A solution stares baseball in the face, and as the end of the current labor agreement approaches in December 2011, the conversation about distribution of revenue-sharing money may get ugly. He is writing a book on the Rays and believes they'll continue to thrive. Following my column on the inevitability of the Rays losing talent, I engaged in a friendly debate with Jonah Keri on the team's long-term viability. Excellent management deserves reward, not an impossible-to-sustain situation. The Rays shouldn't be damned to always chasing the Yankees and Red Sox because they play in a stadium on a particular coast. Though the revenue streams aren't quite proportional, they illustrate that the Yankees and Red Sox live in penthouses and the Rays operate out of a one-room efficiency. The Yankees are a $1.6 billion franchise, the Red Sox an $870 million behemoth and the Rays worth just over $300 million, according to the latest numbers from Forbes. The Rays are a brilliantly constructed, deftly run, shrewdly managed, overflowingly talented team.Īnd yet their standing above the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox, even a dozen or so games into the season, looks odd. They have won seven in a row, including their last four at Fenway Park, in which they made the Boston Red Sox look like a small-market collection of compost. At 10-3, the Rays sport the best record in baseball. Granted, the problem isn't much of a problem this very minute. The plan takes the best part of the NBA and NHL's postseason structure – the rewarding of the best-performing teams, division be damned – and applies it without the interminability of those leagues' playoffs.īest of all, it rids baseball of what is best called the Tampa Bay problem, the impetus behind all this realignment talk anyway. It's better than simply adding another wild-card team, which creates two problems: a postseason that could stretch closer to Thanksgiving than Halloween, and a less meaningful regular season. ![]() It's a significantly better idea than the so-called floating realignment that allows teams to change divisions based on their predicted competitiveness. It has support – albeit silent – from players, managers and executives throughout the game. NBC's Craig Calcaterra agrees with the concept. ESPN's Buster Olney floated something similar. Treat every team as equally as possible when it comes to scheduling, travel and pathway to the postseason. Short of a salary cap, to which the players' union will never agree, bringing socialism to alignment is the clearest way. Either way, the teams with the four best records in each league make the playoffs. The AL has 14 teams and the NL 16 or, for true equitability, each league goes with 15 and baseball turns interleague play into a season-long event. ![]() Make two leagues, the American and National, with no geographical split.
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