A true World Series: how MLB could implement a Champions League style tournament

Why would they do this?

Simple … money and brand growth. MLB is doing everything it can to grow baseball throughout the world. Japan, Korea, and Latin America have consistently shown that they can produce MLB-caliber talent. Baseball’s reach is now spreading into Europe and China as well.

Teams can earn prizes in tournaments of this caliber on top of revenue. In football (soccer), this is called “the purse.” This is something that all the leagues would “buy in” to as part of their association fees to be a part of the tournament.

An international MLB World Series

So here we are, time to create an end-of-year championship that takes the best teams around the world and creates a true World Series. First, what leagues should be included? Ultimately, it will have to be summer leagues with decent followings: Major League Baseball (United States and Canada), Nippon Professional Baseball (Japan), Mexican League (Mexico), KBO League (Korea), Chinese Professional Baseball League (Taiwan), China Baseball League (China), Australian Baseball League (Australia), Honkbal Hoofdklasse (Netherlands) and Italian Baseball League (Italy). It feels wrong to leave out so much of the Caribbean, as most of those leagues operate as Winter Leagues. So, for this experiment, we are going to include the Dominican, Columbian, and Venezuelan Professional Leagues as well. This assumes that they will adjust their schedules or work with long breaks to attend the competition. We have 12 leagues competing, so how should they be seeded?

These 12 leagues are only about one-fifth of the UEFA. Using that rough amount, about 18 teams should enter the qualifying round. Six teams automatically qualify and the remaining 12 teams compete for the last two spots in the bracket. Competing will be the 12 champions, two additional teams from the top-ranked league, and one additional team from the second- and third-ranked leagues.

Automatic qualifiers: Champions for leagues ranked one through four, and the runner-ups for leagues ranked one and two.

The qualifying bracket will contain the remaining eight league champions, the Rank 1 league third place, and the Rank 3 league runner-up. The qualifying bracket will have three rounds. Round one will have the league champions ranked seven thru 12 play each other in three-game series while the Rank 1 league third place, Rank 3 league runner-up, and the Rank 5 and 6 league champions would receive a bye round. From there, the Rank 1 league third place receives a second bye-round while the other teams continue with another round of three-game series. The winners of the third round (again only a three-game series) then qualify for the tournament.

To avoid teams having too much rest, a round-robin tournament may be best to determine seeding or group stage placement.

From there are two options: First, a round-robin group stage that results in four teams moving on into the knockout bracket (this is like what the UEFA does). Second, the more traditional playoff bracket. For the sake of keeping things similar to the UEFA for the article, we will look at the round-robin.

To determine the round-robin tournament groups, teams will be placed into pots based on performance and then placed into their groups based on how they are drawn. Seeds 1 and 2 will always headline their group, but the league officials will draw the remaining teams for placement. For example, seeds 3 and 4 could be selected for either 1 or 2’s group so that a group could vary from 1, 3, 5, 7 to 1, 4, 6, 8. Each team will play six games against the other teams in their division (two against each team) and then the top two teams will move onto the elimination bracket.

The elimination bracket would consist of two rounds, both seven-game series, culminating in the true World Series.

Things MLB would need to change

Honestly, MLB would have to change very little of its structure to implement this style of tournament. The biggest thing would be that the season would have to be shortened to 144 games, if not something even smaller like 130 games, player longevity, and health are something that needs to be looked after. Going all the way from the first qualification round to the last game of the championship could be adding up to 29 additional games to a team’s season.

The main thing that would have to change is a series to determine the league’s third-place team. This could run concurrently with the MLB Championship (former World Series). But this would be a simple thing to tack onto the end of the season and give the NL and AL runner-ups something to play for.

An example

The best way to picture something like this is by seeing it work in action. Using results from last year and the WBC from earlier this year, we can picture how this year’s UEFA would have looked. League rankings were based on traditional skill levels of the leagues represented (NPB is usually referred to as AAAA ball, which is why they are ranked second, for example):

Conclusion

Will MLB offer a UEFA-style tournament? No, probably not, but it sure is a fun experiment.

I think we could see exhibition matches happen against international teams during spring training. Could this tournament take place during spring training, similar to the WBC? This could result in it being taken less serious by the superstars, but it would need to start somewhere.

I envision stories of small teams from Italy or Colombia making it through the World Series. Baseball’s growth worldwide has been satiated with the World Baseball Classic thus far. I guess I will just never be content with how it is called the “World Series.” Without actually featuring teams from throughout the world, it feels cheap. Baseball is becoming an international sport, its championship should reflect that.

But I guess a guy can dream.

Information for this article was found using Wikipedia and Baseball-Reference