On Saturday we took my mother-in-law, who is 100% Greek, to a lutefisk supper at a very old, tiny Norwegian Lutheran church within the exclusive economic zone of the People’s Republic. As she recently bought a place in preparation to move up here from Flatlandia, it was our way of welcoming her to the state. Arriving early, we walked around the churchyard. I noted a few headstones with dates of birth dating back to the eighteenth century, which one doesn’t often see in this part of the country. There was a marble cenotaph honoring seventeen congregants who served in the Civil War: six of the men were named Ole. There were also two Arnes & a Knut.
I wanted to put this out here, one last time, just in case. The Trueblood Blood Drive in honor of their son is still looking for 16+ people in order to make sure it can happen. It's November 11th (which would have been his 6th birthday), in Coon Rapids. If you are nearish, available, and have blood (or if you know someone who has blood!), sign up can happen here: https://www.mbcherohub.club/index.cfm?group=op, entering group 4491.
In case anyone wants to relive the final 8.9 seconds of Sunday's game.
Cross one potential Cleveland connection off the list of candidates for the Twins’ pitching coach vacancy: as of this afternoon Mickey Callaway will be the Mets’ new skipper.
Travis Sawchik brings up the perennial topic of expansion, this time based on what Tracy Ringolsby wrote. Ringolsby decides to realign the teams and chooses this structure:
This seems wildly crazy. I assume every team would be using the DH at this point, which seems like a hard issue for NL fans. And now the AL/NL is also gone? I also like how the Midwest division includes Colorado, Houston, Kansas City, St. Louis, and Texas. You can argue about Missouri being included (the Census Bureau does), but the other three teams, no. And then there's Milwaukee being north of Cleveland and Detroit; Chicago is 22 minutes north of Cleveland too.
I do like focusing more on getting all of the teams within a division in one time zone, but radical realignment is going to make a lot of people, especially NL fans, upset. I'm reminded of what Jeff Sullivan said in that he's no longer a fan of one team and doesn't really watch one game from start to end. I imagine many national writers are like this. To them, this is no problem because they like baseball and this is baseball. But a fan likes baseball, identifies as a fan of a team, watches that team, and that team has certain characteristics. A realignment like this risks changing too many of them and alienating fans.
Hell, if you're going to play willy-nilly with the current arrangement, might as well put Portland and Seattle in the North as well, makes just as much "sense"
I agree that combining within timezones should be the biggest goal. That said, the only groupings that I could see would be: East, Flyover North, Flyover South, West
If radical realignment is a must, I give your suggested divisions a resigned co-sign.
The Twins in a division with the Red Sox and Yankmes is a recipe for me finding other things to do with my time between February and February. Also, every one of those teams except the Twins would be in the Eastern time zone. Sawchik’s guess at 8-team divisions maintains the AL/NL alignments, which I strongly prefer, but still has the Twins in the AL East, which I abhor. (Last I checked, Chicago is significantly further to the east than Minneapolis.) Four team divisions would be an NFL-worthy joke. I think Jay Jaffe’s analysis of the Ringolsby proposal is spot-on:
Selfishly, I'd like to have the Twins play more games in the east. Any more, a lot of central time zone games don't end until 10:15 or 10:30, and with my schedule it's hard for me to stay up that late. Eastern time zone games give me a much better chance (other than games with the Yankees, which still sometimes don't get done until 10:15 or 10:30).
It's hard to put into words how much I detest Ringolsby's suggestion.
My guess is that this will go about as far as Bud Selig's radical realignment did, which resulted in the realignment of one team (his own). So I'm not too concerned about it at this point.
This.
I'm not opposed to expansion, but this type of realignment is just not the kind of thing anyone seems particularly interested in.
I'm super interested in radical realignment and the end of the AL/NL split, but it might be a regional thing. Fans in the central time zone currently have it the best. East/central games tend to be 7-10 on weeknights and west coast away games get to be late, but 9-12 is a choice you can generally make, whereas watching a 10am day game on a weekday is out of the question for most people. Seattle had 61 games this year in the East or Central time zones, which is awfully remarkable when 81 of the games are at home.
I feel like expansion and moderate realignment goes a long way to helping you out in these issues.
Nobody working regular schedule can watch weekday day games. It doesn't matter if they start at 10 a.m. or 2 p.m.
Lots of people can listen to those games on the other hand, but not the ones ending after 10:30pm. And during the school year kids don't generally have either option.
So you're saying that having teams in PT regularly playing teams in CT is bad all around. I agree! Maybe having 40% of the AL West in the Central time zone, solely to maintain a totally arbitrary "American League" is a waste of everyone's time.
How much of the AL West was in the Central Time Zone up until 1994? “West” didn’t mean “West Coast” when the division received that name.
So expansion has changed the geographic make-up of the league and if you added two teams you could take the opportunity to re-think the structure of the league. It's not like the American League has existed since the beginning of time.
In baseball terms, the AL (and definitely the NL) have existed since essentially the beginning of time. The last independent challenger to them ceased operations over a century ago, and the last independent continental league to exist above the AAA-level was diminished to minor league status nearly sixty years ago. MLB itself is a more recent invention than either of the leagues that constitute it. So this would be, indeed, a radical departure from everything we know about baseball.
A radical departure from everything we know about baseball? Without changing a single rule of the game? This would be a less significant change than adding the DH, or implementing video review, or raising the pitching mound, or basically any rule change. Or free agency, now there was a meaningful change.
I'm saying it's bad for either coast, but I'm saying it's worse for CT teams playing PT than vise-versa. I think it would be a nice compromise at least for instance for Central day games to start an hour earlier against East teams and an hour later against West teams, although the inconsistent start times aren't as considerate to the home fans.
Or they could just schedule more games for teams within the same time zone and be considerate to the home and away fans simultaneously.
I think everyone here has been saying that all along.
Then why argue against radical realignment? The best way to get games at convenient times for the fans is to do away with the historical AL/NL designations.
And the first example I've seen here has the Twins playing exclusively east coast teams.
I don't know that AL/NL really matters to that many of the single-team fans that you are talking about. When Milwaukee switched from AL to NL, attendance went up. From 2012 to 2013, when Houston moved to the AL, their team was just absolutely abysmal both years, but they drew just slightly higher the second year.
Honestly, if you just care mainly about your home team, I don't see how it follows that you care so much about who you are playing. I think a lot of people like pitchers hitting in principle, but those people tend to be such big fans of baseball, I don't think it would stop them from watching. After all, the AL had to go to the DH at one point and it hasn't cratered in popularity since then. Houston moving to the AL is another example of adding the DH and it didn't seem to have any negative consequence whatsoever.
Schedules today are already so unbalanced, and interleague play already has NL teams playing with the DH for some fraction of their games, I don't think you'd have to sell it that hard. And I maybe I'm forgetting a team that switched leagues recently, but I can't come up with an example where it was really that negative. I think the time zone issue would really help, especially on the west coast, where so many away games start at 4 or 5pm, when people are still working or commuting home.
I think the main complaint would be stifling rivalries. Minnesota would have neither the Royals or Brewers in their division; if schedule is going to continue unbalanced, that's going to kill some fans' road trips.
It's not like the entire season is going to be played within a given division. Minnesota went without Milwaukee in its division for quite a while and life went on--you make new rivalries out of the teams you are playing more often.
I don't love all the specifics here--if you expanded another team in the East instead of Portland, you could bump Minnesota to the Midwest and Colorado to the West--they you'd have the best time zone alignment overall. Having a team in Portland would be nice for Seattle, but I wouldn't want it at the expense of shoving the Twins in an all-East time zone.
you make new rivalries out of the teams you are playing more often
even though none are within reasonable driving distance; I'm talking about road trip rivalries. Sure the Brewers went away, but still had KC and to a lesser extent the Sox
And I'm sure Minnesota would still play KC and Milwaukee and both Chicago teams in the new alignment.
For three games every year, based on what Ringolsby was suggesting. That’s not a rivalry unless those three annual games are the middle set of the World Series.
I would disagree with him on scheduling, then. I would advocate for more games to be within division, then more games to be within East or West/Midwest, and then some portion of the schedule rotating longer-distance match-ups.
I don't think it's the "no DH" part, but the "no DH, no leagues, et cetera" parts all changing and for 15 teams that is the problem. The Brewers and Astros moving were just one team, and a small one and crappy one respectively. Too much, too quickly.
I think you'd be surprised how many people wouldn't even notice. I think back in the '70s or '80s you could argue this was too much at once, but we're now in a world with constant interleague play, a wild card and a mild card in each league, ridiculously unbalanced schedules with "rivalry" weekends. The whole thing is a three-ring circus as it is. Any of the staunch traditionalists that would leave have already left, IMO.
I’d be willing to bet a very good steak dinner that a majority percentage of the increase in attendance in Milwaukee in 1998 is attributable to FIBs and FIB transplants going to see the Cubs play in Milwaukee on the regular. In other words, directly a consequence of the Brewers moving to the NL. Protestations about Milwaukee originally* being an NL city aside Seligula knew what he was doing.
* The 1901 Brewers played in the AL, of course, but Seligula was supposedly devastated when the Braves left.
So are you arguing then that without the Cubs, the switch to the NL would eventually have doomed the Brewers to failure? They would have gone under and not survived? People talk about these realignments like it would just kill the league and I really don't see any evidence for that. MLB has been gradually killing off all the sacred cows for decades now and it's still going very strong.
I’m not much for arguing counterfactuals, but I think it’s pretty safe to say Milwaukee would never have gone under with the Commissioner’s family owning the team. Moving to the NL was a convenient way of capturing Cubs-generated revenue without initiating a Bay Area-esque territorial dispute.*
Thing is, realignments would kill the leagues. There’s no reason to keep a two-league structure, let alone the American League & National League names or any of the context that gives them meaning, if teams are realigned so radically. There is value to knowing & preserving the organic development of the leagues, because even with the trend toward homogenization in the Seligula & post-Seligula era, the choices teams made sixty years ago still matter to fans, even the ones who weren’t alive when they were made. Perhaps I have a preservationist perspective, but to my mind getting rid of something with over a century of history simply because it’s no longer convenient has been the basis for a lot of decisions that seemed forward-thinking at the time but myopic in retrospect.
* I think you could make an even firmer case that the uptick in Houston’s attendance (when the club didn’t even have a TV contract) was driven by Rangers fans in the Houston metro having greater access to their team. It certainly wasn’t because the Mariners and A’s were coming to town instead of the Cardinals & Cubs.
Yeah, the realignment would kill the leagues. The American Association got killed a while back, too.
The reason to keep a two-league structure--or you could call them conferences if you want--is to reduce travel. You group the two eastern divisions together and group the Midwest/west together and teams tend to play closer to their time zone. Since teams don't all play the same schedule, you qualify though your league rather than a single table.
If Houston benefits from being grouped with Dallas, and Milwaukee benefits from being grouped with Chicago, then I don't see why the Mets wouldn't benefit from being grouped with the Yankees, the A's with the Giants, the Angels with the Dodgers, etc. I also prefer 8-team divisions to 5-team divisions because you could get away from this ridiculous 18 games against a team nonsense and ratchet it down to 12 games per team in your division.
For instance, 12 games against teams in your division, 6 games against teams in the other division within your league, and then 3 games against each team in one of the other divisions, which leaves you with 6 games left over that you can use for a home-and-home against a historical rival or for just filling out the schedule. It wouldn't have to be exactly that, but it would be one way to make it work.
But the unbalanced schedule enables more games within your time zone...
I see your point, but the American Association was never a major league. Minor league ball has, and always will be, subject to much greater fluctuation than MLB, which is (as far as I can tell) unique among professional sports in the stability of its organization. I don’t know a ton about English soccer, but the closest thing I can think of to that level of stability is the Football League First Division, which, although it was founded in 1888, was still a comparative newcomer to the National League.
“Association,” though, is a good word to frame what is at stake with radical realignment. Associations or leagues are families of franchises. They formalize familiar bonds that have developed for decades, in some cases over a century. Fans develop relationships with the communities they're connected to via those associations. Those relationships don't belong to some constellation of (temporary) ownership groups, or to the MLBPA’s transient members; they belong to the fans, who are the people that give the entire enterprise its meaning.
I don't care for every single person in my family. There are people in it I never much liked to begin with, and people who have done things I don't like at all, which makes it hard to like them in return. There are people in my family who I once adored, but who have become harder to love as time passes. There are people I grew up with that I look forward to seeing every time we get together, but who live far enough away to make those meetings inconvenient or infrequent. None of those relationships are constructed in a way that is totally convenient, but they are constructed in a way that is organic. Would I choose to realign my family to some outwardly ideal grouping if I could pick its members from among my relatives and friends? If I did that, what problems would that create? How long would it take to reestablish my identity within that artificial construct?
I’d like to see radical realignment advocates actually grapple with the philosophical issues behind what radical realignment would do to those relationships between franchises, fans, and communities, rather than hand-wave it all away in the name of efficiency.
Eating alone at the Olive Garden.
poetic
No baseball since Friday and Im getting antsy for more games!
I wish the game was tonight as both the local teams are playing tomorrow as well with tonight off.
I think we should attempt to make game logs for all of the Wolves games. I'll attempt to include the Wild when their games overlap.
This sounds like something an online magazine might do if was the world's greatest.
My scar is not as cool as Rhu's, but I don't have to drop trow to show off
tasty
Dude, that's as long as my two scars combined! And it's not really an issue mooning you yahoos, btw
Adventures in sour dough V 2.0. The liquid herman I have is a solid producer, and brings back the taste of my childhood. After my first loafs were out of the oven it became clear that I didn't have an understanding of basic dough production, and I didn't realize that over flouring was totally, easily achievable. The crust never came together and the crumb was dense and lifeless. The flavor wasn't bad, though (a win I suppose). I read Artisan Breads Everyday cover to cover and learned a thing or two. (seems I am educatable after all). I'm working up a post on breads in a hot minute (or next week...), but hot tip for tonight ---> don't score your dough until you're ready to throw it in the oven. I've failed at this twice now because not actually ready and impatient, but I won't fail a third time.
When I first started making sourdough, I made some gawd-awful things. Brick-dense, super sour whole wheat monstrosities, for example.
But I got better, and so did my starter. Within a year or so, I was making beautiful baguettes. If you don't have a baguette pan, I highly recommend one.
Mine is similar to this