Quote:
Originally Posted by David Watts
Not a big 4 team division fan, but if it is the future, I vote do away with interleague play and go with the 30 games against teams in your division and 6 against the other subleague teams.
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That proposal has two drawbacks: (1) That's an awful lot of games against the same three opponents. In the real world fans may well get sick of seeing the same few opposing teams over and over and over. (2) That many games against such a small number of divisional opponents can lead to unbalanced results if one team is particularly dominant or one team particularly weak.
Something to note from MLB historical results is that the more divisions there have been the lower the average winning percentage of a division winner. From 1901-68, for example, the average winning percentage of a first-place club was .634 (that's the equivalent of 102.7 wins in a 162-game schedule). From 1969-93, the era of two divisions, the average winning percentage of a division winner was .593 (96.0 wins). From 1995-2013, the period of three divisions and wild card, the average winning percentage of a division winner was .587 (95.0 wins). The average winning percentage of a wild card qualifier was .572 (92.6 wins).
The more divisions there are in a league the more difficult it becomes to find the proper balance between divisional and non-divisional games. Three divisions is more problematic than two, and four divisions is more problematic than three.