Why does MLB, like other American sports leagues exist in a fixed stratified hierarchy of leagues that preclude promotion and relegation?
Last Sunday, when the reason for this hit me right between the eyes, I wrote about it in the newsletter subscribers receive. Although I want to start with that question, I would like to push on to how major league baseball—including MLB and NPB–could be re-imagined.
Japan, in particular, is ripe for a revolution that would allow baseball to do an end run around the iron grip of the Yomiuri Giants’ dictates about what teams and leagues can do.
America’s awful truth
I didn’t start by thinking about baseball and relegation, but about how Japanese children are taught in school that their ranking among their peers is of critical importance, and how American kids in my day were taught the opposite: that we were all equal without regard to color or ethnicity, and that only character, skill and effort mattered.
I learned from an early age outside of school that opportunity and advancement were not equally portioned out regardless of background, gender or skin color, but my school did a bang-up job of convincing me that what I saw was, at worst, an aberration.
Reading the “The 1619 Project,” however, helped me understand inequality in America was not, as we were taught, a bug, but a feature by design, that our society was forged as one comprising a class of the enterprising wealthy who would make the rules and a lower class of laborers who would obey them.
On Tuesday, I started reading historian Heather Cox Richardson’s “How the South won the Civil War.” This reinforced the idea that a republic founded on the principle of equality (for some) was built on a foundation of inequality (for others) and was seen by the founding fathers as a statement of natural truth: that the lower classes were incapable of political power.
Cox Richardson argues that the American republic was created for a ruling minority and has been from Day 1 a struggle between oligarchy and democracy, a struggle between the elites and those who would expand the franchise to all citizens and institute majority rule.
What this means for baseball
Although America bills itself as the land of opportunity, where social mobility is supposedly the norm, it is also a society that sees the relationship between its various populations as immutable. Before MLB teams became “organizations,” before Branch Rickey began colonizing minor league teams to create the St. Louis Cardinals’ farm system, there were minor league teams stronger than some major league teams.
The self-anointed majors–for years the National League and the American Association, and then the NL alone–could have absorbed those teams in an effort to create the nation’s best competition, but that would have defied the rationale that informed American society: that members of subordinate groups in the hierarchy were incapable of taking a place among those who REALLY mattered.
The NL frequently took in American Association teams as equals until that circuit gave up the ghost, and also kicked teams out in a restructuring.
In that model, the only way for a league to become a major league was to assume that mantle itself and defend it. That’s how, under the leadership of Ban Johnson, the minor Western League shifted eastward, repositioned itself as the American League, and outperformed the senior circuit by offering a cleaner less-rowdy version of the game.
But by the turn of the century, English football presented another way to deal with rival leagues, although one that has failed to resonate in the United States.
Another model
England’s Football League was founded 12 years after the National League, and faced competition from other domestic leagues in the same way the NL did from the American Association.
As in the U.S., football teams and leagues were all over the map of England, and the battle to be the biggest and best was fierce. but the response to competition differed radically. The Football League merged with its competitors, absorbing the new teams into lower divisions that could earn promotion to the next higher tier by winning their divisions.
The U.S. missed that boat or rather, couldn’t conceive of it. In an era when some minor league teams were stronger than some teams in major leagues, it’s no surprise that those with the capital to fund ball clubs believed wealth and power was the prerogative of the best people, that others were incapable of wielding power. For that reason American society could not have conceive of the worst performing top-tier club being demoted to compete among its inferiors.
Teams were expelled from leagues for not completing their schedules, and were added from competing major leagues as equal partners, but relegation? Forget about it.
What Cox Richardson refers to as America’s founding paradox, that slave holders in the Declaration of Independence claimed all men were created equal, is writ large in virtually every autocratic action on the part of MLB, and echoes the bullshit offered as truth by America’s supporters of oligarchy.
In U.S. history, the anti-democratic proclamations of Southern planters—through the end of the Civil War and after reconstruction, movement conservatives such as Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, and the current Republican Party, have become normalized by a popular base who have nothing to gain from oligarchic control but have fallen into line behind them out of fear of losing their subordinate place in the hierarchy to those currently below them.
This is how MLB’s boot-licking media tout the wisdom of owners dumping elite players so teams can become “economically efficient”–as if fans should have a rooting interest in billionaires’ balance sheets. In the end, many, like those fed on oligarch’s lies, have normalized owners’ anti-competitive behavior as a necessary evil.
So instead of the honest free-market competitive incentive of relegation and promotion that would seem anti-American to virtually every baseball fan and owner in America, we accept tanking by teams, who technically are compelled to compete but whose efforts are laughable and normal in an America where democracy, free competition, and majority rule is rapidly being seen as un-American.
Alternative futures
Back in the day before he worked for the Boston Red Sox, Bill James offered a solution to baseball’s penchant for extorting cities to pay for stadiums and exorbitant salaries: Making every minor league and team an independent business, and dividing MLB into competing three competing major leagues.
Because if there were competing major and minor leagues, a team walking out of a viable market would be replaced by one from a rival. Thus, teams would be unable to hold up local governments. Because major league-caliber players would exist outside the structure of each league, all salaries would become market based.
In that model, minor leagues could emulate the American League, invest in themselves and challenge the “majors.” This would result in fierce competition that would bring competitive pro baseball to markets big and small, and likely end MLB’s blackouts on streaming services as every league fights for viewership.
This would be a huge step forward, as would a relegation-promotion system. Both would vastly better serve the interests of the public and would have to be mandated by law, and would be fought by oligarchs who oppose what’s in the best interest of society if it cuts into their return on investment.
A plan for Japan
Japan offers another possibility for a better product than its current two-league 12-team system allows, and since this is a blog about Japanese baseball, I’d better touch on it.
For 70 years, virtually every NPB vote or decision that appeared set to go against the interests of the Yomiuri Giants, has been met by a Yomiuri threat to withdraw from the establishment and form its own league. That’s how the Giants were able to acquire ace pitcher Suguru Egawa in a trade that went against NPB’s rules, and how free agency was created to serve Yomiuri’s interests.
When the Pacific League threw its full-fledged support behind the 2000 Olympic baseball team and took days off when Japan played in Sydney, then Yomiuri owner Tsuneo Watanabe threatened to expel the six PL teams for breaking the NPB rule that requires them to prioritize their games over all else.
When Yomiuri became the official paper of the 2004 Olympic team, and former Giants manager
Shigeo Nagashima was named to manage the Olympic team, Yomiuri made sure no games were played during the Olympics.
Between the current balance of power in Japan, and the fact that all six PL teams will be printing money from next season as a result of owning or leasing their ballpark’s operating rights, the league’s dependence on the Central League is evaporating.
The PL could do a huge service to Japanese baseball by pulling out of its current relationship with NPB and rewriting a new deal with the CL to cooperate on an all-star game and the Japan Series and on player transfers and whatever else they like.
The PL could then expand to eight or 10 teams, and no longer saddled by the Yomiuri albatross, could remake Japanese baseball.
Faced with real competition for the first time in forever, the CL would be required to innovate on its own, instead of just stealing the successful PL innovations it originally ridiculed. The two leagues might cooperate on a streaming platform, but if they didn’t, the CL would be forced to create its own.
Baseball around the world benefits from having different operational models, that provide tips for innovation and evolution. Separate leagues in Japan that actually compete would make Japanese baseball a hot-bed of innovation, because neither league could afford to sit still.
