[Syd Thrift]

I realize that the history of baseball was 8 team leagues but I feel like 8 is too many. 5 or 6 feels about right; enough for a couple teams to be rebuilding without gifting a division title to an 82 game winner (although the Mets won the NL East one year with 83 wins in the 70s and of course the Twins won the WS in '87 on 85 wins so it can still happen) but not so big that some teams feel like the best they can ever hope for is a distant 3rd. 7 is probably too many as well, much as I enjoyed the AL divisions of my youth. 8 back in the day was "doable" only because roughly half the teams in any given year were no-hopers and many of those teams were perennially that way, especially in the AL.

I'd be somewhat amenable to a realignment, being a fan of the team with the worst travel schedule in all of baseball, but I'm not a huge fan of the "hey, let's break up the Cubs and Cardinals so that they can play the White Sox" stuff. I feel like any kind of realignment like this really needs to take traditional rivalries into account. The Yankees and Red Sox need to be together, as do the Cubs and Cards, Giants and Dodgers, Angels and their own butts because they have the face of a butt, and so on.