Feeling a Draft
The upper tier would follow the same pattern. Starting with pick 13, the teams would choose based on wins, not losses, in the regular season. That makes it much worse to finish last in the upper tier than in the lower.
This punishes the tankers and creates intense competition among these twenty teams, without guaranteeing the top team a great player in the draft.
That makes it a lot harder to wait to sign the most talented free agents.
And of course, for those who know their English Soccer League, the biggest prize is that the top four teams in the lower tier will move up to the premier league for the following season. That would be matched by a demotion for the bottom four teams in the upper tier.
Think of the natural progression this would facilitate. Let’s say you are the worst team in baseball. In your first year in the lower tier, you add one or two free agents; neither is likely to be one of the top talents in all of baseball or the most expensive. At the end of the season, you finish sixth.
You got into the playoffs and increased your revenue for the year over what you would have made in the upper tier (because you would not have been good enough to qualify for their playoffs), and you also got the number six pick in the draft.
Keep it Rolling
The next year, you add one or two more free agents, one of them perhaps a top talent. This time you finish second in the regular season. You get the second overall pick, the ability to go deep into these lesser playoffs due to your free agents–which means being on TV longer–and a move to the premier league.
And your fans got to watch you play into the middle of October, at least.
But you cannot afford to throw away those years of work by finishing in the bottom four the following year; you’d get the lowest pick in the draft. And you have already been spending just to get here. Only making the playoffs in the upper tier can ever save you; fortunately half of the teams are going to qualify.
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Time to really go for it now. Time to compete with the New York Yankees and Houston Astros of the world.
And the same is true for a team that cannot compete at the top. You need to be able to rebuild without empty stadiums in August and meaningless games on TV in September.
Going down to the bottom will assure you a top-twelve pick, but you cannot rebuild with that. But the next year, you can start rebuilding via free agency, get a top-six pick and into your playoffs all at the same time…and stay on TV longer.
Oh Boy
Look, there are many stumbling blocks to this almost impossible plan. For instance, the DH. Nothing could even begin discussing until that is settled, and that alone is monumental. But the question we should ask is, does the game need to change? And how?
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Right now, the answer is no; the game does not need anywhere near this type of radical realignment. But it might someday, ten or twenty years from now. I think this plan would be a great solution; notice I wrote, a, not, the. For you readers and critics, feel free to laugh at this.
Now, feel free to put up your ideas. I put my thoughts down on paper, er, computer and opened myself up to ridicule. Now, let’s see which one you nuts has got any guts.