Could interleague play have been meant to condition fans for an eventual major realignment?

Could interleague play have been meant to condition fans for an eventual major realignment?

There was a time when the two major leagues were completely separate.  They had separate rules.  They hired separate umpires.  They had a separate organization structure.  American League owners met and voted on American League issues. Likewise for National League owners.  They were two completely distinct organizations whose teams only met for the annual All-Star Game and in the World Series.

This is the reason why baseball has two Rookies of the Year, two Most Valuable Players and two Cy Young Award winners; one for each league.

When expansion happened in 1961, it was an American League issue.  The American League owners voted on it, and two American League teams were added.  Likewise, when expansion occurred again in 1962, it was a National League issue.  National League owners voted on it, and two National League teams were added.

This leagues existed like this, side by side and distinct, until the mid-1990s. The last single-league expansion occurred in 1993.  It was a National League expansion, with the cities being selected by a committee of National League owners.

After the 1993 expansion, the two leagues began laying the groundwork for an eventual merger.  Major League Baseball considered expansion again.  But this time, the committee consisted of owners from both leagues.  Initially, the Arizona Diamondbacks and the Tampa Bay Devil Rays were slated to become American League teams.  But baseball decided instead to place one new franchise in each league.  This would have given each league an odd number of teams, and required interleague play to balance the season’s schedule.  However, interleague play only began in 1997.  Even then, it was an experiment.  For it to continue, interleague play required approval by the players’ union.  When Arizona and Tampa Bay joined Major League Baseball in 1998, that approval was not yet a sure thing.

To address this situation, and maintain an even number of teams in each league, one team had to switch leagues.  Milwaukee became the first franchise to switch leagues since the demise of the American Association in the Nineteenth Century.

But interleague play was a hit with fans, and soon became a staple of the baseball season.  By 2000, the two leagues were no longer separate, but became a single legal entity.  The only vestige of the separateness of the two leagues was the designated hitter rule.  It was a rule adopted by the American League for the 1973 season.  The National League, the older of the two, has steadfastly insisted on retaining the traditional rule where every player, including the pitcher, bats. 

The designated hitter is a rule that still sharply divides the fans of the two leagues.  National League fans, who are generally more traditional, prefer the complexity involved in strategy by requiring the pitcher to hit, while American League fans argue that they didn’t buy tickets to watch the pitcher strike out.

With this history and tradition of having separate leagues, there has generally been resistance to any form of realignment which would require a large number of teams to switch leagues.  In 1997, for example, there was a proposal to realign baseball in a radical way, where the leagues and divisions would be organized strictly around geography.  The American League would function much like the Eastern Conferences in hockey and basketball, with an Eastern Division and a Midwest Division.  The National League would have been the Western Conference, with Central Division and a West Division.  The main strength of this plan was the reduction in travel.  But the voice of the traditionalists won out, and radical realignment never happened.

Interleague play meant that National League fans had to accept the designated hitter, at least from time to time.  The rules of the home team applies in interleague games, which means that whenever a National League team plays in an American League stadium, the designated hitter is in effect.

Meanwhile, the designated hitter has infected almost every other league in the country, all the way down to little league.  Generations of fans have grown up seeing that particular abomination as normal.

League switching again happened seamlessly in 2013, when the Astros moved to the American League, creating an odd number of teams in each league.  To balance the schedule, interleague play must happen on a daily basis.  Indeed, the many younger fans, the two leagues must appear as a vestige of a bygone era. 

Thus, in October of 2017, rumors spread of a new potential expansion, and subsequent realignment.  The expansion would create thirty-two major league baseball teams.  Tracy Ringolsby of Baseball America postulated that one way baseball could be realigned to accommodate the two teams would be to create four geographically based divisions of eight teams.  The potential realignment looked an awful lot like the radical realignment that was rejected in 1997.

The argument in favor of such a realignment is that it would address union concerns over travel demands.  According to Ringolsby, it would also promote greater rivalries between teams located in cities close to each other, but currently separated by being in different leagues.

It is interesting that this proposal was not made officially by Commissioner’s Office or anyone officially connected with Major League Baseball.  It is almost as if the proposal was meant to be a trial balloon to gauge fan reaction, while permitting baseball to maintain plausible deniability.

If this were an official proposal, it would face the same obstacles that the radical realignment proposal of 1997 did.  That is, baseball traditionalists still view the two leagues as separate, with a separate and ingrained history. 

And this is where interleague play and the switching of leagues comes into play.  A cynical view is that interleague play was meant to reduce the perceived differences between the leagues.  It was meant to wear down National League fans’ abhorrence of the designated hitter.  It was meant to lay the groundwork for an eventual realignment which would make baseball look a lot like basketball and hockey. 

Whether the time is right for such a realignment remains to be seen.  Last year, Commissioner Rob Manfred appeared to be taken by surprise when teams like the Giants, the Phillies and the Mets resisted his statement that National League clubs were warming up to the designated hitter.  The fact is that a significant number of fans continue to see the leagues as separate, and will resist a change that fails to honor their distinct traditions.

William J. Kovatch, Jr.