If it was Good Enough for the Mick…
Let us assume for the moment that baseball does indeed expand to 32 teams, as seems their hope. Bear in mind that part of the reason for this is to decrease travel and expense.
Baseball would at that point split into two tiers; this is the model for the Premier League.
I heard a caller try to explain this to New York Yankees announcer Michael Kay one day, but the Kayster immediately assumed the caller meant something akin to the minor leagues.
That would mean pro players would be back to riding buses and playing in much smaller stadiums; no one is proposing that. In fact, this would not affect the Minors. No, teams would continue to live and play exactly as they do now. And that includes the major league teams.
One change, though, to the regular season would be the loss of three regular-season games, settling on a number between what the New York Yankees and Mickey Mantle played under in the Fifties versus the Sixties. Hold your judgment on that until you see the playoff ramifications.
Or Even After That
The upper tier would hold 20 teams; those would be the teams with the 20 best records from the previous year. That already makes the transition from the current system somewhat smooth.
These 20 teams would go back to four divisions, as MLB had until 1994. And the playoff format would be mostly the same as it is now with ten of the twenty teams making the playoffs. The difference would be that this ten would be half of the league, as opposed to its current one-third.
That will hopefully serve as an incentive to win now, every year. And there will be additional incentives when we get to the draft order.
My preference is that the league use those regained regular season games to play two simultaneous series of three games each, for the bottom four teams. Those two winners, along with the six top finishers, would then play rounds of five, seven and seven games. Again, that part is very familiar.
That, combined, would adequately replace the regular season TV and gate revenue for the playoff teams.