Radical Unalignment

You want to unalign? Ok, here's how you do it:

Do away with the leagues entirely. Get off the fence about the DH, keep it or ditch it. Then play a balanced schedule. Every team plays every other team 5 times, and the top 10 teams advance. That gets you a 145 game schedule and ends your season 2.5 weeks earlier. That gives you time for every round of the playoffs to be a 7 game series.

Poof. Done. That's the only "fair" way to do it folks.

You're only other choice is to do away with interleague play.

Anything in between is going to have imbalances. There's no way around it.

How about we go wacky?

Create three leagues of 10 teams each: The American League, the National League, and the Federal League or the Player's League or whatever you want to call it.

For the first half of the season you only play the teams in your league. Each team plays each other 10 times for 90 games total. That'll take you into July sometime and you move the all-star game to there. How do you play an all-star game with 3 leagues? Does it matter? It's a pointless exhibition game anyway. Do it by random draw.

That's the end of the "first" season. Four teams from each league, for a total of 12, advance to the "champions league". Those 12 play each other 6 times. That's another 66 games, taking you to 156 to this point.

The top 4 teams advance to the playoffs. You have a semi-final round and then the World Series.

Of course that will never fly because more than half the league will only play for 90 games, but isn't that kind of how it is already? More than half the league stops playing meaningful games by July anyway. Why make them actually play those game? You're just opening players up for injuries.

Of course, while the "champions league" is playing, you could have the "second league" play each other 4 times each, have "second league" playoffs and a "second league" champion. Wouldn't that increase the number of "meaningful" games down the stretch?

I'm not entirely joking.