"We need to do things fans want," Bud Selig said Thursday, but realignment has little to do with fans. Baseball keeps pointing to polling that shows the masses support the concept, but such numbers are merely props. What matters is that Selig and his grim-faced minions want to maximize revenue.
Time was, team owners were thought of as sportsmen. The breed has been rendered all but extinct. Baseball is now controlled by a gaggle of glorified accountants. Why realign? To have more starting times in the prime viewing hours. What will that do? Help pry more money out of TV. And where will that money go? To those aforementioned fans in the form of a rebate?Yeah, buddy. That check's in the mail. Elvis licked the envelope himself.
Realignment is baseball's way of rearranging the deck furniture on the Titanic. Does it matter who plays where if the games remain 3-plus-hour snooze-a-thons? Is the kid who has posters of Jordan and Shaquille and Penny wallpapering his bedroom apt to switch allegiance just because the Giants switch leagues?
What needs realigning is the game itself. Make it faster. Put a clock on the pitchers. Make the batter stay in the box. Invoke a ceiling on mound visits by catchers/coaches/managers. Cut the commercial time between innings. And don't say such streamlining isn't do-able, for it was once done as a matter of course: Game 7 of the 1971 World Series ended 2-1 and took 2:10; Game 6 of the 1995 World Series ended 1-0 and took 3:02.
But the accountants in charge want no part of that. They have smaller fish to fry. Speaking on behalf of the owners, Stan Kasten said Thursday that baseball wants "to better reach out to fans" and to serve "30 different sets of circumstances and needs." What Kasten failed to acknowledge was that these are entirely separate agendas.
Baseball should be more than the sum of 30 separate franchises. The whims of the Chicago White Sox may be utterly opposed to the Best Interests of the Game.
Kasten likened the task of juggling "30 separate needs, 30 different histories" to "three-dimensional chess." ESPN reported that the number of varying realignment plans has grown to 121. Said Selig: "We've looked at more maps than Magellan." Which is what accountants do: They create their matrixes and total up permutations, but they lack any semblance of a grand vision.
Realignment as a concept is not heresy. At some point it may even be necessary. Kasten spoke of the need to embrace "the current generation of fans as well as the fans of the next century." But what nobody has yet explained is just how realignment will do that.
"By giving (fans) better races," Kasten ventured, "and interleague play in blocks, and more intrastate rivalries - those are all pluses." They will, alas, be overridden by a greater minus: That a game once great has been allowed to turn stale, and that the men in charge have mistaken cosmetic change for cosmic.