It’s admittedly a strange subject at first glance; considering how in-fighting between MLB owners and the Players Association nearly brought the sport as a whole to a screeching halt for the 2022 campaign during their CBA negotiations just a few months ago. But therein lies the opportunity to introduce the element of expansion to a 32-team league for the financial gain of players and ownership alike.

So let’s start there…

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Why would anyone want this?

In order for any city or ownership group to join the ranks of America’s favorite past time at the professional level, they’ll need to pay up front to do so. The buy in for a Major League Baseball franchise is estimated by some in the know to be in the ballpark of $2 Billion at least. That money is then distributed to the pre-existing franchises, and more specifically the owners who are permitting entrance to a brand new competitor. Additionally, any added money that gets kicked around the league through revenue-sharing from a brand new market getting tapped into just helps the owners come away with even more money over the longhaul.

For the Major League Baseball Players Association and its union members, new teams means new jobs opening up for major league players who might otherwise not have an opportunity. It also entails the creation of new Minor League systems for the fresh-faced franchises and with that even more opportunities for players to fill out these rosters. Also, adding two more potentially competitive organizations looking to sign players in the open market would lead to a raise in player salaries as more teams are involved in bidding wars.

While fans in cities where Major League teams already exist might not be super excited by changes to the formatting that they know, this is a move far more rooted in activating new fans and a previously untapped audience. Getting fans with no prior access to a Major League team, or in some cases any professional sports team at all, would be a huge victory for all parties involved, especially from the standpoint of trying to grow the game of baseball.

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What needs to happen first?

While MLB Commissioner, Rob Manfred, has expressed a desire to bring in new franchises to the sport for the first time since 1998 (the longest expansion drought in MLB history), he has rightfully expressed a desire to first make sure the Oakland Athletics and Tampa Bay Rays have permanent homes. Both of those franchises are currently struggling with poor playing conditions in their current ballparks and an unwillingness to front the cost for a new one by their host cities.

The negotiations in Tampa appear to advancing much better in recent weeks as there’s increasing optimism that the two sides will be able to negotiate the construction of a new and improved stadium in the greater-Tampa area when the lease is set to expire in 2027. This step would help to keep the Rays right there in Tampa Bay, a city that they’ve called home, since they joined Major League Baseball by expansion back in the 1998 season.

On the other hand though, negotiations in Oakland have gone nowhere, and to that end, it could be that relocation precedes any conceived expansion. With the Athletics’ owner recently expressing that his team could soon follow the NFL’s Raiders in a move from Oakland to Las Vegas, Oakland would be left without any professional sports teams. While this is an incredibly disheartening revelation for what has historically been one of the better sports towns in the US, it would provide a new level of intrigue and excitement surrounding a constantly rebuilding A’s franchise. Throw in the bonus of a vibrant city like Las Vegas getting a baseball team, and you’ve already set the stage for a new era of the game.

As long as plans on a new stadium, somewhere, are put in place for both the A’s and Rays, it looks like we can move forward with the expansion plans.

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Where do we put new teams?

This is actually the easy part given recent information coming to light. With the A’s perceived relocation to Las Vegas (becoming the Las Vegas Athletics) that disqualifies one of the stronger candidates for expansion from the running. Additionally, there is already a perceived ownership group accumulating funds to bring a baseball team to Nashville, TN. Headed up by former big league Pitcher, Dave Stewart, a team of minority-stake owners are already nearing their funding goal of that $2 Billion target we spoke about before. Nashville makes loads of sense as a city on the rise in recent years both in population and economics. Geographically, it sits smack in the middle between St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Atlanta, which means there is a huge area of baseball fans that don’t have a clear rooting interest. That problem could easily be solved with an expansion franchise in the same city that comes out in droves to support the NFL’s Titans and the NHL’s Predators. The group has already conceived a nickname for the squad to boot: The Nashville Stars!

For the second franchise, we have another relatively easy solution that’ll make a ton of baseball fans happy. When the Rays were looking for potential new homes, one solution that was teased was the split-season between Tampa Bay and Montreal. While that plan got nixed by league officials, the idea of an MLB franchise resurrecting itself in Montreal is hardly a stretch of the imagination. The surge of Canadian sport-fandom has seen massive upticks in viewership and attendance for the Toronto Blue Jays, and exhibition outings in Montreal have shown that there is still a yearning for a big league ball club to come back to the biggest city in Quebec. Resurrecting the Montreal Expos moniker feels like the right way to go here, reclaiming the team’s banners and achievements from the since relocated and renamed Washington Nationals in the process.

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Where do these new teams fit in?

There are two very distinct ways that Major League Baseball could go about introducing these teams into the current league landscape. Option A would see baseball move in the direction of division-less League-only bracketing that feels a bit more akin to the NBA format and the steps baseball is taking in future scheduling of games beginning in 2023: every team has fewer divisional games, instead playing each other franchise at least one in a calendar year. Option B is instead to follow closely to what the NFL has done with their 32 teams divided into four divisions (North, South, East and West) in each of its two separate conferences (in our case the AL & NL).

Here’s a look at how each of those would break out:

Option A –

Option B –

While I personally think that Option A makes a lot more sense in the long term (and not just for baseball), we’ll explore Option B going forward as it’s undoubtedly the more palatable for a wide array of fans who are accustomed to celebrating division winners. Also it’s probably a more favorable option for owners of smaller market franchises who’d feel confident in their ability to make the playoffs more regularly and capitalize on that Postseason revenue.

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What does the Postseason look like?

Luckily for us, the new Collective Bargaining Agreement between MLB owners and the MLBPA laid the ground work for a 12 team Postseason for the foreseeable future. That actually helps with our new eight division landscape quite well, as the playoffs would feature four division winners and two wild card teams on each side of the bracket.

The Wild Card Round would look like this in both the AL & NL:

• The two division winners with the best records would get to bypass this round and head straight to the Division Series
• Wild Card 1: The division winners with the third best records would face off against the Wild Card teams with the worst record (the last team in the playoffs)
• Wild Card 2: The division winners with the fourth best records would face off against the Wild Card teams with the best record (the second to last team in the playoffs)
• All matchups would be a best of three series hosted exclusively by the division winners

The Division Series would look like this in both the AL & NL:

• The division winners with the best records would face off against the winner of Wild Card 2
• The division winners with the second best records would face off against the winner of Wild Card 1
• All matchups would be a best of five series where the team with the better record would host games 1, 2 and 5* while the team with the worse record would host games 3 and 4* (* = if necessary)

The Championship Series would look like this in both the AL & NL:

• The winners of each Division Series would face off against one another
• All matchups would be a best of seven series where the team with the better record would host games 1, 2, 6* and 7* while the team with the worse record would host games 3, 4 and 5* (* = if necessary)

The World Series would look like this:

• The winners of each Championship Series would face off against one another
• All matchups would be a best of seven series where the team with the better record would host games 1, 2, 6* and 7* while the team with the worse record would host games 3, 4 and 5* (* = if necessary)

To put this in perspective, the bracket below represents would be playoff teams in this format, based on 2021 win-loss records:

As you can see, the new divisional alignments play a major role in how things would shake out:

• In the new AL North, the White Sox still dominate, but get stuck facing the winner of the seemingly inevitable Yankees/Red Sox Wild Card showdown.
• In the new AL East, one win separates the division winner, the last team into the playoffs and a team who narrowly missed out.
• In the new AL South, the Astros get screwed by playing in the same division as the only team who had a better record than them in the American League.
• In the new AL West, the Mariners get to shock the world and break a massive playoff drought.
• On the NL side of things, the Phillies getting a chance to win their Atlanta-less division and break a playoff drought of their own.

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How do they get their players?

We really don’t have to reinvent the wheel for this expansion. Back in 1998 when the Colorado Rockies and Tampa Bay Rays were added to the league, an expansion draft was held at the start of the previous offseason that enabled the new franchises to put together a roster by pulling players from the already established teams in the league.

It’s hardly the most enjoyable thing to watch for the supporters of existing ball clubs, as some fan favorites and exciting young prospects get ripped away from your squad, but it’s a necessary way to enforce a level playing field for the newly established franchises. It’d be hard to get behind a big league roster comprised exclusively of free agents that were deemed unworthy of a spot on any other team.

Not just anyone would be on the chopping block though, so Angels and Rays fans wouldn’t have to stress a Shohei Ohtani or Wander Franco exodus so soon after their arrivals to their respective teams. The draft operates so that the Nashville Stars and Montreal Expos could pick any player not on the protected lists of the 30 other teams, although no team can lose more than one player in a given round.

The protected list for each team consists of:

• For the first round, 15 players from the rosters of their entire organization—both their 40-man roster, plus all minor league affiliates. All players in an organization are eligible to be drafted, except for the following:
  • Players with a minimum of six years of major league experience, who are set to become free agents in that coming offseason
  • Players (who had signed at age 19 or older) with no prior major league experience, who had spent less than three years on the payroll of an organization
  • Players (who had signed at age 18 or younger) with no prior major league experience, who had spent less than four years on the payroll of an organization
• Each team can add three more players to its protected list after each round

As with the 1997 expansion draft, the order will be determined by a coin toss. The winner of the toss could choose either:

1. The first overall pick in the expansion draft
2. Allow the other team to pick first and receive both the second and third overall expansion draft picks, as well as the right to pick first in all of the subsequent rounds of the expansion draft

Once the 70 rounds of the draft are completed, the teams would join the rest of Major League Baseball’s franchises in attempting to sign free agents or complete trades for players on existing contracts.

Right away you’d get a clear cut sense of team identities and how these franchises plan to operate in the immediate future. Perhaps one of them rolls the dice on several high-risk-high-reward veterans on less than team-friendly deals, just to take an early run at some playoff success. Maybe one elects to patiently poach from opposing farm systems, in the process, turning themselves into a juggernaut of the future.

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Conclusion

Major League Baseball has lost an unfortunate amount of steam since the steroid era. Pace of play problems, a lack of star power and an inability to stay out of its own way have led to the phrase “America’s Favorite Pastime” being used more sarcastically than not. There’s a desperate need for an injection of excitement, and expanding the league is a surefire way to do just that.

Just some of the things to look forward to here:

• A must-see live television expansion draft that’ll uniquely engage fans of every single team in the sport in a way typically reserved for the All-Star game
  • The important difference of course though being that this’ll have far-reaching consequences that extend passed simply the night of
• New cities getting a new professional sports team to root for.
• The creation of new divisions within baseball, and as a result, new rivalries can be formed that’ll captivate fans who have grown weary of seeing the same guaranteed matchups constantly
• Expanded intrigue in the playoffs, without having to actually expand them any further, which would only serve to lessen the prestige of a team who makes it in.

It’s a move that Major League Baseball has gone to time and again, and with good reason. So Mr. Manfred, I implore you to dust off the playbook of commissioners past, and get back some of the excitement you’ve played a role in draining from baseball!