Solution 2: One new league with two divisions — NPB (NPB Central and NPB Pacific)
Playoffs
If NPB merged into MLB, I could see the whole thing being brought in as a new league. This would be more difficult from a playoff logistics perspective. There is now a third league vying for the World Series. There are a few ways that MLB could work around this:
1. Blow up the current league structure and reorganize into three leagues in North America (four total leagues in MLB)
This would be the easiest to implement and provides a similar expansion opportunity to that I listed above. This would give MLB the goal of having three 12-team leagues in North America to work towards. Each league would be divided into two six-team divisions and playoff rules would be changed. For this, I would be a fan of a 16-team playoff (four teams per league). This would consist of a divisional round, League Championship Series, the World Semifinals, and, finally, the World Series.
How MLB aligns this would probably deal heavily with geography, minimizing travel to offset the cost of traveling to Japan at least once per year. But that isn’t the only way MLB could do it…
2. Give the league with the highest interleague winning percentage a delayed playoff start (essentially a bye week for the entire league)
This second solution would be interesting. A three-league MLB would see three different league champions each year. How can one have a World Series with three different league champions? Well, you give the team from the best league a bye week while the other two hash it out for the final World Series slot.
Many will be quick to point out that bye weeks are not always a good thing in baseball (my precious 2007 Colorado Rockies lost all their momentum going into the World Series thanks to a break that lasted over a week). The solution? Give the entire league (as in NL, AL, or NPB) a bye week at the beginning of playoffs. The league with the best interleague winning percentage will start upon the conclusion of the other two leagues’ Wild Card Rounds.
Playoffs can remain the same as they currently are, though this means first and second seeds could go as long as seven days without playing a game (at most three games for other leagues’ Wild Card Rounds and then at most three games for their own league’s Wild Card Round plus one rest/travel day).
Scheduling
Ok, so, believe it or not, the NPB being brought in as a whole new league actually makes the scheduling thing easier. All you would have to do is reduce the amount of interleague games from two-, three-, or four-game series to having every interleague matchup be only a two-game series. This means that every United States-based team would only have to spend about 12 games (six two-game series) a year in Japan and Japanese teams would have around 30 games (15 two-game series) in the U.S. each year. This would be ideal as it cuts down on travel time significantly.
Depending on how you implement NPB into MLB, this could become an uneven split. If MLB brought NPB in as a new league alone (three MLB Leagues total), each Japanese team would play 60 interleague games while North American teams would only play 54. Additional contests or extended series among “interleague rivals” could continue as they did before trying and even up the number of interleague games.
A final note on MLB International Expansion
Will the NPB be merged with MLB? Probably not. But the World Baseball Classic really makes me wonder if it should be. The fans, the atmosphere, and the competition were all top-notch. To see another continent care about baseball as much, if not more, than North America is refreshing when people were declaring the game dead not too long ago.
International expansion may not be as far as people think. MLB is increasing its international series every single year, branching out into more European and Latin American countries. Personally, if I were MLB commissioner, I would run at least one series a year in Japan, potentially more.
Baseball is growing and the World Baseball Classic is becoming a sensation, so it only makes sense for MLB to capitalize. Let’s turn the World Series into what its title implies, a true World Championship.
Data for this article was provided by Nippon Professional Baseball, Wikipedia, Baseball-Reference, World Baseball Softball Confederation, Japanesebaseball.com, The Japan Times, Forbes, and MLB.com