Welcome all and thank you for coming to my inaugural online live video presentation in my capacity as Baseball Czar with emergency powers for the limited time frame of the next 6 months only.

 

My first act is to announce that when my six months are over, and baseball has once again been re-established on a new national (and international ) basis, my successor, the new Commissioner of Baseball will the single person most likely to permanently restore confidence in the integrity of the game:

 

Mr. Henry Aaron of Mobile, Alabama.

 

My second act is to announce plans for realignment:

 

Major League Baseball will henceforth be re-organized into four 8-team leagues. There will be NO interleague play. The excitement of the postseason, seeing the champions and best teams of each league play each other not knowing how they will fare against each other will be restored.

 

The four leagues will be divided into Eastern and Western and in the first round of the postseason the regional championship series of the East and West will pit the pennant winners from the  National Eastern and American Eastern  Leagues against each other to decide the best team in the entire East in a best of seven series. The same match up will take place between the pennant winners of the National Western and American Western Leagues.

 

The winners of the Eastern and Western Championships will face each in the best of seven World Series.

 

Two new teams will be added. Invitations to join MLB will be made to the following cities: Memphis, Mobile, Charlotte, Austin, Portland (Oregon), San Antonio, Sacramento, Las Vegas, Omaha, Montreal, Vancouver, Louisville, New Orleans, Nashville, Columbus, Indianapolis, Buffalo, Brooklyn, Newark, Richmond.

 

The two teams must come both from either East or West of the Mississippi River. Should the teams be from the West, the two Chicago teams will move to the Eastern Leagues (National in the case of the Cubs, American in the case of the White Sox). Should they each be Eastern teams, the two new teams will join the Eastern Leagues.

 

The Designated Hitter is hereby abolished and banned in each league. The addition of 50 regular players through the creation of two new teams more than compensates for the loss of 15 DH positions. Artificial turf is banned. Theme music announcing the batter is banned in all ballparks. There will be other changes related to television broadcasts of games that will be mentioned later.

 

The example below is based on two Eastern teams, but should say, Austin and Sacramento join instead, they would be in the American Western and National Western Leagues respectively, with the Cubs and White Sox moving to the Eastern Leagues.

 

American Eastern League           Winner of League Pennant

 

NYY

Boston

Tampa

Detroit

Cleveland                                                                                          vs.

Baltimore

Toronto

Memphis

 

National Eastern League              Winner of League Pennant                       

 

NYM

Atlanta

Washington

Miami

Philadelphia

Cincinnati

Pittsburgh

Louisville

 

                                                                                                                                             Eastern Baseball Champion

 

 

 

                                                                                             

American Western League         Winner of League Pennant

 

Oakland

Texas

Seattle

Milwaukee

Chicago  WS                                      vs.                                                                                                        vs.

Kansas City

Minnesota

LA A

 

 

National Western League           Winner of League Pennant

 

Chicago C

LA D

San Francisco

Arizona

San Diego

Colorado

St. Louis

Houston

                                                                                                                                             Western Baseball Champion

 

 

                                                                                                                                             World Series

 

All games for all postseason series will take begin somewhere between the hours of 4 pm EST (noon on the West Coast) and 7 pm EST (3 pm on the West Coast).

 

 

Further, the four second-place teams from each league will face off in a wildcard series, with the games for that series taking place one day in each case before the series between the pennant winners in each round.

 

What is the point of the wildcard series? First bragging rights, but as will become clear from the other decisions below on team ownership and revenue distribution, there are great incentives, material and spiritual,  for fans to follow that series as well, though slightly less so than for the pennant winners series.

 

 

Next, the issues of team ownership and of the players’ collective bargaining agreement are to be addressed:

 

First, all teams are, thanks to the People’s Baseball Act just passed at our urging by the Congress, the funds have been provided by bond issuances for MLB to enable the cities, states, regions or other relevant geographic authorities to purchase all MLB teams to make them property collectively of the fans in the geographic area relevant to each team (Minnesota and the Dakota for the Twins, New England for the Red Sox, and so on).

 

The revenues from the teams and from all revenue sources – game ticket sales, Television and other broadcasts, and so on, will be divided based on a formula that provides one-third maintenance of the team, its park, and other services and administrative costs, scouting etc., one-third to MLB itself part of which will be for redistribution to teams and cities/regions as needed and most importantly for player salaries (see next item) and one-third to the cities and towns in the area of each club proportionate to population size. This means that of every dollar spent by fans on baseball or acquired through advertising, sales of team paraphernalia etc. 33 cents go to upkeep of the hospitals, schools, parks, roads, police, fire and emergency services, public transportation, infrastructure, care for the elderly and disabled and other needs of the people in each MLB region. Going to the park  and watching and rooting for your team now means more money for your kids at school, more services for your town.

 

We believe that on this basis, baseball will again be the national pastime.

 

Further, ALL players through the collective bargaining agreement will now be employees officially of Major League Baseball NOT of the respective individual teams for which they play. Each player’s contract WILL include the team for which they will play, excepting mutual agreements between players and team managements to allow free agency in mid-contract or trades (with the 10-5 rule still in effect). But the players will technically work for baseball as a whole.

 

This will not necessarily mean any major reductions in salary per se, as the collective bargaining agreement with the players’ union will now be based on salaries that will be the same for each player at a certain level of achievement: hitting .300, hitting 30 or 40 or 50 home runs, stealing 40 bases, having an ERA below 3.00 or below 2.50 and so on will mean a certain salary range to be adjusted slightly in bargaining depending on years of play and age, conditioning of the player, other services to the public and baseball, contributions to championship teams etc. at the margins.

 

But the overall revenue available for player salaries collectively cannot surpass the overall amount that goes to MLB for that purpose. That the one-third system of dividing revenue may prove too rigid means we can adjust it as needed every few years, but in no case will the amount going to municipalities be allowed to fall below 20% of total baseball revenue.

 

So players can and will change teams but will no longer due so merely for the money since their pay even as free agents remains the same based on their actual accomplishments regardless of the team they play for. So motives for leaving one team or joining another will include friendship or admiration for the well-organized team in another city, where they want their kids to grow up, seeking a championship or pennant and so on, but not money alone. This too will go a long way toward re-attaching players, teams and fans and the general public.

 

The private ownership of teams in the age of free agency not only meant a wide disparity between resource-rich and poor teams, poorer competition, alienation of fans, but also meant that teams no longer recruited baseball players from the United States, not only because of the admittedly often great talent of players from Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia and elsewhere, but mainly to find cheap labor. As a result the proportion of African American ballplayers in the majors, after all the decades of struggle to gain access and all the sacrifices these entailed, has again fallen precipitously, and the percentage of MLB players who are not American citizens is now at 35%. Clearly no national pastime can gain the confidence and love of the public under such circumstances.

 

The extraordinary achievements, contributions and fan base of players from Latin American, Asia and around the world is greatly appreciated and will continue in the form of players who have migrated legally to the United States, or who arrive as refugees, and in the occasional cases of players recruited overseas by teams. But no team will be allowed to have more than 20% of its active roster consisting of non-citizens of either the US or Canada at any one time from here on in. And we will, with the new forms of ownership and new fan interest we thing all these changes will bring about, begin active reorganization of Little League and other baseball activities for children and young people in every community in the US and Canada.

 

We respect other organized sports, but baseball remains a game, and the best one, and it is irrefutable that the decline of our country, its industries, government ethics, and national character and culture, began and coincided with the replacement of baseball with football, basketball and other organized sports. Baseball builds democracy, community and independence, these other sports do so only haphazardly if at all.

 

That Congress, which – and our thanks to President Bernie Sanders, Secretary of Commerce Ralph Nader, Federal Reserve Chairwoman Elizabeth Warren, and the Congress with its new majority of the Progressive Party-Green Party coalition that swept into power in the wake of the collapse of the Democratic and Republican Parties for their help in reorganizing baseball, its ownership and its restored status – has recently passed the new tariff system, the massive infrastructure investments and other measures to restore our position as a leading manufacturing and inventing nation with good wages and jobs for all – is a sign that we are back on the right track finally after decades of neglect.

 

We thank the President for making Opening Day a national holiday and for the shortened work days and school days during the World Series and postseason.

 

The revenue from the Regional Championships and the World Series will be divided 70-30 between winners and runners-up with most of the revenue again going to services in the towns involved, and the same is true of the Wildcard Series. So fans have a real incentive to root for their teams to win in both series and to fill the ballparks and tune in, as a playoff win means better conditions in your home town.

 

We also appreciate making the position of Commissioner of Baseball a Cabinet position. Henry Aaron in the halls of government can only be a good thing.

I am happy to announce that all Steroid-era tainted statistics, while they remain on the record books, will not count as all-time records, since to establish all-time single-season or career records that can never be broken except by androids, cyborgs or robots or by cheating would give an incentive to cheat or else rob the game of the excitement that comes with the possibility or anticipation that someone can break a record. So the all-time home run record is 755 by our new commissioner of baseball, and the single season record remains 61 until someone breaks it without using methods that cannot be reproduced without dangers to one's health or violations of rules. The home run accomplishments of steroid users, will be treated for MLB purposes as though they happened in exhibition games, though unfortunately we cannot undo the effects on game and pennant competition between teams, and the same goes for those games won by pitchers that obtained Cy Young Awards though the Awards in certain cases from those dark times will be reviewed shortly and possibly withdrawn from the winners in cases of cheating. But the effects of winning pennants due to economic inequality cannot be undone either, and so remain, as reminders of how we once did things, but also to help us appreciate all the more the new, democratic, America and National Pastime that we are finally re-establishing starting today. 

 

Play Ball. America is back.

 

Thank you.

 

(italyprof signs off).

 

If only!

booger, you are misunderstanding the difference between the employment contract and being a member of the team. Teams can cut players, they do now and still have to pay the rest of their contract when they do. Except under this idea the contract is with MLB and would be paid. 

But players don't play for the same team, in fact this separates one thing from the other. 

Why would every team have the exact same opinion of every player if they have their own scouting departments? Of course they would each still do their own scouting. Yes they would all want a likely superstar and not want a likely very poor player. Otherwise there would be different views of each player and also each team needs something different. 

What would possibly be the point of a single MLB scouting dept. MLB will not be fielding players on a team, so why would it scout any? It just administers contracts with players and negotiates the contract with the players union. 

I think booger has a point wrt same salary from any team resulting in play that is geared towards increasing salaries... to a point. The problem also is that a team that doesn't have the revenue might not be willing to invest in a player that's salaried too high for what they actually want. Personalities exist, etc.

I think you could accomplish preventing imbalance simply by setting salary caps, possibly even stricter ones than the NFL if you wanted, or use that system, and then requiring teams to spend at least 95% of the cap. With 100% revenue sharing between all 32 teams, you have every team with the same amount of cash ultimately. Especially as public ownership has already eliminated the concept of rich and poor ownership to a point -- of course some areas still have more money than others. At this point, other things -- the belief in the team that's being built, loyalty to the personnel that gave one a chance, the personality of the staff and fans, and the quality of the stadium facilities -- begin to play a much more significant role. I do like the NFL model because it's one of the most competitive leagues.

I don't see how you get President Sanders to agree to that 20% foreign cap especially as that's basically a discrimination call. American sports generally have not allowed discrimination, especially anything that looks like racial discrimination, which this can, in recent years, and the other sports don't seem to have this problem so much. At a minimum, to make this not end up harming other markets we need to invest to have robust leagues in Latin America, the Carribean, and Asia (and possibly Europe eventually) that play at the same time as MLB and can form the core of a world system a la FIFA (hopefully sans the rampant corruption of said organization -- I mention it because FIFA leagues *do* have a foreign cap in general, a notable exception being Major League Soccer, who recently kicked a club out of the league for discrimination issues) 

If you're going to look into all those cities... hmm, could we possibly add most/all of them and initiate a second division (also taking a page out of soccer's book) -- again, trying to keep teams competitive -- also making races interesting at the bottom, as teams fight to maintain their chances... just a thought... of course how the minor league system would be handled would be a challenge...

You missed the fish-in-a-barrel call of renaming the American League franchise in Anaheim to Anaheim.

I sort of disagree with losing the DH because it's useful to protect pitchers in formats like the All-Star Game, World Baseball Classic, etc. and if you drop it then you've lost the ability to use it with a straight face in these formats as well. I understand the purism argument though.

I'm not sure how going back to playing the same 7 teams ad nauseam can constitute a good thing for baseball. Either allow American/National interleague or East/West interleague but perhaps not both -- maybe alternate which one happens each year -- but it's unlikely I'd go to more than 7-8 games a season that way even if my team was good. Don't need to see the same opposing team more than once or twice, really, especially bad ones.

Why the hate for theme music? Just curious.

A lot of comments, hopefully food for thought in general. I might have more at a later date and/or as this thread develops.

uncleal, don't have time to address all of your thoughtful comments here, but do want to briefly respond to the issue of whether a limit on non-nationals in the majors would be discriminatory - by the way I have written one book and published several articles on immigration and am an immigrant myself in the country I live in, so I am very pro-immigration. That is not what I am referring to.

Immigrants who live in the US can either play in the majors under a 15% non-nationals limit as non-nationals - by my count at least 128 non-US citizen players would be in the majors under this limit and I don't think 20% would be excessive either though much beyond that - or can become US citizens and so are not part of the quota limit. 

I am instead responding to the fact that most of the non-American/Canadian players now in the majors are NOT immigrants to the US per se, but have been recruited and trained at MLB team camps in the countries like the DR (less true of Asian players) and then require visas to enter specifically to play major league baseball, replacing US-born or US immigrant resident players merely so that the teams can save a buck on player salaries. Assuming that they are good enough. But here "good enough" means not as good or better than the "replacement player" available from the US - citizen or immigrant resident, but means cost effective. So a .280 average fielding SS or 2B might be preferable to a .300 hitting better than average one from Kansas or Harlem, from a southern Texas barrio or a Native American Reservation or a trailer park in Appalachia or from a New Jersey suburb, or who emigrated as a child to the US from El Salvador or Haiti or South Korea,  because any of these expect to be paid $1 million or more and the foreign national player will accept $300K and so is good enough. 

So it is not discrimination not to allow an excessive and purposeful overseas recruiting of foreign labor merely to undermine player salaries of US citizens, Canadian citizens and foreign-born immigrant residents and new citizens living the US or Canada. It is foreign policy. 

As for FIFA, it is a global, an international body (and arguably the most horrible organization in the world - see John Oliver, the British guy that was on the Daily Show do his number on FIFA, which makes the IMF and the European Central Bank look like Greenpeace or Amnesty International - anyway FIFA is an international body, so discrimination in its case explicitly refers to discrimination against people from other countries, as does labor policy with the European Union, which is a labor market consisting of 27 countries. The United States is not and the National and American Leagues are, as their names suggest, national baseball associations, not global ones. 

The presence of the Blue Jays (and formerly Expos) in MLB belies the idea of MLB not being international. For better or for worse, MLB is the top professional baseball league globally -- NPB isn't quite on the level of MLB and it's the only one that can reasonably say it's even close -- and especially with the control MLB has over the WBC, we find that MLB very much functions as a powerful voice in the international baseball community.

This might be a simple case of different priorities. You might be more focused on specifically using baseball to build up the United States specifically, while I'm looking at this as a perspective of good for the game globally.

You mention that it causes a problem when players are cheaper from places like the DR because it displaces equivalent or even better players from the US (or immigrants to the US) that want more money. This is true, but I think it would cause just as much problem to these other nations to suddenly dry up the pipeline. Those players play for less money because the cost of living is lower and that much money is actually more money to them. The solution might be one of the other solutions I mentioned -- setting up a global circuit of competitive leagues. With this, these players could play professionally, making this money locally, driving their own prices up and thus somewhat negating this issue. This would also limit the influx because if you're not going to save money on international players, there's less need to internationally scout, which costs more money than domestic scouting. (Of course I have always personally been for a global state anyway and this would probably be an extension of this same idea applied to baseball.)

FIFA is undoubtedly a horrible organization, but that doesn't mean the idea is unsound -- the reason it stays powerful is because the concept of itself makes a lot of sense. It's horrible because the people running it are horrible, the same way a government of a state becomes horrible, when the people running it corrupt it in some form. (Which is almost a good argument for a monarchial system, less people with an opportunity to cause corruption in the system. MLB sort of functions this way with the Commisioner position anyway.) But I digress. The point is that MLB could probably manage to take over the IBAF/WBSC/etc. and make it an organization that actually does something and contributes to the smooth running of professional baseball around the world. Or something along these lines.

Good points uncleal. 

But 15% of all major leaguers is not drying up the pipeline overnight. It is just moderating it to a reasonable level. 

Besides, the ML team camps in the DR and other countries are training thousands of young people every year, of whom 4 or 5, maybe 10 might make the majors each year. So for 99% of the would-be players the pipeline is always dry anyway. 

I don't know how global I want baseball to become. A huge part of why many of us love it is that it is one of the only things in all of America that has history and tradition. The Boston-Tokyo-Port Au Prince-Stuttgart playoffs don't have any appeal to me, which is probably one of many reasons that soccer leaves me kind of cold, and why other than some interest in seeing great young athletes so do the Olympics. 

But I recognize that such interests exist and appeal to others. Some compromise, maybe the US World Series winner playing a series against a global league winner from outside the US would be fun or interesting to a point. 

Obviously all of this was a thought experiment. Would people be sick of seeing the same 8 teams play all the time in this day and age? Maybe. But I know that, paradoxically, when baseball had not even expanded beyond the Mississippi it was more important to everyone's life, including in the West and South where there were no teams, and was more widely followed. My experiment is a "via di mezzo" (a halfway measure): regional leagues, so real rivalries can thrive, in a national (and partly international) context, but where once again you could imagine knowing, as many of us did as kids, the starting lineups and starting rotations of all the teams in the league your favorite team played in. 

None of this will happen unfortunately (or not as you like). But I wish it would. But then, I wish there were local, neighborhood bookshops with owners that knew books really well and could talk about them with you. Fresh milk delivered to people's houses in glass bottles. Labor unions that represented most workers. Products made in the US.  I am really glad that patriarchy, segregation and a number of other things from the pre-expansion, pre-DH America took serious hits in my lifetime, proud even. But I can't help think that a) we threw the babe (ruth) out with the bathwater and b) just as Blacks, Women and others got a shot at full participation in America we decided to 1) close the factories and move them overseas, 2) not have an economy anymore, just corporations, 3) make now desegregated baseball no longer the National Pastime, and so on. 

Maybe it is living overseas, maybe a mid-life crisis, but I feel nostalgic lately, watching old baseball games online (or listening to them - like the 1948 world series radio broadcast on a CD I ordered a while back). America and for that matter Italy, seem alienating, busy, commercialized beyond even what we imagined decades ago, frenetic and nervous and nerve-wracking. America to me was always four things: 1) the land and its beauty, 2) the history of the struggles for social justice - labor, anti-slavery, civil rights, Native American struggles, women's rights and the rest, 3) the music, from Appalachian mountain music and white gospel and country and western to jazz, blues, ragtime, and their historical meeting (in Memphis if I am not mistaken) to become rock n' roll and then all of the rest since, and 4) baseball. 

Miracle miles of shopping malls and chain restaurants, March Madness, everyone having to be an "entrepreneur" by working freelance trying to figure out what aspect of themselves they can sell today to feed themselves, advertising in movie theaters, during TV shows, after every pitch of a ballgame, these things don't appeal to me much. Maybe I am old. Maybe I am more conservative than I want to admit (socialist that I remain). Maybe baseball was the thing that protected me from the freneticism of American life under corporate capitalism and now that is treated frenetically and commercially beyond previous limits too it makes me sad and makes me feel even further from my home country than I am geographically. Maybe the bad guys won and I have trouble dealing with it. Maybe I am self-critical, having myself been one of the proponents that drank the Kool-Aid, urging the left to embrace global strategies and outlooks to confront capital's globalization project, buying into the implicit Hegelianism of the end of history. Now I think that if humanity must unite (it must) that unity can't come from globalizing stuff, but must come from every political community bringing their own contribution, remaining themselves, a unity of unique and distinct republics, whose multiplicity challenges each other to do better, do undo injustices, not a homogeneous and homogenizing "abstract universal" (to use Hegel's term) but a concrete universal that is, to use Marx's term "the ensemble of all the social relations."

Hmmm. These are all good points. I'm not really going to respond in a debate sense because there's nothing to respond to. I don't have the comparative experience you do.

Or, at least, the half of "uncleal" that's actually making these posts, doesn't.

I (mainstreet, or Uncleal the Younger, or whatever you want to refer to me as) am only 23. I grew up in a world of increasing globalization and connection with the world at large especially through the Internet. My first girlfriend lived on the other side of the Pacific from me, and a list of many of my favorite things have a distinctly international flavor to them. I run a chat network with servers in the US and in France, the latter bought from a Canadian company. I never really see the US as an entity that itself means anything in particular. It's a nation, and it goes and invades other nations a lot. I get that part. But... we're all human. I see everyone as more or less the same. So I see these arbitrary national boundaries, and I see these things where some nations exploit other nations through this mystical force known as "the economy". (Okay, I'm getting a little overly poetic here.) I watch the Olympics, and the World Cup, and the World Baseball Classic, because it's the pinnacle of international competition in sports, and it's one of the only valid purposes I find national boundaries truly serve. I would like to see manufacturing brought back, as you would, both because it would increase jobs here, and also because it would limit the exploitative nature of paying individuals in "developing" countries $5/day to make our stuff. So overall my attitude towards the global world is different: to me, it's a fact of life, I've never known anything else. I don't think the trend is reversible, but maybe something can be done in the long run to equalize the world and prevent exploitation. Maybe, ironically, once that happens, things will shift to a more local experience, because there will be no need to constantly go far away for products. But this is just the filter of my experience. I can see yours is different, and I see no reason to believe that our differing ideas and conclusions aren't equally valid given this.

Overall, still a great thread.

Actually it is great to know about your experience, very different from mine but similar to many of my students'. And undoubtedly more attuned to the near future than my concerns, experiences and tastes. 

thanks.

I agree with much of what you have written here, italyprof. I don't follow present baseball because I reel from the rampant greed and eye candy presentation that pollute the sport. I am one of the participants here who experienced baseball when it wasn't like that, and I realize I expose myself to dismissal as a geezer wallowing in rose-tinted nostalgia. The two best years were St. Louis in 1961 and 1962, when my dad took me to a dozen or so games. I recall vividly Musial's coiled snake batting stance, but the most awesome thing I ever saw/heard in a ballpark was a Bob Gibson pitch that Willie McCovey lined against the left field wall. The "crack" that ball made when it hit the wall echoed through the stadium like a gunshot. It was, of course, an opposite field hit.  Hard to imagine what would have happened if Stretch had pulled it into right. My dad and I usually sat in the grandstand overlooking 3rd base on seats that cost .75 to 2.00. You would pay more than twenty times that price today. But most of the time Cardinal baseball was the sound of Jack Buck and Harry Caray on the radio. Warm, muggy evenings, fire flies, Kool Aid, and the Good Humor man.
It's expected, perhaps inevitable, that as people age they look backward to their childhood and feel regret for lost innocence. But what you have articulated here, italyprof, is beyond a sense of personal loss to the disturbing evidence of a culture in decline. For most of the 20th century, America was a society that relied upon the conviction that things would be better for the next generation. The "greatest generation" took it for granted that their children, we baby-boomers, would be more prosperous and more secure than they had been. By the end of the century, I realized that many of the students in my history classes were going to find life more difficult than it had been for their parents. And that's not necessarily a money issue. I step aside to let Terence Mann have the final word:

"Ray, people will come, Ray. They'll come to Iowa for reasons they can't even fathom. They'll turn up your driveway not knowing for sure why they're doing it. They'll arrive at your door as innocent as children, longing for the past. Of course, we won't mind if you look around, you'll say. It's only $20 per person. They'll pass over the money without even thinking about it: for it is money they have and peace they lack. And they'll walk out to the bleachers; sit in shirtsleeves on a perfect afternoon. They'll find they have reserved seats somewhere along one of the baselines, where they sat when they were children and cheered their heroes. And they'll watch the game and it'll be as if they dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so thick they'll have to brush them away from their faces. People will come, Ray. The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it's a part of our past, Ray. It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again. Oh... people will come Ray. People will most definitely come."