It's time to face facts. Professional baseball has grown stale. We need to improve the sport. Let's put forth our ideas, no matter how ridiculous, to get people interested again...
Lately the Yankees or the Red Sox manage to get to the world series about every other year or so. Sometimes it's every year for a decade. The other teams in their division rarely make it and all New York and Boston fans want to see are their teams battle it out. So why not just make a division for these two teams? We'll call it the grudge division. They'll play 100+ games a year against one another. Instead of a wildcard, the winner of this division advances to playoffs.
Of course why stop there? Since the Yankees and Red Sox spend roughly three times the combined GDP of Sub-Saharan Africa on their roster, they have an obvious advantage over the entire sport. To create a disadvantage, I propose adding a team to the grudge division... in Honolulu. It doesn't even need to be a good team. The long flights to and from their home field will be an invisible player on their roster and will wear down ten million+ dollar free agents through attrition.
I propose the team be named the Honolulu Red Eyes.
Why not expand home field advantage to physical attributes of the park? Instead of having permanent padding on the outfield boundary walls, we'll make it inflatable. When the home team is on the field, the walls are inflated. When the away team is on the field, the walls are deflated. Visiting teams will be less likely to steal home runs as a result.
Instead of extra innings, after nine we begin removing players at random. Once we're down to pitcher and catcher only playing defense, the game should be a lot more interesting...
The designated hitter has already ruined baseball forever. With that in mind, let's take things to the next level: designated everything. We'll just have defensive and offensive lineups and have extremely overspecialized players for every conceivable purpose. This isn't outside of reason at all. I recall being a designated outfielder in high school PE classes...