From 2013 through 2022, division rivals in MLB played each other 19 times every season.
(Maybe the owners were inspired by Minister Louis Farrakhan's rambling discourse on the number 19 at the Million Man March in 1995?)
If they go back to that, and have out-of-division teams within the same league play each other seven times each, they will never have to worry about tiebreakers deciding who wins a division, or, for that matter, who makes the playoffs, beyond the season series — and which team in all season series gets the extra home game will go back and forth every year in both cases.
The NFL should be so lucky.
And since everyone is assuming (you know what Tony Randall said to Jack Klugman in that famous episode of The Odd Couple about people who assume) that one expansion team will be added to both leagues (or one team switches leagues and both of the new teams go into the other league), that will create an alignment of both the NL and AL having four divisions of four teams each (which everyone seems to favor, even though it will create the constant threat of non-playoff teams finishing with much better records than playoff teams), there would be a more manageable 21 interleague games for every team (there were, in fact, 20 such games in 2013-2022) — three games against all four teams within the same division (rotating on a four-year cycle), with the remaining nine games involving three games each against teams that finished in the same place in their respective divisions the previous year (that is to say, possibly an annual Yankees/Dodgers series).
Having too much interleague play can wreak havoc if too many games are rained out, causing multiple extensions of the regular season — which is why it was so shocking that they actually did that in 2023.
But even in a 32-team setup, the playoffs should under no circumstances be cheapened by expanding the playoff field beyond the 12 teams that already qualify therein; instead, bring back the concept of the "first division" by guaranteeing a share of the postseason Players' Pool to all teams that finish second in their division, whether they make the playoffs or not; furthermore, thanks to the increase in the number of same-division games, it can be decreed that both of the wild cards in the same league must be second-place division finishers, the other two second-place teams each receiving 1/2 of 1% of the total pool, with Wild Card Series losers getting 2%, Division Series losers 5%, League Championship Series losers 10%, the World Series loser 20%, and the World Series winner 30%.
Another way to foster competitive balance (a subject that Joe Buck discussed in a recent interview after being inducted into baseball's Hall of Fame), is to find some way to make baseball's draft more important — which could involve young prospects from such Latin American baseball powerhouses as the Dominican Republic.
But relying on "cost constraints" alone — as the owners are trying to do with their "Salary Cap or Bust" agenda — can only lead to baseball's version of its own "Nakba."
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