Baseball 2011: Too Many Sideshows

Attendance is up, but questions about interleague realignment and the fate of the Dodgers and Marlins are distracting from the game

By Rick Horrow and Karla Swatek

Unless your name is Jimmer, in light of a potential NBA lockout and the threat of a canceled season, Thursday's NBA draft is about as attention-grabbing as wearing white at Wimbledon. There's little movement in NFL labor talks. U.S. Open hero Rory McIlroy is taking the next few weeks off. And an octet of octopi vying to succeed the late Paul, who correctly predicted all of Germany's games during the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, is getting more attention than the American squad preparing to contend in the upcoming Women's World Cup.

That leaves baseball, which should be top of mind for U.S. sports fans this time of year. Yet a controversial realignment proposal, a handful of errant MLB owners, and a cranky octogenarian manager are currently garnering more attention than double plays and strikeouts.

Interleague Intrigue

Over the past 15 years, baseball has grown from roughly a $2 billion industry into a $9 billion one. Nearly 1.65 million fans at ballparks across the U.S. just turned out for a weekend of interleague play—the league's biggest attendance weekend since September 2008, "and September is when everybody is playing for keeps," notes the Baltimore Sun's Peter Schmuck.

"Fans coming out in these remarkable numbers demonstrate the popularity of interleague play," said MLB Commissioner Bud Selig in a news release on Monday. "I remain optimistic that our attendance numbers will continue to climb, with summer beginning tomorrow and five of the six divisions separated by 1 1/2 games or less."

If baseball's 30 owners get behind new realignment proposals being discussed by Selig and his staff, interleague games will become more commonplace. MLB is looking at diving into two 15-team leagues in which the top five teams in each league make the playoffs—a format that is much closer to the NBA and NHL than to baseball's current postseason design. That realignment would also correct MLB's current schedule imbalance, culminating in six divisional races and a wild card slot. The National League comprises 16 teams, the American League only 14—meaning a team from the NL Central division now has a one in six shot at making the playoffs, while a team from the AL West has 25 percent chance.

In order to even out the National League and the American League, more interleague games would have to be incorporated into the season-long schedule (a move that's bound to be popular with baseball fans), and one team would obviously have to move from the NL to the AL. The two teams in the NL believed to be the most likely to change leagues are the Houston Astros, currently in the middle of a sales transaction, and the Arizona Diamondbacks. But Diamondbacks President and Chief Executive Derrick Hall told the Arizona Republic last week that he "doubts his club would have to make the move."

"Naturally, we would look into it if asked about it," Hall said. "But I'm not sure we'd ever get to that point, because I think other teams make more sense geographically than we do." For the moment, Hall is more concerned about his team's own divisional race—and the prospect of playing host to MLB's All-Star Game in July.

Onus on the Owners

While it appears that baseball's steroids era is all but over—Barry Bonds' trial earlier this year was barely a blip on the radar, and there's little buzz about Roger Clemens' upcoming days in court next month—MLB Commissioner Bud Selig's biggest headache today is not errant players but errant owners.

In New York, Mets owners Fred Wilpon and Saul Katz continue to fight a $1 billion lawsuit filed against them by Bernie Madoff trustee Irving Picard. On Monday, Katz and Wilpon filed a 68-page memorandum of law in support of their motion to dismiss, citing false allegations and unsupported claims in Picard's assertions that the Mets owners had turned a blind eye to Madoff's Ponzi scheme. Jeff Wilpon, the Mets' chief operating officer, also contradicted claims that the Mets, due to the Madoff imbroglio, will not be able to add players to their current roster ahead of baseball's trade deadline.

On Tuesday, two Nebraska women filed a lawsuit against Chicago Cubs owner Joe Ricketts and his Opportunity Education Foundation in Omaha on grounds of harassment retaliation. The suit alleges that the foundation's chief operating officer made inappropriate remarks to both women and was fired after they filed a complaint with HR, but was rehired by Ricketts days later, and at least one of the women lost her job in the process.