A Modest Baseball Proposal Part 1

professional leagues, as well as Cuba's amateur league, plus the champions of the smaller amateur leagues and American Independent Leagues), and create a 64 team "World Series Tournament"!!!

 

The tournament would be held in January in the most fun and weather-friendly places around America: Miami, San Diego, Las Vegas, (someone hire a contractor to make Sam Boyd Stadium baseball compatible), and New Orleans.

Matt, foreign clubs, let alone amateur teams cannot compete with an MLB squad.

Wrong. Well, kind of wrong. In baseball, any team has a chance to win one game against any other team if their pitcher gets hot or the better team has an off-day. That's why baseball playoffs are played in a series. It gives the better team more of a chance not to be upset in one game. In this tournament, we eliminate the series effect until the end. From round 1 until the Elite 8, the tournament will be set up as a one game playoff. The last four teams will play a three game series to get to the finals, and a three game series to determine the champion. This will give every team a better chance, and generate more interest from foreign audiences who don't want to watch their team get slaughtered in a series. 

 

On top of that, the winning team will play ten games at the most, minimizing the chances of an injury that will affect them when the MLB season starts. Almost any team can catch lightning in a bottle for 10 games. Imagine a Dutch team upsetting the Cubs, (Cubs fans can already see it), an Independent team knocking out the Hanshin Tigers, or an amateur squad from any country becoming the 2006 George Mason of the tournament, and having the world outside the Bronx get behind them when they have to face the New York Yankees. The Nielsen Ratings system would crack, and international attention would be brought to this awesome party of a tournament. The winner would be the real "World Series Champion", and every baseball club owner would go into an epileptic shock just dreaming about the publicity and revenue he could get from that title. That would be enough to convince him to let his players go out there for ten games before spring training.

When it is all over, the casual fan like you or I will be left in a better state than when we started. There will be debates ranging between how the tournament should be changed, (especially if the team we support is upset early), which players from other leagues would we want on our MLB team, (Dice-K from the first WBC is the best example), and how the game is played with different styles in different areas. We as fans would get a better appreciation for baseball by seeing it played in different styles, and baseball itself would globalize further as other countries decide they want in on this party-tournament action. Really, if baseball can't make the world a better place, perhaps nothing can.

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