Ark of the Lost Angels

Oriole Park at Camden Yards, American League Wild Card Series Game 1, October 1st, 2024 _{(Credit: Author)}

Baseball as America’s pastime could use a little tweaking.

With the MLB playoffs starting today, the idea of baseball remains in the air. Baseball has a long history as America’s pastime, with the first game being played almost two hundred years ago. By the late 1800s, baseball was the sport of the nation. Baseball saw America through multiple wars, several presidents, and buoyed the nation in many of its darkest hours. Baseball was the moments of the greats, gave birth to American icons like Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Joe DiMaggio, Nolan Ryan, Cal Ripken Jr., and so on and so forth. 

Now, a sport that’s been around this long has gone through some changes. Some are good, some are bad, but changes to the rules are part of the evolution of sports over time. Major League Baseball has changed a bit from its glory years (or maybe just the Orioles’ glory years) to become the game we know today. Some of the rules being changed have done a lot of good for the game in my eyes. I think some others should be rolled back.

Admittedly, I’m somewhat of a baseball purist, so some of these suggestions are rooted in nostalgia for a different era in baseball. The type of baseball people always talked about when I was younger, like the baseball that was played in Yankee Stadium, Shea, Comiskey Park, Candlestick, or Memorial Stadium. Baseball to me always felt like an old sport, and some of these changes were meant to keep the feeling of the game from when I was a kid.

The ideas within this article were developed in collaboration with my father and one of my best friends, both avid baseball fans. The majority, however, come from me, and any and all critique of the stupid parts should fall on my head, not theirs.

Play Ball…Better

Baseball has traditionally been a game of finesse. A good pitcher’s duel is a sight to behold, with both teams doing their best to keep the batters at home plate before sending them back to the dugout. Those games become measures of tension and a battle of wills. Personally, in September 2023, I almost watched the Tampa Bay Rays pitch a no-hitter against my Baltimore Orioles (until Heston Kjerstad knocked his first career home run in the majors during the bottom of the sixth) on September 15^th, 2023. While I was not happy watching the Rays run over us, it was still pretty amazing to see a potential no-hitter being pitched before my very eyes. Since the pitcher’s mound was lowered in favor of permitting more home runs and more intense offense, I think the game has gotten less cerebral.

Raising the pitcher’s mound back up would give pitchers an advantage and bring some of that finesse back to baseball. I believe the pitch clock should stay, however. It keeps the pace of games consistent and keeps the game moving. However, it does put more pressure on the pitchers to throw harder pitches faster. Therefore, I think that raising the pitcher’s mound would be a good compromise to give something back to the pitchers. Hopefully this means they wouldn’t have to work as hard to hit the same stats as they currently do. As a result, hopefully, the number of injuries to pitchers will be brought down a bit as well.

I’d also remove the runner on second base at the start of extra innings. To me, it’s just a way of cheapening games. Extra innings means extra innings, and you traditionally play extra innings as normal. I recognize that this is the purist in me, but I think that the idea of playing the baseball game in extra innings is that they follow the same rules as the rest of the game does.

Officiating also tends to be a contentious issue. Part of the problem is that umpires are still humans, forced to make the calls with the faults of human eyes and minds. Part of that is just the nature of sports, but with how variable the strike zone seems to be behind the plate, and how impactful that can be on the outcome of a game, I think that there needs to be a robo-ump implemented. The plate umpire should be confirmed by a robo-ump to avoid anything remotely resembling Angel Hernandez calling games and ensure the strike zone is fair and consistent between batters on both teams. I am a fan of using challenges and replay to ensure the game is officiated in a fair manner, and think that change, despite going against my baseball purist nature, is a good one and should remain. Ultimately, baseball should be played fairly, and that includes fairly applying the rules on the field.

There are also a few financial aspects which I believe should be addressed. I think a salary cap should be instituted across the league. It would have to be grandfathered in and scale up as time goes on to account for salaries teams currently pay. I think this would go far in making the league more competitive, and not letting the richest teams hold a monopoly on talent. As part of shaking up the financial side of baseball also means reworking contracts so that teams like the Dodgers can’t sign Shohei Ohtani to a contract and then defer most of the payments until after the contract is over and he retires. A team should have to pay the contracts of their players while they’re playing, instead of pulling creative accounting.

And I think that the uniforms should remain free of advertisements, the same way the NFL does, and baseball did previously. Every surface of the world we live in being plastered with advertising is a dystopia run amok, and I believe it should stay off of baseball uniforms.

Bigger League, Bigger Games

It makes total sense that the MLB should expand. More baseball is better for everyone and makes the game more fun. Baseball is somewhat of a local sport, which makes instances such as the Oakland Athletics’ current relocation out of Oakland sting very hard. Since they had been in Oakland for 57 years, they became intertwined with the local culture of Oakland. Their departure deals a heavy blow to the city’s economy and culture and disrespects the fans who turned out for Oakland year in and year out.

The current MLB setup of 30 teams in total, with each league having three divisions of five teams each makes the playoff setup feel a little odd. Compared to how the playoffs used to be, with the division leaders and one wild card team, the current system is a little wonky.

Adding two more teams would make a divisional realignment easier.

It’s important to keep many divisions as similar to the way they currently are as possible. Longtime rivalries like Angels-Athletics, Cubs-White Sox, Mets-Phillies, Dodgers-Giants, and the utter pit of hatred that is the AL East should be preserved at all costs. The geographic divides should help with divisional games not having as many dramatic travel challenges as there could be.

Two of the most likely candidates for expansion teams are Nashville and Salt Lake City. This would allow the MLB to reorganize into four divisions in each league, which would have playoff considerations as it eliminates the need for the wild card, and the playoff teams advance would be the division leaders. This does eliminate the bye for the top two teams in the playoffs.

This leaves the playoffs in a much better position, allowing just the division winners to go, or if more playoff games are desired, two wild card slots per League. Wild Cards would play each other, and the division leaders would play each other with normal seeding based on results.

This leaves the divisional series of five games each (preceded by the wild cards if so desired), and the championship series of seven games each, and the World Series of seven games to play out the post-season.

The following hypothetical divisional realignment assumes that the Athletics return to Oakland in light of no stadium funding being approved for their new ballpark in Las Vegas. In that case, Las Vegas would receive an expansion team. If not Vegas, then Salt Lake City would be one of the new expansion teams. Nashville would be the other.

AL East
Baltimore Orioles
Toronto Blue Jays
New York Yankees
Boston Red Sox

AL North
Cleveland Guardians
Minnesota Twins
Chicago White Sox
Detroit Tigers

AL South
Houston Astros
Texas Rangers 
Tampa Bay Rays
Kansas City Royals

AL West
Seattle Mariners
Los Angeles Angels
Oakland Athletics
Las Vegas/Salt Lake City

NL East
Nashville Stars
New York Mets
Philadelphia Phillies
Washington Nationals

NL North
Chicago Cubs
Cincinnati Reds
Milwaukee Brewers
Pittsburgh Pirates

NL South
Atlanta Braves
Miami Marlins
Arizona Diamondbacks
St. Louis Cardinals

NL West
Colorado Rockies
San Francisco Giants
Los Angeles Dodgers
San Diego Padres

Walk Off

I am not saying that baseball is fundamentally broken or flawed. I am certain that there are arguments to the points I made here that can be refuted with logic, perhaps with facts or reasons that would even cause me to shift my own thinking. I believe that baseball is a sport that should be open for everyone. I think the game is better when people are actively engaged and giving input.

I also realize that much of this is based on my own sentimentality. To me, baseball is a game with a lot of history which and should be honored. At the same time, there are things which should change to reflect the nature of American society changing. Baseball is a major international sport now, seeing as the greatest player in the MLB is Japanese. In light of this growth out to the world, baseball deserves to be doing its best, both in sharing the history and legacy of the American game to the rest of the world, while still being a game everyone can enjoy and appreciate.

Then again, these are just the thoughts of a humble man who is falling back in love with the game again after so many years away. Seeing the Orioles be genuine contenders for the first time in my life makes me feel like a kid again, hearing about the glory days of the Birds of yesteryear.

At the end of the day, baseball should make everyone feel like a kid walking into the ballpark for the first time. There is no greater sense of awe than to see the nine on the field do what they do best after hearing those magical words: “Play ball.”