John Smoltz may be in Cooperstown thanks to his exemplary exploits on the mound, but he threw a wild pitch when he proposed bringing back the minor-league "split season" concept of 1981 to the majors, somehow believing that doing so can forestall the lockout whose countdown now stands at T-minus 113 days and counting.
Giving this loopy idea even partial credence means that, very likely, MLB will have to both immediately expand to 32 teams and realign into two 8-team divisions in each league, when Commissioner Rob Manfred seems to instead lean toward each league having four 4-team divisions — despite the fact that this will almost certainly lead to teams making the playoffs with a losing record (five such teams have done that in the NFL from 2010 through 2025 under the same setup that Manfred prefers).
Then they will have to figure out what happens if the same team wins their division in both halves. Do they get a bye into the next round? (This is what happens in most minor leagues that use a split-season format — but not in the majors in '81, when it was determined that a team winning their division in both halves would get four home games in the ensuing LCS instead of only three. Not only terminally lame, but the move was made on the fly so to speak.)
Also, let's not forget that in 1981, the Reds had the best overall record, not only in their division, but in the majors as a whole — and didn't even make the playoffs because they finished second in the then-National League West in both halves of the split season (on that season's final day a banner was displayed at Riverfront Stadium, with the Reds logo, accompanied by the slogan "Baseball's Best Record 1981").
But what if three-fourths of the owners aren't ready to add two new teams (the supermajority necessary to make changes of this sort in baseball) — or can't decide which divisions they are to be slotted into? (In the just-merged NFL, a secretary had to pull the new alignment for the NFC out of a fishbowl in 1970.) Then both sides will end up with major-league egg on their faces.
And nothing but sour notes were sung by USA Today's Bob Nightengale a while back, when he lionized the Braves/Giants "pennant race" of 1993, conveniently omitting that in that year the 103-59 Giants finished six games ahead of the 97-65 Phillies, and did not make the playoffs, while the Phillies did (the leagues were then realigned into three divisions therein, with one wild card playoff spot added to each, no doubt to address this issue — but of course the 1994 season was scuttled by a strike, so no one got to derive any benefit from this until 1995). And more recently, the same Bob Nightengale is pouring cold water on expansion.
Another supremely bad idea that had to be rectified was the practice of giving the winner of the All-Star Game the home-field advantage in the World Series. This endured for 14 consecutive years until the owners, acceding to the demands of the MLBPA (and heartily cheered on by both the writers and the fan base alike), gave the team with the better regular-season record home field advantage in the Series (however, unlike in the NFL, a wild card from one league can host the odd home game in the World Series against a division champion from the other league, providing that the former had a better record; and the distribution of home games has always been 2-3-2 when 2-2-1-1-1 would significantly increase the superior team's home-field advantage).
The bottom line is that neither side in this dispute really seems to want the matter at hand settled conclusively, which is why one side or the other prefers to talk about matters that are ancillary at best, the number of rounds there should be in baseball's draft (not surprisingly, league wants a reduction to 12 rounds, while the union wants at to keep it the same, at 20), which even at 20 rounds is much less definitive than its counterparts in the NFL and NBA.
And if the owners really want to do something to help the so-called "small market" teams, they should do what the NFL started to do, albeit unevenly and covertly, in 1978, more bluntly and overtly in 1988 and again in 1995, and even more so when a 17th game was added to the regular-season schedule in 2021: give these teams easier schedules.
This would entail rolling interleague play back to its pre-2023 levels (after a team plays all four teams against a division of the other league, they can play their remaining nine interleague games against teams that finish in the same position in their respective divisions the season before), so that strong teams will have to play more games against other strong (read: large-market) teams, while weak teams will get to play more games against other weak (read: "small market") teams, and also have division rivals go back to playing each other 18 times, as they did when divisional play was introduced in 1969, making it far less likely for a team to win a division with a losing record. And the networks will simply love both of these changes, with visions of dollar signs and Nielsen ratings points dancing in their heads.
It is difficult to see either side provoking a strike or lockout to prevent that from happening; and not only will it work at least as well or even better in Manfred's preferred divisional alignment, but even without any immediate expansion, in that at present there are three five-team divisions in both leagues) — after all, there are many ways of doing something, but there is only one way of doing nothing.
Instead, both parties would rather step on ants while the elephants are stampeding — and rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic.
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