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If You Don’t Like This Proposed MLB Re-Alignment, You’re Just Not AL NorthBEAST Material
By Kyle Pagan
Published:
What do we think about this MLB re-alignment?
As a Phillies fan I love it and if you don’t you’re just not AL NorthBEAST material. Give me 50+ division games against the Yankees, Red Sox, and Mets over some sleepy weekend series against the Marlins and Nats. I want the 10-game road trip up the Northeastern Seaboard. Imagine the legendary Amtrak rides you could take, making memories with your buddies one summer. Give me the most brutal fanbases motherfucking each other for 162 a year at the park and on social media. I want it to be an arms race in the NorthBEAST because no team is allowed to just sit around and not spend while their opponents are getting better. Stacking four top-10 payroll teams in one division? BRUTAL! Sign me up. Entertainment galore. The entire league would run through the NorthBEAST like college football runs through the SEC. We’d be the cream of the crop. A division title would feel like winning a World Series getting through this gauntlet. You’d get to see star after star play at CBP. Maybe as a child of the Steroid Era I grew up on dingers and I let it mold the way I consume baseball forever. Maybe I don’t care about tradition in baseball and that’s why I love this. I loved the addition of the pitch clock and the DH in the NL and I’m going to love the ABS system when they implement that next season. I don’t even care that with this re-alignment the Phillies would be in the AL. NL, AL, who gives a shit:
I can understand baseball purists hating these changes, but Manfred doesn’t care about you. He’s fighting his own arms race with twenty other sports leagues around the globe for eyeballs and he’s going to try and acquire those eyeballs anyway he can. They’re thinking about how the next generation, who has an attention span of a goldfish, is going to watch 162 games of nine inning baseball (the MLB season should be shortened but we’re not ready for that conversation yet). The re-alignment is a solid start. Crosstown rivalries, old school rivalries, a mixture of consistent shitty and consistent good teams, and geographical sense. It’s all there!
Now sure there are drawbacks to this. The NorthBEAST would be a blood bath. There’s a good chance to raise a banner you’ll need 95+ wins a year. Winning a NorthBEAST division title would feel like winning the World Series some years. On the other end you might need 85 wins to take home the AL Mid-Atlantic crown. For the people who don’t think the Phillies would ever win their division check the overall standings this year and let me know what team would’ve finished first:
MLB would also need to do a complete overhaul of the playoff system. They should adopt the NBA system, where the top seven or eight teams in each conference make the playoffs, but everyone is seeded by overall record. There’s also a problem with the small market teams continuing to not spend. But I don’t see where that’s a Phillies issue. That’s a Rob Manfred issue and it’s been plaguing the game for decades. Maybe as the commissioner you should tell these owners making a mockery of your sport to get in line. A salary cap of course would probably help with this, but I don’t know enough about the pros and cons to talk about it. Some people in Philly won’t want to lose the Braves rivalry, but to me that one has become so one-sided I’d say sayonara. The Braves don’t even come close to working me into a rage like the Mets do and the good news is you have two new, more hateful fanbases to talk shit to. Your WIP Uncle today ain’t complaining about MLB taking the Cubs, Cardinals, and Pirates from the NL East in 1994. They won’t complain in the future either. It’ll just be the greatest baseball one has ever seen. The only thing I hate is the name of the division. AL Northeast sounds like the name of a VFW in Mayfair. Keep it AL East or AL Coast or better yet make it AL BEAST!
Kyle writes blog posts and does Man on the Street-style videos all around Philadelphia. He graduated from Temple University (a basketball school) in 2015. contact: k.pagan@sportradar.com