Houston Astros to American League Not the End of the World

The worst-kept secret in Major League Baseball became even less of a secret on Wednesday.

An anonymous source told the Associated Press that a codicil added to the proposed sale of the Houston Astros from Drayton McLane to Houston businessman Jim Crane would see the team moved to the American League.

The Astros-to-the-AL talk has been buzzing for several months, and it's been met with some criticism.

This is understandable—for all our high-minded talk about change being good and something to embrace—most of us react to change much the same way a child reacts to a forkful of Brussels sprouts.

I've joked for years that there appears to be a sort of societal psychosis regarding change; we talk about how wonderful it is yet when asked to do it ourselves, our mantra becomes, "Any change is bad...always."

The move of the Astros to the American League West makes a lot of sense in the long run. While having two leagues of 15 teams each would necessitate constant interleague play, I've resigned myself to the idea that it is here to stay—whether I like it or not.

Realignment would allow flexibility to create schedules in baseball that are fairer.

The overload of divisional games seen in recent years may have helped forged some rivalries, but as a New York Yankee fan, I admit to tiring a bit of that seemingly interminable string of games against the Baltimore Orioles and Toronto Blue Jays.

The loser in a world with more balanced schedules, of course, would be ESPN. Those Red Sox-Yankees matchups the network loves to hype as the next game of the century would be gone.

Balancing the divisions to five teams apiece is long overdue. It's never made much sense to have six teams in the National League Central and four in the American League West, but by trying to avoid a full-fledged plunge into interleague scheduling, it was the best baseball could do.

For those worried about the move completely disrupting everything they hold near and dear, consider this: the Milwaukee Brewers switched leagues after the 1997 season. Despite cries from some circles that it was the end of the world as we knew it, we were just fine. The sun rose again and we adapted to the Brewers being in the National League rather than the American.

Texas Rangers president Nolan Ryan, while welcoming the notion of a divisional rival in Texas, expressed some misgivings about the idea because of Houston's half century of tradition in the National League.

I do have to call B.S. on the part of Ryan's statement where he told the AP he "grew up an Astros fan."

Nolan Ryan was born in 1947, 15 years before Houston became a major-league city. The team wasn't called the Astros for another three years afterward, changing its name from the Colt .45s to the Astros for the 1965 season.

At that point, Ryan was 18 years old. So I've got to ask myself, how exactly did he manage to grow up a fan of a team that didn't exist?

Not a huge deal, but it still bugged me.

This news comes as reports have surfaced that a new collective bargaining agreement is nearly done, without any of the strife endured by the NFL earlier this year or the NBA right now.

Expanded playoffs, balanced schedules, draft slotting and a so-called "competitive balance tax" are reportedly part of the new deal.

Which means I didn't get my wish—sadly, the designated hitter is not going away.