Just an interesting tidbit from MLB on how the competitive balance will help/hurt teams. They have for us as middle of the road just because we were scheduled for NL East anyways and now spread things out to Central and others. So, in other years, I would assume that it hurts (e.g. when we were suppose to play NL Central following year).
Amongst all the changes you’ll notice on the field in 2023 -- the pitch clock, the positioning ban, the larger bases, the pickoff limits -- there’s another quietly meaningful one that might not be quite so obvious if you weren’t looking for it. For the first time since Interleague Play
www.mlb.com
"But for the relatively weak
AL Central, it doesn’t seem like it’ll matter so much. That’s because these five teams had already been scheduled to face the NL East in 2023, so those games aren’t new, and instead they’ll pick up games against the equally weak NL Central and the NL West, which features a somewhat depleted (compared to previous years) Dodgers squad and the very poorly projected Rockies. We project these five teams with almost no change at all.
The takeaway: It was already pretty hard to see the Central sending a team to the Wild Card, given the strength in the East and West, and this only exacerbates that."