Owners Can’t Do It, but He Has the Answer

John Harrington, chairman of baseball’s realignment committee, stated there’s not a perfect solution to the scheduling and is using this view as an excuse to make major changes in traditional leagues. He’s wrong and I suspect he is dissembling to rationalize the horrific crime that realignment is. There is a solution.

1. Dump the silly gimmick of interleague play, a 1990s version of barnstorming baseball that pollutes the title races, perverts statistics, negates the specialness of the World Series, and burns out players with NBA-style travel.

2. Put Arizona in the NL West and Tampa in the AL East. Move Detroit to the AL Central and Kansas City to the AL West. There’s your realignment for you.

3. Expand the schedule to 168 games to accommodate the two 15-team leagues. Each team would play their 14 opponents 12 times, each team scheduling one doubleheader per month. This makes sense with a wild-card format because teams would play an equal number of games against everyone in their (traditional) league and eliminates the possibility of a club sneaking into the playoffs because it faced an odd number of games against weaker opponents.

As a fan who roots for both the Dodgers and Angels, why would I want them in the same league, let alone the same division? I have a team in both leagues to cheer for and I like it that way. What Harrington is proposing is a return to the old Pacific Coast League. We could then call the Dodgers the Hollywood Stars and bring back the Oakland Oaks, San Francisco Seals, Seattle Pilots, and Denver Bears. If we are going to regionalize the national pastime into minor leagues and resort to barnstorming methods, let’s at least be honest about it and call it what it is.

TOM RUSH, Orange