When Houston joins the American League next year, they probably won't enjoy having to play the divisional schedule against quality teams like the Texas Rangers and the Los Angeles Angels. But their toughest opponent will be their travel schedule - significantly longer trips, the worst being between Houston and Seattle.

Baseball did Houston no favors in this realignment.

If baseball wants to realign teams for a sense of fairness, they could/should look to resolve other issues such as geographical rivalries, the designated hitter issue, the cost and competitive effect of travel on teams.

Set of Issues

The first step in resolving these issues is to do away with the concept of separate leagues - that is an arbitrary and outdated concept. (Umpires have combined into one group).

The second step is to resolve the DH issue since you can only have one rule. Either way, just decide.

The third issue of travel cost and the effect of travel is a realization that this is a business and that you can create an alignment of teams that result in less travel costs and less negative effect on team play.

With the general acceptance of using the wild card concept for playoffs, the number of divisions becomes arbitrary. You could have six divisions with five teams, five divisions with six teams or three divisions with ten teams. Which makes the most business sense?

Current Alignment (2013)

For the current 30 baseball cities, the six divisions with five teams is a geographical Rorschach test reflecting the evolutionary nature of franchise movement.

The sample divisional alignments below were generated by calculating a minimum travel distance between divisional teams for all possible combinations of teams in a division of the specified size. Legend: The number shown is roughly the sum of direct miles between stadiums for each pair of teams in the division - think of it as a ‘relative travel weight'.

Option 1: Six Divisions

Keeping six divisions, teams can be realigned to have minimal intra-divisional travel.

Option 2: Five Divisions

An alignment using five divisions would result in six teams each. The 162-game schedule would be 18 games against the five divisional teams, and three games each against the other 24 teams.

One benefit of this option is that Seattle gets grouped with the California teams. However, one competitive issue is the relative travel within a division - the northeast cluster of six teams would have significant less travel than the midwest division.

Option 3: Three Divisions

An alignment using three divisions would result in ten teams each. The 162-game schedule would be either 11 or 12 games against the nine divisional teams, with three games each against the other twenty teams.

The benefit of three divisions is better travel balance within each division, developing more potential rivalries and better geographical clusters.

Suggestion

Baseball should realign to three divisions of ten teams.
This alignment provides the following benefits:

• Every team would play all 29 teams in at least one series each year.
• Teams would develop more regional rivalries.
• Increased marketing revenue since the stars on each team will play in every city over a two-year period.
• There will be less travel imbalance affecting quality of play.

Data - using Lat/Lon values of each stadium from wikipedia, the straight line distance was computed for each pair of stadiums. The table can be accessed in one of the following forms.

Travel Table (pdf format)

Travel Table (csv format)

Travel Table (doc format)