The Milwaukee Brewers' move from the AL to the NL

The Game Room
1

One of my friends asked me why the NL Central (Major League Baseball) has six teams in it. I sort of knew the answer, but my memory is fuzzy on the details. Can any Dopers fill me in?

Here’s a what I think I know…correct me if I’m wrong about any of it.

Both the NL and AL Central divisions were created with 5 teams in 1994 as part of the changes to create the Wild Card playoff spot and additional playoff series in each league. At the time, there were 28 MLB teams, 14 in each league.

In 1998, two expansion teams, Diamondbacks and Devil Rays (now known as Rays…sans Devil), were created. For some reason unknown to me, the Devil Rays were placed in the AL, and the D-backs were placed in the NL.

This meant there were 15 teams (an odd number) in each league. Interleague play was introduced the previous year (1997). The MLB owners did not want to have an odd number in each league, because that would force at least one interleague matchup at all times during the season. So, given this priority, one team had to switch leagues.

The Royals were given the first chance to switch but they turned it down in an attempt by Selig not to show conflict of interest. Selig then pushed a plan to switch his (at the time) own team to the NL allegedly in order to draw more fans to the Brewers games; Wisconsin has a lotta love/hate for both the Cubs and Braves, which are NL teams. Remember that the Braves played in Milwaukee prior to moving to Atlanta.

The switch meant 16 teams in the NL and 14 in the AL. With three divisions each league, there could not be an equal number of teams in each division. The Brewers geographic location dictated its addition to the NL Central.

Once all this got sorted out, the D-backs were added to the NL West and the Devil Rays to the AL East. The Tigers were moved from the AL East to the AL Central to fill the void left by the Brewers.

My questions:

  1. Why were the D-backs and Rays not added to the same league?
  2. Why was (is) there so much opposition to having and odd number of teams in each league causing at least one interleague series at any given time in the season?
  3. How did the other MLB owner feel about the Brewers move? Was there much controversy? Did the other owners approve the move unanimously?

Thanks, Dope.

2

The D-Backs’ owner requested the National League, and the American League didn’t want the NL to have the state of Florida all to themselves

Beats me…I would have preferred it to the uneven leagues/divisions.

I don’t recall any controversy. The Brewers love trading on the legacy left behind by the Milwaukee Braves, (much in the same way the Mets like to claim the Brooklyn Dodgers and to a lesser extent the New York Giants legacies as their own) and being in the NL helps feed that nostalgia sense. The offer to the Royals was, as you said, a pro-forma way of making it look like Selig wasn’t giving it directly to Milwaukee without giving anyone else the chance.

3

There aren’t enough interleague games on the schedule such that they could have at least one series going at any given time throughout the year. Also, it’s good for marketing to have most of the teams having interleague play all at the same time just a few of times a year.

One arguement that Milwaukee be the one moved is that Milwaukee had a “National League tradition” since the the Braves used to play there before they moved to Atlanta.

4

1) Why were the D-backs and Rays not added to the same league?

The state of Florida was already home to another expansion team, the Florida Marlins based out of Miami, already in the NL. Wanting to put the “other” Florida team in the “other” league meant the (D-)Rays were tabbed for the AL from the get-go.

Why not also add the D-Backs to the AL? As Wikipedia summarizes, Colangelo strongly felt that Arizona was a National League oriented location, with historical interest in and ties to the Dodgers, Giants and Padres. He pushed hard for going into the NL, but due to MLB needing to have even numbers of teams in both leagues, was only able to get it done by having Milwaukee sign off on moving to the NL (more on this later).

Milwaukee in turn was relatively glad to move the NL as it historically was a National League city, as the home of Milwaukee Braves in the heyday of Hank Aaron. They did win an AL Pennant in the Brew Crew era, though, so if the now-NL Brewers ever make it to the World Series they will be the first franchise in baseball history to win league pennants in both the AL and NL (of course, the list of eligible franchises is, shall we say, rather limited).

2) Why was (is) there so much opposition to having and odd number of teams in each league causing at least one interleague series at any given time in the season?

You ask this question lightly, but it’s not a light question. Interleague Play was very controversial at the time, and was only introduced in the 1997 season as an experiment, and the D-Backs entered the league in 1998. Forcing an odd number in each league would mean not only permanently establishing IL play as a feature of the MLB schedule (not a foregone conclusion at the time), but also mean that it would be a season-long feature rather than a “once a season oddity” like it is even now.

Baseball history is predicated on division and league pennant races, which is diluted by playing roughly double the number of teams by scheduling series in the other league. Of course it’s imbalanced now with the unbalanced IL schedule. I’d rather see IL abolished, and certainly not ensconced by dint of having 15 teams in a league.

3) How did the other MLB owner feel about the Brewers move? Was there much controversy? Did the other owners approve the move unanimously?

There was some controversy, but not the way you seem to think of it. Switching leagues was seen as a financial windfall, and the Brewers were actually the second team to be given the option, the KC Royals having been given first dibs (which would place them as division rivals with the neighboring St. Louis Cardinals).

5

The imbalance is ludicrous, and I can’t believe there hasn’t been more of an uproar about- Seattle for example only has to be better than three other teams to secure a plyaoff spot, while St. Louis has to be better than five.

6

I see that most of this has been answered, so I only wanted to add that the New York Times had a fairly good run-down, which mentions some of the opposition to the Brewers move and the reason the Royals turned it down.

I never gave Selig’s “National League tradition” much credence, especially since the Brewers had played in the AL for much longer than the Braves were in town, not to mention the fact that Milwaukee was a charter AL franchise (now the Orioles), even if that was for only one year.

7

Then how come the 2006 Cardinals won the World Series despite a barely-better-than-even 83 win season, while the Mariners have yet to make it to a World Series even in their 116-win season of 2001?

Less tongue-in-cheek, the number of teams matters less if you play your intra-division rivals the same number of games. For example if you play 72 out of 162 games against your division rivals, it doesn’t matter so much if you play 4 teams 18 times each or 3 teams 24 games each; and of course you’re playing the rest of the league the same number of times as the rest of your division rivals (except for those “three games against your natural interleague rival” that distort the schedule).

Either way, winning a division typically reflects your Win/Loss record against your division rivals. (Just ask the 2007 NY Mets.)

8

Did the D-backs also take travel into account? Seattle, Oakland, Los Angeles, and Dallas, Texas is a fairly wide geographic range.

I think I’d prefer the LA, San Diego, San Francisco, and Denver travel area myself if I was on a Western division club. LA and SD are usually scheduled back to back and the travel time between them is minimal.

Dallas and Denver are both out of the way. However, I think I’d rather play in Denver in the middle of the summer than Dallas.

9

A new round of expansion would address all concerns, but there might not be any viable markets left which could support a ML team. A North Carolina team is likely the leading candidate (it has NBA, NHL, and NFL franchises now), followed by central New Jersey, Portland, & Tennessee. Long shots would include Mexico City (lot of people, most poor) or San Juan (where half the market is the Atlantic Ocean).

10

There also isn’t enough pitching to go around.

11

But to completely eliminate the imbalance, you’d have to go all the way to 36 teams. By going to 32, to be sure, you could at least bring the disparity to five versus six (within a division) instead of four versus six.

Because the five teams in the NL Central happened to have lousy records last year. It doesn’t matter. This isn’t about one season or one team. It’s about structural unfairness built into the alignment. Year in and year out, the six teams in the NL Central have to be better than five other teams to make the playoffs, or they have to beat out 12 other teams to win the Wild Card. The four teams in the AL West have to be better than three other teams, or to beat out ten other teams to win the Wild Card. It’s stupid, and it’s grossly unfair.

Nonsense. There’s no reason to think that the best 468 position players in the world playing against the best 432 pitchers (with 36 teams) would produce a noticeably different game than the best 390 hitters in the world against the best 360 pitchers (what we have today, with 30 teams).

12

I think you’re wrong. There are plenty of AAA position players who can play on a major league roster at a much higher level than most pitchers at the AAA level.

13

Or simply have four four-team divisions in each league, with the first round of playoffs featuring the best team in each circuit playing the worst division winner, while the second-seeded and third-seeded AL teams square off against each other, as do their NL counterparts. Best remaining team in each league gets home-field advantage for the LCS. World Series home-field advantage could be done by any of several methods – rotating between the leagues each year, awarding based on All-Star game result, or by record-based merit.

14

The first part is factually true, but I don’t see how you conclude “it’s grossly unfair”.

Look at it this way. You are team T, and there are N teams in your division. You play G number of games within your division, where G is a much larger proportion of your season’s schedule than it is against any other division, nearly half of them; and for your non-division games, assume that your division rivals are playing an identical schedule (i.e., if you play in the AL West and play the Mighty Red Sox six times, so do all the other teams in the AL West).

You make the playoffs by winning your division (leaving aside the question of the Wild Card for now, or ties that require a tie-breaker like the Cards/Astros result from a few years back). So, your fate is largely determined by how well you do against your division rivals.

This is a Good Thing in Baseball.

Since only one team will win the division it doesn’t matter how many teams there are in it, so long as the schedule is balanced within the division (each team plays each other team the same number of times). You play (N-1) * G games against your division (considered an aggregate of all the other teams), and so do all your division rivals.

If there are 72 intra-division games in a given division, there could be 72 teams in the division and every team would play every other team exactly once in a complete round-robin. That would be the ultimate in fair, right? Now scale it down to N teams from 72 and it’s still just as fair. So long as the number G is evenly divisible into N, it all works out in the end.

OK, now you’re saying, what about the Wild Card, which goes to the non-division-winning team with the best record? That’s another angle which rewards doing well against your division rivals. Since the largest chunk of games come against them, you want to beat them up to either win the division or the WC.

Now we come to my beef, the unbalanced interleague schedule, where teams have artificial “natural interleague rivals” that they play 6 games against regardless of the IL division matchups for the season. For example, the Cubs will play the White Sox 6 times while none of the other NL Central teams may play the White Sox at all, or 3 games at most. This distorts the schedule far more than having 4 or 6 teams in a division.

15

Well yes, that’s fair within the division. Each one of the 72 teams has an equal chance to win. But it isn’t fair at all relative to another division which only has 6 teams, or 12, or 36!

In the long run, the AL West teams will make the playoffs half again as often as the NL Central teams (less a slight adjustment for the wild card). That isn’t fair!

I mean, if I organized a bowling tournament with you and eleven of your friends, and I put two of you (at random) into Group A and ten into Group B, and then said that the winner of Group A was going to meet the winner of Group B for the tournament championship, wouldn’t you think the two guys in Group A had gotten a break?

16

If that were true then scoring levels in AAA leagues should be extremely high, with all these MLB-ready hitters teeing off on bad pitchers.

But they aren’t. Why is that?

17

Anyone know what the Royals biggest objections to moving to the NL were?

Seems to me that if I were the moribund Royals organization I might like the chances of getting out of the AL and having to face the Red Sox and Yankees multiple times a season and in the theoretical postseason. As it stands they don’t have a particularly vigorous rivalry with any of the AL Central teams and their geography isn’t dramatically more convenient than a west coast circuit would be.

In the NL they’d have been able to play the Cardinals multiple times a year even if it were a non-divisional game, considering interleague was no sure thing this would have been a coup. They would have gained another close rival in the Rockies and been able to play against 2 recent expansion teams in division. Even the novelty of the new opponents in KC would have given attendance a short term boost.

Whats the story? Just tradition?

18

Tradition played a big part. Kaycee had always been an AL town, even back when it was the AAA farm club for the Yankees.

Also, there can be such a thing as too much rivalry. Put the Royals and the Cardinals in the same division and it’s likely the Royals would always be the weaker team.

Broadcast revenues were another issue. The Royals already have enough trouble getting affiliates in Missouri (against the Cardinals) and Iowa (where the Cubs dominate). Put them in the NL Central and it’s possible their geographic fan base would shrink even more.

19

Interleague play is still a blight and a travesty, and a bunch of other bad things I can’t think of right now. Hate it, hate it, hate it. I can’t believe it’s been eleven years.

20

I think we will eventually see two new teams, maybe on the next 10 years. Geographically, we need one from the west, and one from somewhere else. I think Portland or Las Vegas are the best options for a west team.