It’s been more than a week since MLB commissioner Rob Manfred dropped his latest bomb. Manfred, as we’ve learned, enjoys throwing ideas out into the universe to get his sport some easy pop while seeing how the masses will react. Just a few months back, he scrambled the brains of baseball fans with his idea of a “golden at bat”, which would allow a chosen player to come to the plate, once a game, when it wasn’t their turn to hit. Oh, he got his publicity alright: many of us took the bait. Was it a genuine, bona fide idea? Probably not. When MLB is serious about a rule change we tend to see it played out in the minor leagues, and last I heard, baseball lineups were still linear down on the farms.
Now Manfred, who has brought unprecedented change to on-field rules – the pitch clock, the shift ban, three batter reliever minimums, the ghost runner, just to name just a few – is back playing with the heads of the public, this time, floating plans to realign baseball’s 30 teams, who will be upped to 32 if the sport adds two more franchises through expansion, which the circuit is widely expected to do. Nashville, Salt Lake City, Raleigh and Portland are seen to be front runners, with Montreal looming as an outside shot. This could effectively end the league structure which has governed baseball since 1903, back when the upstart American League made peace with the senior National League and agreed to settle scores in a World Series rather than trying to run each other out of business.
