Bill Shaikin wonders if the stadium problems in St. Petersburg will lead MLB to delay expansion plans:

The county has yet to approve bond financing for the new ballpark, postponing an October vote in the wake of the hurricane. In elections this month, two ballpark supporters on the county commission were replaced by ballpark skeptics.

“Last month, the County Commission upended our ballpark agreement by not approving their bonds, as they promised to do,” Sternberg said. “That action sent a clear message that we had lost the county as a partner.

LATimes.com

It seems voters understand that stadiums don’t provide the economic impact better than politicians. That’s a very good thing.

The Rays could come up with more money to build the stadium themselves (without the community development, for example), or move somewhere else. It’s the last point that may delay expansion, since one of the likely expansion cities would probably get the team:

Austin, San Antonio, Salt Lake City, Portland, San Jose and Mexico City also have expressed interest. It is considered highly unlikely that MLB would consider placing another team in Oakland any time soon.

That six cities might be interested in teams intrigues me.

Expansions can level talent. Right now, the talk is to add two more teams, which I suspect would create eight four-team divisions. That’s 80 new MLB jobs (40 man roster), and I assume each team would lose three players each. In 1998, the new teams were given a chance to establish a minor league system, so new job would be created there as well. Most of the replacements for the players lost to the draft would be replacement level players. Some of them would be youngsters teams might have kept in the minors longer to maximize affordability, but in general, the spread of talent in the majors would increase a bit.

What if, however, MLB went all in and expanded to 36 teams? Every division gets a new team. So 240 new jobs, every existing team losing eight players. Even the deep teams are going to lose some decent players. There would be a lot more replacement talent coming into the leagues, and a lot more good young players. It might shake up the game more than any rule changes implemented in the last few years.

Let’s take this one step further. Instead of two leagues, three conference exist with different divisions going head-to-head every year. Scheduling is very easy with this setup. Two division winners and two wild cards from each conference play a best of five and best of seven to determine the three conference winners. The winner of the Nippon Professional Baseball Championship then comes on as the fourth team for the final two rounds of seven to crown the World Series champion.

Japan’s World Series viewership rivaled the US this year, so there is a huge audience waiting. This could lead to a number of other positive improvements:

• Putting the North America and Japan on the same talent acquisition footing. Allow teams to draft players and sign free agents from either area with no friction.
• Leagues from Korea and Taiwan could be part of the playoffs to determine the far east entry.
• This might encourage more areas to take up the game. I suspect we could get to four regions quickly. South/Central America/Caribbean could be one, maybe Europe or Australia.

The hope would be that eventually we get to eight regions, with all teams using a mix of players from all over the globe for a true World Series. I probably won’t be around to see that, but would love to see the Japan piece in my lifetime.