Map, Squiggles, Action?
Expansion is again a hot topic, but bring your Sharpie
Since we were preoccupied last week with the likelihood of a lockout at the end of next season, it’s probably fair that the talk these past few days would be around that other structural part of the game that always prompts more questions than answers and never really satisfies anyone – expansion and realignment.
Commissioner Rob Manfred told ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball about how baseball expanding to 32 teams would offer an opportunity for a geographical shift, with more than one eye on the implications for broadcasters. He said:
“I think we could save a lot of wear and tear on our players in terms of travel. I think our postseason format would be even more appealing for entities like ESPN because you'd be playing out of the East, out of the West and that 10 o'clock where we sometimes get Boston-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.”
Fox Sports wrote that the “American and National Leagues might soon be gone as we know them" while Joe Pantorno at amNY said that Manfred “keeps trying to steal baseball’s soul.”
Realignment, Pantorno said (and as Jim Bowden imagined a couple of years ago)
“…would mean the disbanding of the National League (since 1876) and the American League (since 1901), the divisions that come with it, and the institutions in which the game has been built upon for nearly 150 years.”
Within hours, an overload of pundit speculation led to an outburst of maps of what the new set-up might look like. This one from the New York Post, for example, who described how Manfred “sent the collective heads of baseball traditionalists everywhere spinning.”
And of course even a “hint” from the commish of what might come was enough to spark strong opinions on both sides. Cameron Maybin was a firm “nope,” calling it a “manufactured shakeup”. Matt Snyder at CBS Sports was more open to the idea.
I happen to agree with Snyder on both his main points: it’s definitely time for a two-team expansion, but doing away with the AL and NL as a result would be a step backwards.
But I’d add a third point, for what it’s worth; that however the game might be restructured this time – and hopefully that will stand for another generation or so – it shouldn’t be done without a serious consideration of the impact of climate change on which expansion cities are chosen and how much time teams are going to spend playing day games in what are going to be consistently hotter temperatures.
Stephen J Nesbitt at The Athletic has a good rundown of how a potential realignment might take shape, including expansion teams and crossover franchises, but keeping the enhanced AL and NL structures intact. He concludes:
“All there is to do for now, as The Athletic’s Jayson Stark wrote on this topic in 2018, is “close your eyes and try to picture all of this. [T]his is no Rob Manfred pipe dream. This is going to happen. This isn’t a matter of if. It’s a matter of filling in the year — and then filling in all the brave-new-world details that are guaranteed to follow.”
“It was only after concluding this realignment exercise that I realized mine exactly matched one of Stark’s from seven years ago. So it must be right. The only difference was when Stark guessed these changes would all come about. It’s right there in his first sentence. Manfred’s expansion dreams would come true, Stark wrote, in “the year 2025.”
“Well, we’re still waiting. And we’re still spiraling.”
See Also:
High Heat – This particular Dome doesn’t have a retractable roof
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Batting Around
History was made at Nationals Park this week when for the first time in MLB history, two managers from Venezuela faced each other: Miguel Cairo for the Nationals and Carlos Mendoza for the Mets.
The Mets ran out 8-1 victors.
(Pete Alonso went 0-for-5 on the night, a week after becoming the Mets’ all-time home run leader, hitting number 253, off the Braves’ Spencer Strider. This, by Rich MacLeod, is pretty cool…)
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The other New York team also set a(nother) home run record, hitting nine in a game for the second time this season and tying the franchise record they set in March. They became the first team in MLB history with multiple games with 9 or more home runs.
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Not quite breaking a record this week, Mariners’ catcher Cal Raleigh is on the brink – hitting his 47th of the season to be one shy of the record for catchers, set by the Royals’ Salvador Perez in 2021.
Raleigh’s dinger came when the Mariners and Mets contested the Little League Classic, ahead of the final stages of the Little League World Series. The Mariners lost to the Mets 7-3.
“Big Dumper” even signed a toilet seat for a fan in Williamsport.
The LLWS tournament itself runs through Sunday, and you can follow news, scores and updates here.
Meanwhile, my friend Prof Chris Lamb is appearing at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown tomorrow, August 21 (if his car makes it) to discuss his recent book about the 1955 Little League World Series. You can stream the session live from that link.
You might also enjoy my Q&A with Chris, with more details about his work:
See Also:
Where The World Comes To Play?
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News of another tournament now, this time held in the Czech Republic, which saw Great Britain’s womens’ team defeat the hosts to become European champions.
Great Britain Women will now go on to the 2026 WBSC Women’s Baseball World Cup Group Stage as the third European team after France and the Netherlands. Congratulations to them all! (via GB Women’s Baseball)
The team even got to feature in a couple of awesome paintings by artist Andy Brown.
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And don’t forget there will be tryouts for the Womens Professional Baseball League at Nationals Park this coming weekend. The nation’s capital will host one of the inaugural teams.
The Athletic reports:
“The WPBL aims to launch in the summer of 2026 with six teams and would become the first women’s professional baseball league in the U.S. since the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, which existed from 1943 to 1954. The AAGPBL was depicted in the classic 1992 film “A League of Their Own.”
See Also:
And you can register now for SABR’s seventh annual Women in Baseball conference, online from Sept 19-21.
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As the Milwaukee Brewers continue their apparently relentless advance towards the post-season (although I noticed they lost a double-header yesterday…) it’s worth remembering that they were featured on the front cover of the very first issue of Sports Illustrated, this week in 1954, albeit under a different name.
Just another re-alignment, I guess.
Also this week, three years before that, Eddie Gaedel famously came to the plate for Bill Veeck’s St Louis Browns.
See Also:
Going Bananas – Baseball’s hottest ticket turns up the heat still further.
In that piece in May, I wrote:
“After all, as far as the game of baseball is concerned, where the Bananas are right now, amid an attention-shortened America starving for fun, is arguably just the latest inevitable step along a road originally paved by the great barnstorming teams of the past, as well as more recently by the likes of Bill Veeck and Eddie Gaedel.”
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Talking Baseball
Finally, I mentioned last week that I’d have some information about what’s happening with the project…
Well, much as I’ve enjoyed talking at you through this Substack – now I want to get back to having conversations with you. That was the whole point of this project after all.
After everything that has happened over the past two years that has unforeseeably held me back – as many of you have kindly reminded me, it’s just called “life” – I’m finally going to re-start the Q&As next month, now that I’m relatively sure I won’t need to interrupt things again as I did before, running through to the end of next season and the increasingly crucial midterms.
Thanks for your support and patience, especially if I had asked you to do a Q&A and I never got around to following up. I’ll be in touch with many of you – and importantly, I’d also like to circle back with the subjects from those first couple of seasons, just to see if anything might have changed.
And I hope we can catch another game together.
If you’re one of the new readers I’ve been very happy to pick up on this platform, and you might like to take part, drop me a note? Likewise if you know someone who might make an interesting Q&A subject. The only requirements are that you care about baseball and the fate of the country.
I’m going to keep the twice-weekly schedule here and will link from here to the new Q&As as they appear.
This Substack and the accompanying States of Play site will always be free, and more than anything I welcome your feedback.
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As always, thanks for reading. I aim to write a baseball-related post midweek and then a politics wrap at weekends.
Usually, one is substantially more sane than the other, particularly at our current chaotic and dangerous moment.
You can always find a full States of Play archive here.
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