How come the divisions aren't balanced?

I think the NFL, NBA and NHL have all profited from balanced divisions, and in terms of scheduling, is really the only fair way to do it.

That wouldn't work because that would make an odd number of teams in each league, meaning they would have to have interleague year-round or give a team an off-day everyday. That can work with other sports but not baseball.

That's a great point - the most convincing I've heard. Perhaps they can expand the MLB to 32 and then split up into divisions like the NFL? I suppose with the ability of schedulers to schedule the MLB season (in my opinion, they are genii to get all the games in with limited margin for error (i.e. days off)), I'm sure they could figure a way around it though. Thinking about it, they probably wouldn't fit it in the 6 months with your second suggestion. I think since baseball is so popular it could be expanded to about 36 (3 divisions of 6 in each League). At least there would be more variety in opponents, rather than playing divisional opponents 9 times home and away. They could then expand the playoffs to 8 from each League, and just shorten the series to best-of-five. 4 from 18 seems too few (but then, so does 4 from 16/14).

Baseball expanding is not an option. There's been contraction talk for the last 5 years. There's no way they're going to go out and expand to 32 teams and especially not to 36

Oh, fair enough, I didn't know that. Perhaps they could bring it down to 24 then, so you'd have 3 divisions of 4 in the two Leagues. Then it would work.

Yeah, expansion isn't going to happen. Teams can barely survive in florida, do you think one can make it in OK city? vegas? Its just not gonna happen...

The number of teams stays at 30, period. There was a huge uproar when the Twins and Expos were talked about for contraction. You can't add a couple more teams and there's no way you can just destroy 6 franchises from 6 regions of fans.