You want realignment?

So rumor has it that baseball wants to realign its divisions, in particular to keep the Yankees and Red Sox from dominating the AL East every single year. OK fine. But if they're serious about doing it, they'd have do a lot more than year-round division relaignment. They'd have to expand, and they'd have to shuffle one team from the National League to the American League. Why yes I drew up a plan, and it only took me twenty mintues to do so! First let's look at the American League:

AL North	AL South	AL East	AL West
New York	Texas	Boston	Anaheim
Toronto	Tampa Bay	Baltimore	Oakland
Chicago	Kansas City	Cleveland	Seattle
Minnesota	EXPANSION	Detroit	Colorado

So under this plan, Colorado would switch to a DH, which should provide for a massive amount of home runs by them. Now, let's look at the National League:

NL North	NL South	NL East	NL West
Pittsburgh	Atlanta	New York	Los Angeles
Cincinnati	Florida	Philadelphia	Arizona
Chicago	Houston	St. Louis	San Diego
Milwaukee	EXPANSION	Washington	San Francisco

This one was tough. I had to move Colorado to the AL because I wanted to try to keep it geographically correct, and unless you moved the Dodgers back to Brooklyn, there really was no way possible. St. Louis is technically not in the East, but then again Kansas City isn't in the South. They're kinda in the middle, so for all intents and purposes, they had to go to the AL South.

Now, we've gotta come up with two cities to put expansion teams in. Truthfully you could move Washington into the NL South, since they play in the Southeast division in the NHL. But then where in the East would you put an expansion team? I'd say Brooklyn, but let's keep it to one city per league. So, back to the South. Put them in a smallish market that had an NL team until the turn of the 20th century. Put an NL team back in Louisville! The AL is a no-brainer: New Orleans. I'm sure the Superdome could be used for such a purpose until a baseball-specific stadium is built.

Just an idea which probably won't happen, since this is the same MLB leadership that wanted to contract Montreal and Minnesota (which, as a lifelong Braves fan, I would not have shed any tears had Minnesota went away) and probably thinks expansion is suicidal. But, for the sake of competetive balance, they should do this anyway. And in the ensuing expansion draft, leave no player protected, BUT the teams could only pick from the league they're going into. Let these teams be competetive from Day One.