Eric Lacy of the Detroit News gets the opinion on the matter from Tigers skipper Jim Leyland after an ESPN.com article suggested that realignment is a real possibility.
“That’s been tossed around for a while,” he said, lying on his office couch with a pillow under his head. “I don’t really know what the answer is. I haven’t really looked at it in-depth.”
That ESPN article written by the networks baseball analyst Buster Olney stated that the league may go realign so that each league has 15 teams. Currently there are only 14 teams in the American League while the National League has 16 teams.
Leyland was non-committal in supporting a restructure but said that a realignment is inevitable.
“It’s a pretty complicated issue, but I look for (a change) in the future,” he said.
Two unnamed sources cited that the possibility that the league realigns is about 50-50. Furthermore the original ESPN report stated that if the league were to have an equal amount of teams in each league they could do away with the divisional format and have the 15 teams fight for five playoff spots.
Source: ESPN.com, Detroit News