One New York Life

I moved to New York City in October 2005. While there were infinite differences from the upstate area I grew up in; one I distinctly remember happened in the summer of 2006. I escorted my cousin to Grand Central Terminal on an early Saturday morning so she could catch an airport shuttle. It was the first time I experienced a summer-in-the-city morning — that brief window of perfect weather and temperature before the cab horns, sirens, bus exhaust, blacktop heat radiation, and tourist traffic take over the streets. It was so perfect, I decided to walk the 3.5 miles home to Lower Manhattan.

At the time, I hadn’t started watching soccer and I was only dimly aware the World Cup was happening. On this day, the city was thrumming with it. Any Manhattan bars with a European or sports’ theme were packed full at 8:30 AM. I was intrigued — not because I was particularly interested in soccer, but I was interested in a culture where people were drinking at 9:00 AM and it was OK. I had walked in to an English-styled pub at 9:00 am mobbed with fans to watch England/Paraguay. That single match got me started. Months later on a hungover Saturday morning, I’d discover both Fox Soccer Channel’s live broadcasts of English Premier League matches and the fact that morning soccer with understated British commentators is, perhaps, the greatest thing to watch on television during a hangover in the history of television and hangovers.

I discovered over the next five years that European soccer is run better than American sports in nearly every way except treating their fans like abused spouses (in which the NFL excels). From handling of youth athletics (teams are more likely to provide for, educate, and train players from a young age instead of pawning them off on high school and colleges where they must remain dirt poor with no incentive to educate themselves until they enter a professional league with no idea how to balance a checkbook or be rich) to their league structure to banning secondary ticket market sales to keep ticket costs reasonable. England’s league structure includes 92 professional teams in four tiers. Those teams can achieve promotion or relegation based on their on-field performance. Teams with superstars stay better. Teams that don’t wish to participate in the unchecked spending of players continue to have competitive games in a league that closer matches their talent level.

Can we apply this to baseball?

With baseball examining radical re-alignment that would further dilute the leagues, why not finally address the giant elephant in the room: that some teams — either by choice (Pirates) or front-office incompetence (Royals) simply can’t compete with the rest of the league. Since that is the case, why not start talking about separating the leagues again but, this time, instead of doing it by historical American/National lines, do it by skill? Why not consider creating a relegation league?

Let’s address the most common misconception first. Relegation does not mean demoting the Athletics to the Pacific Coast League or having the Buffalo Bisons promoted to the NL East. This doesn’t work for many reasons. It’s logistically impossible as Triple A stadiums aren’t equipped for a Major League crowd. Triple A players are not Major League players for a reason. Most importantly, minor league clubs are affiliates of major league clubs so there’d be no way to handle the Buffalo Bisons and the New York Mets being in the same league. Relegation in Major League Baseball means the following: the creation of a second league (for our purposes we’ll call it MLB2) that does not ever play the first league.

MLB2 creation is easy: take either the 10 or 12 lowest winning percentages in the league following a given season. Given leagues of 18 and 12, the 18 team league divides cleanly in to 162 (9) and the 12 team league gets at least two home and two away series with each other team. In the case of 20 and 10, the league sets itself up for expansion. Talent dilution aside, adding two teams to MLB2 would allow baseball to expand in to currently untapped markets like Portland. The relegation league already addresses one of the problems with expansion: the decade it takes the team to be competitive while hemorrhaging new fans. With MLB2, the expansion team would be competing with rebuilding teams. Let’s presume a 20/10 split because, ultimately, I think baseball wants to expand and in my fictional scenario the Mets don’t get demoted in the inaugural year of a new league that was my idea. If there is a tie at the relegation line, we have a seven-game series for the final spot in the league. Based on 2010′s standings, would you watch a Mets/Brewers series in which the loser got booted from the league? You’d watch the heck out of that.

Taking the top 20 and the bottom 10 given 2010′s final standings, the new leagues look like this:

By placing the dividing line at Chicago most, if not all, the primary rivalries (Dodgers/Giants, Yankees/Red Sox, Cubs/Cardinals) are maintained, some old rivalries (Phillies/Pirates) are restored, new rivalries are created (Braves/Red Sox, Nationals/Orioles), and a new focus gets placed on both intrastate (Indians/Reds, Rangers/Astros) and intracity (Yankees/Mets, Dodgers/Angels, Cubs/White Sox) rivalries. It also gives us the chance to expand the playoffs while not expanding the number of playoff teams. Note the Brewers in the East. It’s not ideal, but there are 16 teams Chicago or West and 14 teams to the East. The Brewers get screwed until we get two more teams. Sorry, Milwaukee — don’t be so open to switching leagues in the future and thus not having any long-term rivals. Hopefully this could be addressed with expansion.

With baseball’s (misguided) insistence on adding additional wildcard teams, it moves closer to the other sport’s situation in which under .500 teams get in to the playoffs. As more teams are added, it becomes less likely the best two teams — as determined over six months instead of two weeks — meet in the World Series. Adding the second league, though, we get two entirely different sets of playoffs with two entirely different sets of prizes. More playoffs mean more fans engaged further in to the season without diluting the World Series.

MLB’s playoffs are simple. It’s for the World Series. The top 3 teams from each division are selected. The two and three play a three-game series for the right to play in the MLB West Championship Series and the MLB East Championship Series. I chose three games because a six to seven day layoff may be detrimental to the division winner. One of baseball’s problems is there is currently no benefit to paying for the one seed. This accomplishes that goal. The one-seed gets a brief rest and a guaranteed ticket. The two and three must play in, using their pitchers and adding extra travel.

MLB2′s playoffs are limited only by how many teams are promoted. My preference is three with the following rules. The top two teams in each division are automatically promoted to their MLB division. For the third, take the two and three from each division, have them playoff, and the winners then play in the MLB2 World Series for the third promotional spot to their MLB division. Imagine your team finishing in the bottom two relegation zone in MLB and their future is now governed by a series they’re not playing in. Again, would you watch that? Of course you would.

Whenever relegation is mentioned, everyone is quick to talk about why it wouldn’t work because of the misunderstanding with Triple A. What they never talk about is the creation of an actual financial penalty for bad owners. Right now, owners have no financial stake in winning. What if the revenue sharing pool was league-exclusive? Right now, the Pirates’ owner has no incentive to get better. According to the oft-cited Deadspin article (in which I’m actually going to cite the NY Times because I can’t find the Deadspin link), the Pirates pulled in about $70M in revenue sharing for about $30M in profit. The Pirates have not finished a season over .500 in 20 years. In a city as sports crazy as Pittsburgh, that should actually be impossible. If MLB2 was half the size of MLB, and MLB2 only revenue shared with each other (with payments for some number of years after relegation so teams with long term contracts don’t go bankrupt), aren’t we creating a financial penalty that matters? Suddenly, the owner in the relegation league doesn’t have all the large-market revenue sharing checks at his disposal. Wouldn’t that kind of financial incentive make an owner care?

Ultimately, the question that matters is “why does it work for fans?” The argument against is always “won’t fans not go to games in the relegation league?” To that I ask, simply, why do fans go to games at Kaufmann Stadium or PNC Park now? They don’t believe at the beginning of every season they have a shot at the World Series, despite the clockwork “on April 1st, everyone has a chance” columns written on schedule when the temperature starts warming. Losing seasons affect attendance, but not enough to prevent a perennial loser from turning an eight-figure profit. In MLB2, aren’t we giving fans a chance to see a good season against similar competition with their own World Series? On the top end, doesn’t it make a trimmed-down MLB competitive to the last day of the season? The threat of relegation with the top three in the playoffs means the top five or six teams in each division are in the playoff race until September while the bottom four or five will be fighting to say out of the bottom two relegation zone. There’s no more mailing in August and September when being in the bottom two leaves the team open to demotion. On the lower end, we’re putting six of ten teams in a promotion playoff. We’ve made a case where nearly 3/4ths of the league is playing meaningful games late in to the season. Isn’t that good for fans?

The final thing to address is how relegation league teams rebuild. It’s likely that superstar free agents would tend to shy away from signing in MLB2 (though as Jason Werth proved in 2011, if you pay them, they will come). More importantly, slightly redesign the draft. The relegation league would get the first round entirely to themselves. Next, the relegation league would get any compensation picks from free agent losses. Then the draft would proceed as it does now. In this way, the top dozen or so prospects from each draft are sent to the teams that need them the most. This accomplishes two things. First, as the Rays (recently) and Twins (forever) have proven, this is the most efficient way to rebuild. Second, it decreases the chance that top draftees will decline to sign with their relegation league team since they will likely always be selected by a relegation league team. If we combined this new draft with a slotting system (to decrease signability problems) and extend the drafting rights of relegation league teams to two years (to decrease holding out) and suddenly there’s a draft system that’s amazingly efficient at getting the best prospects to the most needy teams.

What negatives does this system create that don’t already exist now? Free agents currently don’t choose to go to the worst teams. Second tier teams currently have attendance issues. The only group adversely affected by this change are bad owners who put uncompetitive teams on the field for two straight decades. These owners are vastly outnumbered by good owners. Owning a team should not grant an unalienable right to be bad and make money through taxpayer funded stadiums and revenue sharing. As fans, we get back to a more balanced schedule, unified rules (in either direction, though I’d prefer removing the DH while promising the MLBPA two additional teams), and have two competitive leagues with a revitalized All Star Game. Don’t sleep on how this structure helps the All Star Game. The relegation league has something to prove. The top league actually has pride on the line.

Ultimately, I know the league probably wouldn’t consider it as they’d prefer to pretend the income disparity between the three largest markets and everyone else in the regional sports cable network era doesn’t exist. This type of realignment gives the smaller market teams extra access to rebuilding strategies that doesn’t involve spending infinite amounts of money. It adds playoff shares to teams that would otherwise never make the playoffs and encourages even bad teams to play late in to the season by either playing for the playoffs or to stay out of the relegation zone. Finishing second to last would be bad. Finishing last gets you kicked out of the league. If the Pirates still can’t figure out how to make this work and they go bankrupt? Well, let another owner try to figure it out.

It won’t happen, but it’s fun to talk about. Baseball had two distinct leagues for many years. Having them again — especially in this world where baseball has its own cable channel to feature whatever it wants — isn’t a bad thing. It makes competition better across the board and finally, finally, gives owners an incentive not to be perennial losers.

As evidenced by the “where have I been” post, this trip happened in November.

1) I was happy when I got off the train to discover that DC cabs now have a meter instead of the inexplicable “make up a price” zone system. On the other hand, they’re able to just randomly add unclear fees. When I got off the train, the driver added a $1.00 fee to the meter. No idea why. When PLR used the cab from the train station, they told her they added a $1.50 fee to use the trunk. When the two of us rode together, they added a $1.50 “additional passenger” fee. On a positive note, they didn’t actively try to screw the tourists. At least not the ones coming out of the train station. They must save that for the airport.

2) DC has a lot of homeless people. I mean, a LOT of homeless people. It says something about our country that the seat of the federal government is overrun with homeless people sitting in the shadow of the Capitol and the White House… and it’s probably nothing good. On the half mile walk from our hotel to the White House, the homeless were shaking change cups at about a 3 person/block clip. In front of the Department of Veteran’s Affairs… forget it. For all the military flag-waving that happens inside Washington, they don’t have to wave them very hard to find a homeless, crazy veteran. Maybe they’re not all legit vets, but I’m pretty sure a lot of them are.

3) The Brickskeller: I first went here on a DC trip I took in 2004. He discovered it in 1999 during his semester “abroad” in Washington. The place had a lot of beers on the menu back then. Since 2003, craft beers have gotten, um, trendy, so the bar features 1,000 bottled beers (no draughts) from something like 25 countries. I always get a little flustered at places like this because there are just SO many choices that I want to be careful to not get something I’ve had before. PLR, for instance, found a pumpkin cider. The food is OK pub food. PLR got a turkey sandwich and I got a hamburger and mushroom pizza. The waitress forgot our appetizer cheese plate so we ordered it for dessert. If I come back, I need to check out the upstairs bar which actually has a draught system. Addendum: The time this post has spent as a draft is betrayed by the fact this bar has since closed and been renamed The Bier Baron. While I’m happy I got to the Brickskeller one more time, I’m not surprised it changed over. The bartender didn’t know where to find the first three beers I ordered, and the waitresses told me they were out of two things even though I had seen them in the coolers behind the bar. The new place gives me an excuse to go back again.

4) The Logan Tavern: we looked for a place with a Saturday Brunch and found this place because it was within a few blocks of our hotel and I found the “build your own Bloody Mary” gimmick intriguing. We got there at 10:45 and were one of the first few people waiting otuside for its 11 AM open time. By 11:15 AM it was full. Food was great — avocado benedict for PLR and crab cake benedict for me… the Bloody Mary I chose was Grey Goose and Balsamic with Celery, Dill, and Lemon. Biggest complaint here was the service. The waiter started off pretty attentive but at the end of the meal sent a different server over with our bill without actually coming to see if we wanted anything else… which I did… more coffee. Discovering that I like balsamic vinegar in a bloody mary, though…… priceless.

5) I’ve had the “which city is better” debate with friends who live in the NOVA/DC area. I usually declare victory because none of the folks who defend DC ever actually live in DC. I maintain my position. Everything seems to shut down kind of early, getting to useful things like Nationals Park and airport are a pain, and restaurants/bars have thrown up an 0-fer in service. Granted, getting to Manhattan from NY’s airports is a bit of a pain, but once you’re here getting around is easy and the service, in general, is good. In DC, I consistently felt rushed. Believe me, I’m not one to languish around sipping tap-water after my meal, but it would be nice if I could, you know, finish a glass of wine without being hovered around.

6) However, the one place where I didn’t feel that way was Martin’s Tavern in Georgetown. Martin’s had a nice, pubby feel to it and friendly service with a conversational bartender. PLR and the female bartender had a rather lengthy conversation about warm spiced apple cider. This led to the bartender plying PLR with a selection of her own experimental cocktails involving some form of spiced cider including mixtures with champagne and elderflower. Patrons were also particularly helpful in finding us a neighborhood restaurant for dinner… where the service kinda sucked for pretty tasty Thai food.

7) While I do love Georgetown and try to get there whenever we go to DC — even with the improved cab situation — it is a pain. I find it baffling that a city housing a federal government that falls in love with mass transit has never extended the city’s train lines to get out there. I am sure there is a geographic or cost/benefit reason for the lack of transport but it’s still annoying. I know I’m spoiled by what is probably the best transit system in the United States, maybe the federal government could investigate improving the public transportation in their own seat before trying to get the country as a whole to adopt it?

8) This year was the first time I really got to see the World War 2 Memorial in its full glory. It is really a wonderful structure. For some reason, it gives me a feeling the Vietnam Memorial doesn’t. I can’t explain why… maybe the WW2 Veterans just have a more mythical, legendary status. I mean, the stereotypical WW2 vet is a dude who went over there, took care of business, came home, and didn’t go (publicly) crazy. This ties in to my working theory that people were harder and saltier when they had to go to the bathroom in outhouses. I’m sure the rate of guys who came back crazy were the same — they just had less press.

9) PLR and I have a tendency to make use of the hotel bar for a nightcap. This trip to DC was no different as both evenings ended with drinks and snacks before bed. On one evening we were at the hotel’s odd oval bar when a group of guys in suits — obviously a dime a dozen in DC — sat at the bar and started having a few drinks. Within 15 minutes, a young lady walked up to them and started loudly asking them for a drink. Shortly thereafter, she sat down with them and was desperately trying to be funny while making semi-disparaging comments about the help. The following exchanged occurred:

PLR: That girl is so obnoxious.
TDL: Yeah, she’s a prostitute.
PLR: No, she isn’t.
TDL: Uh, yeah, she is. She went up to a group of dudes in DC and asked for a drink.
PLR: That’s how it works? I didn’t know. How do you know?
TDL: First, it’s a hotel bar in DC. Second, we just know.

10) All in all, I don’t feel quite the attachment to DC as some of my friends. While I do enjoy the monuments and trying to find secret locations my Freemason brethren have covered during the centuries, I didn’t feel the “wow” I felt last year in London. If I went back, it’d be for Nationals’ Park (as friends have told me it’s nice, if not a little neutral) and the Smithsonian. One nice thing: with my joining of of the arguing sports mailing list I know a few guys in DC, and it was cool to meet some of them face to face. Probably the best part of the trip.