I grew up in Pittsburgh, and I lived in St. Louis for 10 years before moving recently to the DC area. I would say there is NOT a significant difference between Pittsburgh and St. Louis. Much bigger difference between Pittsburgh and DC, to be quite honest.

I think Easterners consider Pittsburgh a midwest city (I know a lot of Philadelphians do). Personally, I would rather see the team play in the eastern division, but if we’re talking about regional similarities, I think the midwest is really the right geography.

Mak - DC is not really an eastern city. It’s more of a southern city, with a generic bureaucratic culture imposed over it.
Pittsburgh is not quite midwest, not quite east; it’s in its own special universe. The terrain - the hills and twisting gullies—differentiate it from midwest cities, which tend to be flat and are organized around structured street grids. This really makes a large difference in many ways. On the other hand, obviously, no ocean. I live on the east coast and tend to see the physical and cultural similarities of Pittsburgh to here, especially with places like Baltimore and Brooklyn.
That said, I’d really rather not be in the same division as the Mets or the Braves.

I’m a strong advocate of balanced divisions. That means either we have to kick an NL team back to the AL or expand by two. (And just to get over this hump right now, I think with the talent pools in places like Japan developing so rapidly, there’s no reason the entire world can’t support 32 major-league baseball teams. They did pretty well for decades with 16 teams stocking their rosters from, really, at the very most 20 million white Americans.)

I’d think the political wrangling and fallout would be most minimized (path of least resistance) by going the expansion route. So, what two cities in North America could best handle an MLB team? Las Vegas seems a slam dunk. Buffalo’s out (too close to Toronto—remember, both these teams would go to the AL), so are Portland and Orlando and probably the Tideland area of Virginia, for the same reason. So: No West Coast, no East Coast, no Rocky Mountains, probably no Midwest. The two cities that seem most likely candidates (without going into ownership groups etc.) I think would be Nashville and New Orleans, and while I can see some humanitarian reasons for putting a team there, N.O. still has a lot of work to do.

So let’s say Vegas and Nashville.

Now, with 16 teams in each league, the obvious way to divide them is into four-team divisions. This looks like it would eliminate the wild cards, and baseball just freakin’ loves the wild cards, for reasons that escape me. Much as I’d be loathe to see it, to get this done politically might require adding a wild-card round to the playoffs (six teams make it from each league), but that’s outside what I’m trying to figure out here, which is, how would you align your leagues? Or would you still have two leagues? Why couldn’t you have four leagues, with two divisions each, and the teams play the majority of those games within those leagues? Just askin’.

Anyway, here we go:
NL East: Pirates, Mets, Phillies, Reds
NL South: Marlins, Braves, Nats, Astros
NL West: Dodgers, Padres, Giants, Diamondbacks
NL Central: Brewers, Cubs, Cards, Rockies
AL East: Yanks, Red Sox, Orioles, Jays
AL South: Rays, Nashville, Rangers, Royals
AL Central: Tigers, Indians, White Sox, Twins
AL West: Angels, Mariners, A’s, Vegas

This is, of course, if you want to maintain the integrity of the NL and AL, which I don’t really see a whole lot of logic in doing, but it would mean they’d have to settle the DH issue once and for all and … well, we know how that would go.

Anway, in a four-leagues alignment, simply pair up the two Easts, two Centrals etc. You’d play each team in your division 22 times (3X22=66), each team in the other division 12 times (4X12=48) and in rotation each team in one other league six times (8X6=48). Voila. 162 games.

There’d be a lot of teams fans wouldn’t see for three-year stretches at a time, and MLB might not like that, but really, to get back to Charlie’s point, what does Pittsburgh really have in common with, for Charlie’s instance, San Diego, or Miami? Nothing as far as I can tell, they’re artificially joined. So why should it be any big deal if the Padres come to town only once every three years?

One of the things that strikes me in reading baseball history is how, back in the 16-team days, teams would play 22 games a year against others in their league, and this familiarity bred contempt. The fans and players in each city grew very familiar with their opponents, and learned to hate them, in a good fanly way, because they saw them so often. That’s been lost, I think, and with my four-league plan I’m bringing it back.

You’re welcome.

I totally agree with Brooklynpirate – Pittsburgh can’t really be classified as either a eastern or midwestern city. It has its own vibe, its own accent (for better or worse) and a culture which to me feels far more similar to Philadelphia than Indianapolis or St. Louis. Historically, it has always been oriented toward the east and until fairly recently – the emergence of the Steeler/Browns wars in the 60s and Penn State’s entry into the Big 10 in the 1990s – that’s where its rivalries were to be found.
I would love to have the Pirates re-establish their now almost forgotten rivalry with the Phillies (which in the 70s was just as intense and fierce as the Red Sox /Yankees wars)!