Baseball's Top Dog Touts the Sport’s Biggest, Most Radical Change Yet

Alone among the major sports, baseball has the misfortune of being controlled by people who don’t really like baseball. Over the last few years, they’ve made a large number of changes to the rules that reflect their conviction that the sport they’re trying to sell is slow and boring, and that they need to jazz it up with all sorts of new rules that cut down on the time the game takes. But the rules cut deeply into the game's lyricism, romanticism, and timeless, unhurried pace. And now the chief hatchet man, Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred, is touting the most radical change of all: elimination of the American and National Leagues.

Manfred tried to sell this idea as connected to MLB’s expansion from 30 to 32 teams, saying, "In my mind, I think if we expand, it provides us with an opportunity to geographically realign. I think we could save a lot of wear and tear on our players in terms of travel. And I think our postseason format would be more appealing for entities like ESPN because you’d be playing up out of the East, out of the West. And that 10 o’clock time slot, where we sometimes get lost in Anaheim, would be two West Coast teams. That 10 o’clock slot that’s a problem for us sometimes becomes a real opportunity for our West Coast audience."

What Manfred is saying is that there would be one big league instead of two, a la the NBA and NFL. Teams would be grouped into divisions by geography. Manfred explained that in this league, there would be two conferences, "consisting of four geographically-aligned divisions apiece. Four teams per division, 16 teams per conference."

This would mean that the New York Mets and New York Yankees, instead of being rivals in competing leagues, would end up in the same division, along with the Boston Red Sox and the Philadelphia Phillies. Yeah, that’s over 100 years of baseball tradition, drama, and history out the window in one fell swoop, and for Manfred, that’s just the icing on the cake.

Rob Manfred is the fellow who has changed the rule so that pitchers no longer have to throw four intentional balls to walk a batter. Yeah, the game is sped up, but we are forever robbed of moments such as the one in the 1972 World Series, when Oakland A’s manager Dick Williams showily ordered pitcher Rollie Fingers to throw an intentional ball four, fooling everyone in the ballpark, including the Cincinnati Reds’ Johnny Bench, who stood at the plate with the bat on his shoulder as strike three sailed past. It was a great moment, and it is no more. 

Then there is the ridiculous rule about starting extra innings with a runner on second base. What is this? Little League? We gotta get home because mom has a pot roast in the oven? The charm of baseball is, or was, that it was unhurried, untouched by the exigencies of the time clock. We faced deadlines everywhere else, but not at the ballpark. But the deadline for all that has now passed.

In fact, even though there is widespread anger at Manfred’s plan to destroy the leagues and group all the teams by geography, destroying decades-old rivalries in the process, the American and National Leagues are already relics of the past. They exist as shells of their former selves, but they used to be two separate entities, each of which offered a different style of baseball. The umpires wore different kinds of chest protectors, which led to their calling balls and strikes from different angles. In 1973, the AL adopted the designated hitter, while the NL proudly rejected doing so until Manfred forced its surrender at the height of the COVID hysteria. (How forbidding the pitcher to bat helped prevent COVID, he never explained.)

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Above all, teams from the two leagues didn’t play each other until the World Series. This increased interest in the World Series, and in the days when video wasn’t ubiquitous, forced teams to rely on scouting reports and word of mouth to know what they were up against when the Series came around. 

And now Manfred wants to do away with the American and National Leagues altogether. Well, it has been a long time coming; he would just be administering the coup de grâce. There is some good news, however: He says he is going to retire after completing that last act of destruction. It may be far too late by then, but can we get a commissioner to succeed him who actually loves the game?