BREAKING: Boston to Play in National League in 2026!

Have you checked out the full Sox schedule this year? They start by playing the Reds, the original National League franchise. They finish the season at Fenway playing the Cubs. Their first five series are against the Reds, the Astros (who used to be in the National League), the Padres, the Brewers (who are in the NL, having swapped with the Astros, a fact I have to remind myself of constantly), and the Cardinals. 

Those of you of a certain vintage will be able to complete the sentence easily:

"The American League schedule is a ___________"

If you yelled "TRAVESTY!", you are remembering the bad old days of the unbalanced schedule used during most of the years from the second expansion in 1976 to late in the interleague play era. (I won't detail that; I might develop a PTSD reaction. It's definitely a trigger.) The current schedule, forced with a shoehorn and a blunt mallet into the sub-optimal 162 game schedule, is by contrast "rational". 

You play every team in your division 14 times, split into four series. It's a far cry from the 22 games per opponent schedule the leagues played for 61 years, with no divisions, of course, but it's still a meaningful number of games. Well, it would be if it weren't so easy to get into the playoffs these days, and divisional records are just a minor tiebreaker.

The system breaks down, just a little, with what MLB inelegantly calls "intraleague play", which is to say, league play. Here it's a total of 64 games against the other ten non-division AL opponents. What's that, you say? You cannot play 6.4 games against an opponent? Well spotted! You play six against eight of the opponents (two home and away series) and each year, you play seven games against two very, very special opponents. That balance is shaking a little right now, like a tire that's a couple of weights shy on its rim, but it's still spinning roughly in balance. Note for long-term balance, it takes a full four year cycle for this to even out, and that's not really balance. I can imagine two hypothetical teams with identical fWAR, and one of them has an extra two games against a really good team and the other has two games against a really bad team, and all of a sudden we are out of whack again like the bad old days where the outcome of the season can depend on an unbalanced schedule. It's not nearly as bad as it used to be, but it's still there.

Let's just sigh a little and forgive that as an artifact of a 15-team league. The way the math works out with a 32-team majors and a modified schedule would be nifty. If you played four games against every team in the majors -- two home and two away -- four times 31 is 124. Then your three division rivals, assuming MLB splits into four divisions per league, you play another 10 times, giving us (drum roll) 154 games. As in, the length of the baseball season for the first half of the modern era. You'd need a few more travel days and days off, which I'm pretty sure the players would be all over, and you can still have the season last as it does now from late March to late September and get a full month of ridiculous numbers of playoff series. Now there are all kinds of reasons why MLB isn't subtracting eight games from the schedule -- all of which rhyme with "shmoney"-- but that would be a balanced schedule, for realz, if and when the majors expands to 32. But hey -- two more teams, that much more attendance and TV revenue (if baseball doesn't cannibalize its own market in the way it expands), maybe they will do the right thing here.

Which gets us to the newest part of the major league season schedule, one that I really like. It's the 48 games where, instead of rotating every team once every four years as in the early days of interleague, your team plays every team in the "other" league in a three game series. Sure, it takes two years to balance the home and away, but that is good because hypothetically you get a chance no less than once every two years to see every other team at your home ballpark. This is good in general, and nice for "expatriot" fans. (I've been to a Boston game in San Francisco, and let me tell you I suddenly had 20,000 excited brethren. It was a true thrill.) Every major league team plays every other major league team. That sounds like balance.

OOPSIE. This leaves an extra three games -- which MLB assigns to the "natural rivalry" slot, for a home-and-away double series. This is all well and good if you're the Mets and Yankees, or ChiSox and Cubs, but the natural rivalries get stretched thin awfully fast. Ours -- against Atlanta -- at least has an historic basis, but the Braves left town more than 70 years ago. See if you can find somebody in our fair city who actually remembers a heated rivalry between NL and AL fans back in the day. You'd have to visit Mount Auburn, I think, to find them.

So, yeah, a lot of these are fun: Cards-Royals, sure, the old I-70 show me, no I'll show you intrastate rivalry. Nationals-Orioles, well, hardly a natural rivalry, just an accident of relocation, but in terms of a split fanbase, sure, I suppose. San Francisco - the Homeless A's? Not so much anymore. East Bay vs the Peninsula was a real thing once, but Las Vegas isn't even going to have a home fan base, just a bunch of tourists killing time between the slots and Celine Dion. But...Padres-Mariners? Yeah, all that trash talk between the Moose and the Friar really gets the fans in a froth...um, right? Rockies-Diamondbacks - um, they share a time zone? WAIT A SEC. THEY'RE IN THE SAME LEAGUE. So are the Tiger-Jays, Pirates-Phillies, and Astros-Rangers. 

So, hell, now we're not only out of balance by getting an extra three games against a lollipop team (I'm sure the Cubs and Giants and D-Backs are grateful for the three-game spot in the Wins column) and tough matchups (the New York series, usually, and our benighted matchup against the usually-strong Atlanta squad), and all of a sudden the little flutter becomes a bigger wobble.

Which brings me back to the weirdness of the whole thing. The Sox have an extra three games against the NL, as do a majority of the AL teams, but four of them have extra games against an AL opponent.

What the heck is the point of the leagues anymore? Don't say "tradition" because there's nothing traditional going on. We've had teams swap leagues, interleague play which is never really truly balanced, the DH in both leagues now, there aren't even ceremonial AL and NL Presidents anymore, much less separate offices and umpiring and styles of play. I am down with all this -- in the second quarter of the 21st century, with a single national media market and an international fan base and the Intertubesnet, it makes zero sense to break down the leagues thus.

So why maintain the pretense of having two leagues? Take a look at my 32-team, eight division, 154 game schedule above. That's the way to go. At that point, you really can get more natural groupings of geographic rivals -- this is not new ground, there have been many proposals for reorganized divisions -- and cut down on a little travel time and costs and so forth, and have real rivalries for a bigger stretch of the season. 

Yeah yeah I whine about something that probably makes little difference, but I'm just not feeling that old league loyalty-rivalry vibe anymore. MLB knows this, too, which is why it has started putting out feelers about changing the format of the All-Star game so it's not league vs. league (previously an attraction because it was the ONLY time you'd see 95% of the star players matched up against the stars of the other league). 

But it's just -- I don't know, weird to have the Sox start their season -- and end it -- against a bevy of NL teams. It's like MLB is padding the schedule, now that they've been forced into having continuous interleague play instead of the original bizarre "interleague week" or whatever they called it. It's weird.