Originally Posted by
wiggin
To answer several of you at once:
The 'leagues' in Major League Baseball are a misnomer, being more correctly represented by conferences as seen in American football, hockey, and basketball. They're just two halves of the whole that are useful for in-season matchups/rankings as well as feeding the champion of said league into the final championship game. The reason the NL and AL are called leagues is historical - they used to be independent, and I believe, competitors. Like over 100 years ago. They have de facto been tightly bound together since the early 20th century, and legally so since 2000 IIRC. So, it's not a geography thing or much of anything else, it's just historical. It's certainly not tied to a ranking system like football leagues in Europe; the NL and AL are generally fixed in their makeup, and one league is not necessarily better than the other.
You might argue that the division grouping is a bit more closely tied to geography, but even that is weak at best - I believe the Mariners and Rangers are about 3000 km away from each other but play in the same division. One thing that helps keep down travel-related problems is that teams typically play 3 or 4 games at once against each other in a 'series', and they sometimes get a day off to travel in between cities that are far apart. Furthermore, teams tend to play long stretches of games either 'away' or at their home stadium to minimize the amount of travel necessary. Of course, teams typically perform worse on the road for a number of reasons - home crowd cheering, unfamiliarity with the ballpark idiosyncrasies, etc. - but travel-related fatigue is certainly one contributor.
Setting up the game schedule is quite challenging, actually. The somewhat complex algorithm Flixy quoted is compounded by the complexities I mention above - creating large stretches of home or away games, allowing for 'off days' for long travel is possible, etc. And there are special interleague plays that complicate the schedule - for example, the Cubs and White Sox always have several series against each other, just as the Yankees and Mets due, irrespective of the rest of the year's schedule. And I haven't even mentioned scheduling restrictions at some ballparks (e.g. limited night games are Wrigley), or TV deal restrictions, etc. There are 2430 games per season to schedule, and it's not straightforward.
This complexity sometimes is unfair - some teams have much tougher schedules than others - but them's the breaks.