (Pittsburgh Pirates, New York Mets, Cleveland Indians, Miami Marlins), a minor league system that is inches from truly falling apart, and rampant issues that isn’t being pursued by the mediocre commissioner Rob Manfred. The union and owners aren’t getting along, and a player’s strike is nearly guaranteed in 2021. But even though the quality of talent has increased, the quality of the regular season continues to slide little by little.
Similar to how casuals don’t recognize the NBA until after Christmas, Major League Baseball doesn’t truly grab interest until Memorial Day, nearly two months into the season. The pennant chases don’t pick up in intensity until around after the All Star Break. There are too many fluff games, too many pointless games, and not enough of that addicting high-stakes baseball. Baseball at its most important is where the game truly shines: playoff baseball is easily the best out there. But a league staked with talented teams headed by disinterested owners dilutes the product severely. By August even if half the league have a playoff shot, at most a third of teams really made the necessary pushes to be placed in that position.
The Pirates spent two decades under the basement before finally achieving playoff success---and then wasted this momentum by going cheap and accepting returning to mediocrity. The Tampa Bay Rays back in 2014 were in playoff contention, then traded David Price to the Tigers, angering Joe Maddon to a point in which he left for the Cubs in that same off-season. Most famously, Derek Jeter and his ownership group decided to immediately cut corners to a Miami Marlins franchise they just purchased and had been inches away from seeing the postseason. To this day I have yet to forgive the Derek Jeter ownership group for trading their entire outfield in the same off-season. The reason why these baffling moves are made is because regardless of level of success, everyone profits, everyone makes good money.
This is what makes the European soccer system of league play so amazing; you aren’t guaranteed all the money just by participating, and your status in the top level playing against top level talent is also earned, not given. The lack of financial guarantee incentivizes spending, incentivizes improvement, incentivizes an actual goal as opposed to just putting product out there and hoping that the fans show up. The threat of being relegated to a lower tier and playing inferior opponents thus creating inferior product and profit is what drives up the importance of every Premier League match. You aren’t just playing to try to have the best record, you are playing to survive. La Liga and Bundesliga also succeed greatly by copying this same setup of regular season play.
The current juicy TV contracts would definitely prevent that concept from existing, but what if in the future Major League Baseball considers the relegation/promotion ideology? What if the American League and the National League splits their conferences into different tiers so that only half competes for an actual title, and the other half has to battle for a shot at the actual title?
Under this idea, you could even elevate the exposure and talent level of AAA baseball by offering them a chance to compete alongside lower-tier MLB teams throughout the season. You could easily eliminate interleague by increasing the number of AAA slots available to play professional ball. You can increase to 32 teams, 36 teams, even 40 teams. AAA baseball has 46 teams overall when you include the Mexican League, which would even be more amazing if they joined in on the fun.
More teams, more destinations, more exposure, and more room to create a system that allows for the best teams to play the best teams more often. We can finally eliminate the silly concept of divisions but keep the rivalries. The Yankees and Red Sox would not just be rivalry games, but rivalry games with added value since you are always playing to maintain your position to be at the highest level. Lastly, with no interleague when we finally reach the World Series and other tournaments (which could be added to boost regular season interest) we’ll see matchups that had not existed all season long---an American League versus a National League team.
My personal idea is on its first iteration, the American League and National League will have 20 teams each, with each league starting out with 5 AAA teams. The 10 best records are the only ones able to compete for the title, while the remaining 5 mixed with the 5 AAA has to play all year for promotion and to avoid further delegation. If we used 2019 records to determine the top-tier from each league, it would look like this:
With this setup, you can create multiple tournaments to determine champion and determine seeding for the next season. You can cut the season to add more value to regular season matchups while expanding playoffs without actually expanding the amount of teams aiming for a championship. Nothing gets sacrificed, nothing gets diluted, and everything holds more value. Now teams like the Blue Jays and Pirates can’t lollygag and simply throw away a season, because they risk dipping down to AAA status, which gives you minimal games against popular and actually-good teams. At the same time, if you are on the top-tier like the White Sox, you can’t lose focus otherwise you will tumble to the lower class.
Constantly competing creates better content, you can’t simply blow a season to wait for a free agent. If you run the Diamondbacks, you don’t want to risk the situation which requires two entire seasons before you even have a shot at a championship, you risk having to spend an entire season in a lower professional class and thus losing out on the financially better matchups like with consistent success stories like the Rays, Cardinals, Red Sox, and Dodgers.
Of course, doing this would fundamentally change the current concept of AAA baseball being nothing more than the gateway to the pros and becoming a training ground for MLB teams. Expanding AAA baseball to potentially compete for MLB status would increase the value of each of these teams, would allow for professional teams to even visit smaller towns like Oklahoma City and Des Moines, even areas in Mexico. You’d actually give the chance for professional baseball to happen in Nevada, Kansas, New Mexico, and even Rhode Island. This opportunity would generate interest and maybe even increased budgets from the smaller owners of AAA teams. Even if the chances of the Albuquerque Isotopes of being on the top-tier and winning a championship is extremely slim, the mere exposure to MLB, to larger franchises in the hometown is enough to drive extreme interest to the locals. And an extra wrinkle is that a team like the Yankees could have a SECOND smaller franchise competing in the second-tier making more money and providing more experience to their rising stars.
Major League Baseball’s biggest issues stems from ownership that’s clearly interested in profits and if it means damaging the team’s reputation and free agency value, so be it. This is why the strike in 2021 is inevitable. This is why baseball completely ruined their chance of being the first sport to return to television and conquer the tv ratings while the world slowly tries to return back to normal. The greed of ownership has severely hurt the game, and unless you threaten their consistent revenue these problems will persist. A multi-layered tier system that extends from AA to AAA to multiple levels in the MLB hierarchy threatens revenue, increases the stakes, expands the game even further, and ultimately would create stronger regular seasons while keeping the regular playoff system and even having more tournaments in October.
Major League Baseball should pursue this to elevate the sport, improve the product, and make sure that ownership stops harming the quality of the league with their indifference. Going the European soccer route and stretching participation towards the AAA Minor League Baseball chapter can accomplish amazing things, and create storylines the current system could never duplicate.
The pieces are there, it’s just a matter of implementing a system that has helped make the Premier League the most popular sports league in the entire world and helped soccer maintain its global dominance.