During Sunday night's Little League Classic between the New York Mets and Seattle Mariners, Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred talked about the possibility of not just expansion, but also a total overhaul of the leagues as we know them.

The 84-win Diamondbacks squeezed into the playoffs during the final week of the season, landing the National League's No. 6 seed, and parlayed that opportunity into a World Series berth. They were an exciting, emergent team that turned into one of baseball's great Cinderella stories. Now consider how baseball's current format abetted Arizona's run:

Eight divisions with four teams each, which is a huge shift from today's six divisions with five teams. The American League gets condensed (confined to the heavily populated East Coast out to the Great Lakes region), while the National League stretches out for far more square mileage.