Once the wild card was adapted I pretty much gave up on 'baseball purity' by having as few teams in as possible. Now I figure they might as well go whole hog with the 16 ala the NBA and NHL.

It would be easy to interpret that sentence as, "since baseball can't be as good as we want it, we might as well make it as bad as possible." "My new car got a scratch in the paint, so I'm blowing it up."

The problem for me with expanding the playoffs is that you're chasing something you can never catch:

1. Only one team can win the World Series every year. You could let sixty-four teams into the playoffs and only one team would still win the Series. And you're not helping a bad team become good by letting them pretend.

2. The really bad teams won't be helped by expanding the playoffs. How much would you have to expand them before Kansas City and Pittsburgh had a shot?

3. You're surrendering playoff spots to rich smart teams. Just because it seems like the Yankees and Red Sox will be in there every year forever doesn't mean they shouldn't have to work for it.

4. It's true that we don't have many pennant races among excellent teams anymore. But pennant races between good teams are still better than pennant races between mediocre teams.

The situation we have now isn't actually too bad. Four out of fourteen AL teams in the playoffs is not a surrender to mediocrity; more often than not, all four teams are sufficiently far from .500 as to preserve some respect for excellence. Even adding one more wild card team wouldn't change that much. I don't think it would, anyway; I haven't looked it up. Going to eight teams, though? You'd almost certainly have teams with losing records in the playoffs, and who needs that? Plus, the playoffs are almost too long now anyway; I can't see adding, what, 28 to 48 more.

Besides, we already have a couple of sports with playoff systems like hockey and basketball. They're called hockey and basketball. If I wanted to watch hockey and basketball, I'd watch hockey and basketball. Baseball should have a playoff system that suits its own needs.

My super -early xmas present would be:

2 divisions per league, top 4  per league make the play offs and a balanced schedule. It's not alot to ask. And before anyone brings up gate and TV revenue from playing in the AL East, with an unbalancesd schedule -  there is no way that a Jays team making the playoffs (or even a pennant race!) doesn't make more revenue than any of the recent versions.

One lives in hope...

Matthew what is your solution then? 2 divisions, balanced schedule, top 4 get in? Salary cap?

Solution? You think there's a solution?

You're adorable.

No, I'm just kidding. I don't know. I liked Bill James's idea about splitting local TV revenue the same way gate receipts are split. (Of course, you'd have to make sure that teams owned by their broadcasters weren't cooking the books.) I don't like the wild card, so I'd prefer an even number of divisions, and of course it should go without saying that I'm in favour of a balanced schedule. (Why don't we have one, anyway? Interleague play? Damn and blast interleague play.)

I'm neutral on the salary cap. A long time ago, someone - Robert Dudek? - proposed in my presence a scheme where teams couldn't spend more than (something like) twice the previous year's median team payroll. I was against it at the time but now I think it's not too bad of an idea. No reason why the players should agree to it, of course, but that's what negotiations are for.

The present divisional system isn't that bad. I think it'd be neater if the AL expanded by two teams and there could be four four-team divisions in each league, but I don't insist on it. Another possibility is to add another wild card team to each league, and have the two wild card teams play each other in a one-game playoff on the day between the end of the season and the start of the playoffs. This would make winning the division mean something.

Do I think that the Toronto Blue Jays could succeed under any of these schemes?

Probably not. But it sure wouldn't hurt them.

Please do not add more teams to the playoffs! Watching the Raptors/Bulls this weekend fighting it out for the 8th seed when both teams had no business being in a playoff race is not what baseball should be doing. Adding mediocrity to the playoff format is never a good thing. The Wild Card is fine, but that is as far as it should go.

Plus, at this point, 15+ years without a playoff appearance, I would much rather the Jays make the playoffs in the East up against Boston and New York than in a weakened AL Central. The team has tried to fight this long, let's finally slay the beasts rather than run from them.

There is zero chance of a salary cap.

Player salaries are well under control, and take up a smaller percentage of revenues than they do in other sports. A cap would actually end up COSTING the owners more money.

Even better, the owners in MLB have the most restrictive player entry level system in any sport, which they would surely have to sacrifice to get a cap.

They've got zero reason to put a cap in. It makes no sense for them whatsoever.

It's not gonna happen.

I'm with the ugly one for all the reasons he stated.  A salary cap is a mechanism to control excalating costs.  The only reasons salaries escalated in the last decade was because revenues escalated.

The only team that would be over the cap by any material margin would be the Yankees and we already have a luxury tax to deal with them.  Increase the tax, fix the revenue sharing model and sort out the clubs that don't spend to a minimum salary level.

It's got nothing to do with the players, really.

And if it's actually good for the players, then the players will have no problem with putting one in, right?

What would make a salary cap good for the players?

I think in the 2008 season, league revenues passed the $6b mark.  If a cap came in and players were guaranteed 50% of league revenues (for simplicity - other sports are around 55-57%), that would be $100m per team salary cap.  A CBA would likely build a range of 20% of that and you get a team payroll of between $80m and $120m per year.  More teams are going to get hurt at the bottom end than the top end with that.

If a team can't operate on a 80m budget in this era, then they should move to somewhere that can support them, really.

there's not all that many cities in the world that can support that, really.

Personally, I'm a big fan of salary caps myself. I have no problem with them in principal as long as they are linked fairly with revenues - the league is the corporation, the teams are franchises, and the salary cap is just a mechanism to ensure the health of the league by keeping costs under control. As a fan, I do believe that parity is better than dynasties., and I think MLB would be better off audience wise if every city had a fair shot at competing.

But it's not gonna happen - mainly because of indentured slavery under the guise of an entry-level season, but also because it seems like there was some solid collusion a few years back when costs started to spiral out of control, player salaries are not a big deal for owners as a group right now - they're well under control.

Neither the players nor the owners have any real bottom-line motivation to use any of their bargaining capital to get a cap in there.

Well let's look at the function of sport.

Like it or not, the function of professional sport is simple: to make money. Professional baseball is a business and always has been. It's a form of entertainment, nothing more noble than that. While its employees can certainly compete with honour and integrity, and that certainly adds to the quality of the spectacle for many of us, the industry itself is just business.

and hurts fan interest in cities with small markets, which of course is bad for the game.

Everything you said prior to this statement is a laundry list of reasons why your enjoyment of the game suffers in this cap-free world. Your feelings are your feelings and certainly no one can dispute those. But the truth of this statement is not entirely clear to me. What cities with small markets are currently being hurt? How are they being hurt? How is that bad for the game as a whole? I'm just trying to find out what is behind your assertions.

and having such a skewed money aspect hurts real meritocratic competition

I can't help but think that your personal feelings about the nature of the industry of professional baseball are getting conflated with what you believe are signs of health issues within that industry. Professional baseball is not about meritocratic competition, as much as idealists wish that it were. It's about the bottom line. For meritocratic competition, you'll need to join a Strat-O-Matic league or a fantasy league.

A change of pace...Everybody's familiar with the Joe West controversy over pace of play....Peter King summarizes it nicely.

The West crew did the Boston-New York three-game series in the first week of the season, followed by the Toronto-Baltimore three-gamer.

Time of the three Red Sox-Yankees games: 3:46 (West at the plate), 3:48, 3:21.

Time of the three Jays-Orioles games: 2:54, 2:24 (West at the plate), 2:22.

The Baltimore-Toronto games, on average, were 65 minutes shorter than the Boston-New York games.

West's game behind home plate in Baltimore was 82 minutes shorter.

The ideal of sport should be a meritocracy, and we're really not that far from it. all we need is a salary cap. You talk about it like some vague 'ideal' that can never be achieved, which comes off as defeatist.

What you believe the ideal of sport should be and what it is in the real world are vastly different and it's not a matter of being defeatist.

I'm arguing that professional baseball has no compelling reason to attempt to become a meritocracy. It is a business. Right now business is very good meaning that there are no real pressures to dramatically alter the existing business model. When such pressures exist, the model will change. Moving towards a meritocracy will only be a driving force if, in the owners' eyes, such a move would enhance the business model, and not for any motives purer and nobler than that.

Do you believe that the NBA, NFL and NHL moved to a salary cap for pure and noble reasons? No, they did it to salvage flagging industries. Those leagues needed dramatic changes to their business models to survive. MLB needs no such change to survive. At least not right now.

Simple:

1. Balanced schedule
2. top 4 teams get in regardless of division.

That solves most of the problem.

Well, then, why even have divisions? I don't mean this as an objection; I'm just saying that if everybody's playing everybody else the same number of times, and winning the division doesn't get you anything if there's a third-place team in another division better than you, then for all intents and purposes you've just got one big league with no divisions.

It's not a dumb idea.

I'd like to see:

1. 2 Leagues
2. 2 Divisions per league
3. 1 pennant winner per division
4. 2nd place team from each division hosts a best of three playoff series with 2 "next best teams" from the League (wildcards from either division)
5. unbalanced schedule (though not severe)
6. no interleague

1. Balanced schedule

Initially I thought that west coast teams would oppose this as they'd lose revenue broadcasting more games at 4pm (or 10am on weekends) local time. But they'd also get more Red Sox/Yankees home games which would be a great boost. I'd be interested to see what would outweigh the other, or if the two could cancel each other out. I'd also have to imagine that from a competitive point-of-view they'd rather maintain the status quo.