THIRTY years ago, in the long-forgotten, long-suffering (or is that long-insufferable?) BBBA for the ultra-bangin' 1996 season, your congenital host proposed a post-season that mimicked the regular season. It incorporated an idea that, at the time, was still blasphemous--interleague play.
Thirty years later, interleague play is blasphemous only in the post-season. Nearly a third of baseball's schedule is amongst teams playing across those two creaky, archaic leagues. Those of you with strong stomachs (or who are being fed intravenously) will recall our desire for major league baseball to have four leagues, with certain select differences in how the game is played. (As one reader once noted to us--before disappearing off the face of the earth--"...you have a penchant for complication.")
BUT no more. We have taken stock, and now realize that a main reason for all that post-season flippery was based on the sardonic desire to make possible what is still a total impossibility--to have the game's bitterest rivals be able to play each other in the World Series.
(In keeping with the title of this post, you may--indeed!--say that I'm a dreamer...but, in this case, I might actually be the only one. Perhaps the majority of fans not aligned with those blustery East Coast powerhouses actually prefer that they are unable to pollute the Fall Classic by appearing in it together.)
SO now we will toss aside our ingenious, overwrought four-league foreplay in favor of something so much simpler that you may suspect that we are suffering from cognitive decline (assuming that you didn't have those suspicions already).
No need to ask what it is, of course--the title gives away what we are throwing away. What we are saying is give peace--er, no, wait, what we are waving away--with the practiced gesticulations of a veteran huckster--are leagues (poof!) and divisions (be gone!).
Imagine, now--just thirty teams going at it from dawn to dusk, with the twelve best seasonal won-lost records advancing to the post-season. (We will concede to tradition in one sense: we will retain the old league constructs and capture what is now called "interleague play," because we might be able to add a wrinkle with it--but other than that, all of those old trappings are kaputt.)
NOW you ask--what does doing that do to the configuration of the 2026 post-season? The answer: not much, actually. It removes the Astros (81-81) from their queasy AL West title, and promotes the D-backs (86-76) into the lower tier of the post-season.
WE'RE gonna just cut to the chase and refer you to the diagram at right. The first round match-ups are in green; the teams the first-round winners will face are in orange. From there we have put both our thumbs egregiously on the scale in Round Two (in yellow) to bring about a third-round series (we're going to call it the Fall Classic Foreplay Series, because--well, because we are just that way...) that creates the dreaded, possessed-by-the-devil scenario leading us...to ... the ... unthinkable.
Now could the latter-day Bronx Bombers beat the Brewers and Dodgers in successive series? Could the Sox stuff a sock in Kyle Schwarber and light their former ace Chris Sale on fire? (Headlines in Boston: FIRE SALE!) We'll never know, of course, but we hope that you will join us in seeking a strange, new, strangely peaceful world order that would ensue if baseball's braggadocio behemoths faced off for all the marbles.
FOR many, this would like imagining there's no heaven. But sometimes, hell is heaven. Since we live in dangerous times, we might as well live dangerously...
