In a vacuum, in an ideal world, where the people who head MLB can pass unilateral changes - for the good of the league - without running it past the greedy owners and the intractable players union, a two-tiered major league system could work. A place where inefficient and wrongheaded ownership groups are shuffled out of the deck, and better-run organizations get a chance to rise to the top. Where fans can see top players compete on a daily basis and not be subjected to scrap-heap reclamation projects starting every fifth day.

Now we know that's not going to happen; too much self-interest, too many complications, too many people gumming up the works. But it's interesting to ponder the possibilities. As we continue this thought-provoking exercise, we need to look at how the system would work as a whole and which teams get dropped to Junior Varsity.

Pay No Attention To The Mess Behind The Curtain
The EPL uses a system of two 20-team leagues (actually, several divisions but we're mostly concerned at this point with the top two); I think MLB would be served best by splitting out the top 16 teams for the 1st division and combining the remaining 14 squads with two strong independent minor league operations. Soccer has three teams move between the divisions; for my example below, I used two teams for promotion/relegation.

Without going into a lot of detail as to how the minor leagues would be affected, I would suggest that the top independent organizations have a chance to be promoted to the majors once every five years. You would determine which 2nd division team had the worst record over the previous 5 seasons and replace them with a well-run operation. This would prevent a one-year wonder from being promoted well beyond their ability or a one-year blunder from getting the death sentence unjustly.

As for the schedule, I kept the same 162-game structure, but this adds another wrinkle - how do you arrange the teams? Well, one solution would be to have each team play roughly the same amount of games against the other 15 squads. But you end up with an ungainly arrangement where only the best and worst teams have anything worth fighting for, and the rest of the league is plagued with disinterest. So, switching to two conferences of 8 teams each would be a lot better? Not necessarily, due to uneven competition between conferences and the arbitrary decisions required to make the whole thing work. Picking the lesser of two evils, I say split the teams into two groups and let them fight it out.

The Fear Of Relegation
We have to determine which clubs get relegated to the 2nd division prior to the 2006 season. The easiest way would be to grab the teams with the 14 worst records in 2005 and throw them into the pit. The biggest problem with this is the assumption that this whole process would just be turned on with a flick of a switch. The teams in the league should & would be given an opportunity to adjust to this new line of thinking, and those that failed to adapt would be relegated. It would obviously take a few years to implement the changes.

I ran through a process where, starting with the 2000 season, teams with the four worst records would be placed on probation and could only be taken off if they had one of the top two overall records among those on probation in the next year or later. This would continue until the 14-team quota is reached.

If we follow the same line of thinking for the 2006 season, the teams with the two worst records not currently in relegation are the Indians (is the bungee cord still attached?) and the Marlins; the Tigers aren't participating in the World Series in this universe, but they do escape relegation, along with the Dodgers. (NOTE: The Marlins being demoted makes four consecutive NL WS participants (NYN, ARI, SF, FLA) who are relegated exactly three years afterward.)

But what happens if we look at 2006 using each team's record versus the teams in the Premiership and those in relegation? This would seem to make more sense, as it would be easy to pad your record with games against lesser competition. Using that logic, among teams in the second division, again the Tigers post the best record against the rest of the dross, going 37-16 (.698 win%); the Dodgers repeat as well, with a 61-32 mark (.656).
On the other hand, the Premier League race yields a surprising result. As before, Florida is one of the two teams sent down, winning only 40% of their games (34-51). The other relegation victim had profited much from the bottom feeders, compiling a 61-48 mark on its way to a 3rd straight division title in the real world in 2006. But competing against just the other first division teams, they only won 22 of 52 games.
That team - your 2006 World Series Champion St. Louis Cardinals!

We'll talk about the minors, the draft, and player transactions at the end of next week.