Re-Alignment

I just made up my schedule for next semester, and I'm ticked that I have a Friday class.

I saw this post the other day about re-alignment, and while it wasn't a very good idea from my standpoint, it was at least creative. I'm not sure baseball needs to be re-aligned, but I hate the unbalanced schedule. There's nothing worse than watching nine Nationals-Braves game (they were especially painful this season) in one month. I'd rather see more teams come in. I am a fan of interleague play, even though I know most seem to disagree although the attendance numbers don't show it. Like it or not, it at least brings new teams to town that you don't get to see very often. Anyway, here are some other suggestions for schedule-making.

1) Play all teams an equal number of times. 162/29=5.58. 29x5=145. 162-145=17 extra games. So, you play all teams at least 5 times, and then split up the remaining 17. One idea would be to play those against your divisional foes. Another would be to spread them out to the other teams in your respective league (I prefer the divisional game theory). You play AL rules in AL parks, and NL rules in the NL. This might even out some of the differences between the two leagues as DH's become less important for the AL and more important for the NL, making them equally important for each league. Each team needs a DH-type guy, so the talent should even itself out. The problem is that the DH becomes more common for the NL, and a lot of people don't like the DH (we could just get rid of the DH, but what would happen to Big Papi? or make the DH for everyone, but then why have opposite leagues?). Another one is that teams play more games on opposite coasts. However, you get to play more teams, and the schedules are roughly even.

2) Play teams in your league an even number of times. 162/15=10.8. 15x10=150. 162-150=12 games left for NL teams. 162/13=12.46. 12x13=156. 6 games left for AL teams. The remaining games are spread out to divisional foes. This makes the Anti-Interleague party happy. This again evens out the difficulty of the schedules for the leagues, but not between them like theory 1 does. Again, this means more cross-country trips for teams (oh well), but it also means more variety.

3) Play all NL teams equally and AL teams as well. Okay, this gets interesting. We need 42 games for all the AL teams (14x3), which leaves 120. Divide 120 by 15, and you get 8 exactly for each NL team. In the AL, we need 48 games (16x3), which leaves 114 games. Divide 114 by 13, and you get 8.8 games per team. 8x13 gets us to 104 which means 10 opponents get an extra game in the series, and it leaves us with a negligible 3 game difference in strength of schedule. This way, the AL teams still come, and strength of schedule stays the same across the board. Now, after a season, we really know who the best team is in each league.

I'm not sure if these are really viable, but I just don't like the unbalanced schedule at all. I tried to think of other ones that weren't completely equal, but I'm not sure they actually work. Logistical overload.