The American and National Leagues of the MLB seem imbalanced to me, with 14 and 16 teams respectively. I think having 16 teams in both leagues would make inter-league play and scheduling more symmetrical. Why hasn’t this been done, or has it been discussed?
The AL actually did briefly have 15 teams at one point when the Devil Rays were added. But then the Brewers switched to the National League for reasons that I don’t recall.
Because with an odd number of teams in each league, you’d either have to have one interleague game or an idle team. The Brewers moved so the AL and NL each had an even number of teams.
But doesn’t that imply that the NL had 15 teams before the Brewers switched? Or did they also expand at the same time as the AL did?
Arizona and Tampa Bay Both started in the 1998 season.
Ah ha. So before 1997, both leagues had 14 teams. The only way to maintain parity and have even numbers would be a four-team expansion, which they clearly didn’t want to do, so they did the next best thing of having lopsided, even-numbered leagues.
The reason against continued expansion is the already apparent dilution of talent, particularly with pitching. With pretty much every major league team using a 5 man rotation, look around both leagues and see which teams have a really good 5th starter. Probably none. And what about bullpen talent? Look around he league and see which teams are lamenting their crappy bullpen. Probably most. If you add 2 more teams with 10-12 pictchers on a team, you’re going to make the situation worse.
The problem is where to put them? Cities like Charlotte have rejected paying for new stadiums. Las Vegas, Portland, San Antonio are possible, but don’t seem viable. And there’s already several franchises allegedly losing money.
But in spite of these problems and dilution of talent, I predict MLB will expand within 10 years. They love the expansion fees too much.
They still need a few more years of being two teams short to properly even things out with the National League, which spent 16 years being two teams short from 1977-1992.
Expanding? No. See previous post on dilution of talent. Moving franchises? Most definitely. But where would they go? No, the best bet would be contraction, and we all know that has no chance of flying.
I think they learned something from the NHL, where mindless expansion has gone way too far and for a time the only way they made money was by expansion fees.
I don’t think more expansion is in the cards anytime soon, nor is contraction a possibility. I’d prefer to have a total of 24 teams but looking at the list of franchises it’s hard to find 6 that shouldn’t be there.
Devil-Rays
Rockies
Mariners
Nationals
I guess we can deal with 26. 
Arguments over dilution of talent are meaningless. The average fan cannot tell the difference between a sport involving the best 750 baseball players in the world versus a sport involving the best 800.
People will always invoke “dilution of talent” by pointing to marginal players filling out the rosters of inferior teams. But there will always be such players, in a league of any size.
If there were only two teams, who played each other every game, there would be relatively inferior players–with higher ERA’s and lower batting averages than their peers–on the benches and in the bullpens of each team. People would point at them and laugh and say, see, there is no room for more than two teams. It’s lazy thinking.
The relevant constraint is stadium construction. Over the past twenty years, the cost of a new stadium has risen from $120 million to $500-$600 million. This has reduced the number of metro areas willing and able to play. Plus, owners like to keep one or two viable markets vacant as leverage for those who need new stadiums in their current cities.
Devil Rays, sure. But the other 3 have or are building new stadiums. I think it would be hard to tell them to abandon them.
Other than that, Florida is the only other that looks like it could or should go.
I’d like a cite for the presumed dilution of talent that comes with expansion. Several articles at Baseball Prospectus have debunked this myth (here’s one that, while not the best, does not require a subscription to view). Moreover, there’s the fact that general population increases in the US–not to mention newfound prospects from Latin and Asian countries–means there is more talent available now than ever before.
I’m not sure how you judge a “really good fifth starter”, since by definition he’s considered the fifth-best starting pitcher on his team (though fivers like Chad Billingsley, Jason Johnson, and Zach Miner easily challenge that label). So IMO using the poor quality of 5th starters to evaluate overall pitching is like claiming the US can’t be all that large because Delaware and Rhode Island are so small.
This study reviewing the contribution of pitching talent from the generic 1 thru 5 slot shows that the average ERA out of the 5th slot for a MLB team was 6.24. However, as the author notes, a team often doesn’t have a set 5th starter because injuries in the higher part of the rotation moves everyone up the list, and so the 5th starter is often a spot guy called up from the minors (21 teams last season used 10 or more starting pitchers). What is interesting in the data is the average talent of a team’s “6th starter”–defined as the teams single top replacement starter. On average, this pitcher starts a little over 15 games for a team, but typically produces a 4.77 ERA, comparable to the ERA for a 3rd-line starter (though, of course, with only a little more than half the workload). There are a lot of assumptions in the model, but as the article says “the teams with the best sixth starters were the ones with large pools to choose from.” That fact alone justifies expansion, unless you really enjoy major-market teams dominating with a large talent roster.
There are many reasons to oppose expansion, but “dilution of talent” isn’t one of them.
The “there are no good pitchers around anymore” argument is over a hundred years old. They were saying the same thing when Babe Ruth was playing.
I must ask why the Mariners? They have been one of the most successful teams over the last 10 years and have ranked in the top 1/3 in attendance over the same period. They have the record for the best season ever since the 162 game schedule was implemented (116-46 in 2001) and due to the teams geographic location, has one of the most wide spread fan bases in all of baseball. Why not the Pirates, Royals, Diamondbacks, Cubs, Brewers, Astros, Phillies or Orioles, teams the have performed much worse on the field and at the gate?
You would also need to have two more AAA and two more AA teams, plus 4-6 more A teams. Plus finding two cities to accept the (probable) AAA teams bumped because their cities are now hosting the new AL teams.
What markets would get those 2 new teams? Washington was the last one available, and it was only marginal - it lost 2 other teams earlier due to lack of support. What other cities do you know of that could support a franchise?
It was only a couple of years ago that MLB (well, Selig) tried to *eliminate * 2 of the weakest franchises.
No, it has nothing to do with the “dilution of talent.” There is no dilution of talent; major league teams have as much talent as they ever did, and even if they were to dilute the talent pool by adding two new teams, 99% of the fans can’t tell the difference between an AAA player and a major leaguer anyway. (And anyway, wouldn’t the addition of AAA players make up for the bad pitchers?) As furt points out, this “not enough pitching” stuff goes back to when there were only 8-12 teams and Babe Ruth wasn’t even born. It’s a load of crap.
The reason the AL doesn’t add two new teams is that there isn’t anyone who wants two new major league baseball teams, of course. The major leagues don’t expand by choosing a market and creating a team there; they expand by having prospective owners express interest in paying MLB for the privilege of starting their own teams. The 1998 expansion was made possible because Jerry Colangelo created a corporation in Phoenix to run a major league team and Vincent Naimoli did the same in St. Petersburg. They came to MLB with big bucks and stadium plans and MLB said “okey dokey. You start in 1998.”
To have two new major league ballclubs, you not only need two millionaires who WANT ballculbs, but they also need to either have or be able to raise a truly enormous amount of cash - $100 million or more in expansion fees, $250 million or more to construct a new stadium, and millions upon millions more to set up the team’s major and minor league operations. It’s an expense that exceeds half a billion dollars, so it requires not only one or more multimillionaires, but a very large market with substantial corporate support that new ownership and MLB will be confident in, and that will probably provide cash or loan guarantees to get the stadium built.
So where are the multimillionaires interested in owning a ballclub? And just where are the new markets? The only market in North America even close to the size of an average MLB market is Montreal, where the fans are poisoned against MLB and the government will never help build a ballpark. There are no other large markets. The biggest available ones - Portland, Vancouver, Memphis - are, by MLB standards, relatively small. It would be a hard go in those places.
Believe me; if multimillionaires suddenly popped up in Portland and Charlotte with the wherewithal and muncipal support they needed, and came to MLB with bags of money and approved stadium deals saying “We want ball teams,” MLB would add the Portland Wolves and Charlotte Grey Sox so fast your head would swim. The only reason they don’t is that the multimillionaires with the stadium deals ain’t there.