MLB Scoop

In the last two years I have begun watching soccer. If you told me before the 2006 World Cup that I would be an avid soccer fan two years later, I would have thought you were crazy. Yet here I am, paying for Fox Soccer Channel and Setanta Sports on DirecTV so I can enjoy my un-American football.

Having watched a lot of soccer and a little rugby, there are noticeable differences in the ways the Europeans run their sports than the ways we Americans do. In timed sports, the clock ticks up, not down. There are no commercial breaks, but the players wear the logos of corporate sponsors on their shirts and there is usually the logo of some corporate sponsor on the screen somewhere. Unsportsmanlike conduct is met with yellow (warning) and red (eviction) cards in a system that metes out justice and suspensions in a less arbitrary fashion. All of those things are okay, but there’s one thing the European leagues have going for them that really adds something to the drama: Promotion and Relegation.

First, to understand how promotion and relegation work you have to comprehend that the European sports leagues don’t have minor league affiliations like baseball does. Yet there are still multiple tiers of leagues. You have the best clubs in the Premier League, and below them you have lower leagues with more independent clubs. Player development contests are played by age group in their own mini divisions, the Under-17s, Under-19s, etc.

What would baseball look like if you had promotion and relegation? Well, the minor league teams would need to break off all affiliation with the major league teams. They would have to field their own players, not players owned by the big league teams. Say there were promotion and relegation between the MLB and AAA ball last year for example, and the rule was that the worst team in the American League dropped into the International League and the worst team in the National League dropped into the Pacific Coast League. You would have seen the Tampa Bay Rays and Pittsburgh Pirates demoted, and the winners of those two AAA leagues, the Richmond Braves and the Sacramento River Cats, would have been promoted to the MLB.

This might sound horrifying to fans of teams like the Pirates, Rays, Royals and other perpetual bottom dwellers. However, what this adds in terms of drama to the season is that every game matters. Every team is playing for something. If you aren’t playing to win your division or the wild card, you are playing to survive and stave off relegation for another year.

At the end of the last season of English football (soccer), I watched two matches that showed emotion promotion and relegation provide. Wigan Athletic at Sheffield United was a Premier League game that, on the last day of the season, determined which of those teams would be relegated and which would stay in the Premier League another year. The game was fought bitterly. The two sides wanted to stay up in the big show as bad as two teams fighting over the league title. The effort from the players and the drama in the stands were simply intense. The outcome meant everything to the fans in the stadium, and the home crowd was crushed when their team lost. Grown men were crying. People were simply devastated. The Wigan fans were overjoyed. Compare that to a Royals at Devil Rays game in late September. On the flip side, there was the match between Sunderland and Luton where Sunderland completed an incredible climb up the standings to come from as low as 20th place in the league to win the second tier division and clinch promotion to the Premier League on the final day. Meanwhile, Luton was sent tumbling down to the third tier division. The highs of the Wigan and Sunderland fans and the lows of the Sheffield and Luton fans sold me on promotion and relegation as a superior system to the franchise sports setup we have here in America.

Could promotion and relegation ever happen in the United States? Not in the current leagues we have today. Owners like Jeff Loria (Marlins) and David Glass (Royals) make too much money by putting an inferior product out on the field and collecting revenue sharing welfare from the Yankees and Red Sox to ever agree to it. In fact, I think the MLB owners would unanimously reject it because it is not in their interest. In compromises the safety of their investment. The only ones who really benefit from promotion and relegation are the fans.

The only chance such a system would have at coming to pass would be in a newly formed league. And the odds of that are next to nothing here in the USA. So why write about it? One interesting thing to note is that sometimes a sport will travel overseas, but in its adoption to local culture funny things happen. Rules change to make the game more friendly to local fans. Major League Soccer has done this in the USA by not having promotion and relegation, by having an amateur draft - a concept foreign to the European leagues - and by instituting other competitive balance measures that are out of line with the origins of the game. So too you see the formative European baseball leagues adopting promotion and relegation into their leagues, adding their familiar touch for their local fans. You have it in Honkbal Hoofdklasse, the pro baseball league in The Netherlands. You have promotion and relegation in Serie A1, the pro league in Italy. You have it in the Bundesliga in Germany, and in the Division de Honor de Beisbol in Spain. Promotion and relegation is in effect in the Irish Baseball League.

Just as we take foreign sports and make them our own, so too have the Europeans taken baseball and started to craft it into their own game, at a very formative level. One thing that they will get to enjoy that we will not is promotion and relegation. When their leagues get strong enough to have a 162 game season one day, there will never be a boring September for any team in European baseball.