In Relegation & Promotion: Saving Major League Baseball (From Itself), JB Manheim examines why professional baseball has become increasingly distant from the people who support it. Team owners can maintain valuable franchises through years of poor results, leaving fans paying higher prices to follow clubs that seldom compete for championships. Manheim proposes changing the league structure so an owner’s financial future depends more directly on results. Drawing on English soccer, he describes a system in which the weakest major league teams drop into a lower division after each season. Successful teams from that division would take their places, giving communities outside the major leagues a route to the top. He then sets out a five-year transition plan showing how baseball could adopt this system.

JB Manheim delivers an excellent examination of professional baseball in Relegation & Promotion, and the timing could hardly be better. Manheim writes with a wonderfully conversational academic voice that makes the business of the sport easy to follow, even for readers meeting its financial workings for the first time. I was particularly impressed by how confidently he used the Los Angeles Dodgers’ 2025 payroll of more than $345 million alongside the Miami Marlins’ $68.7 million to establish the extent of baseball’s competitive imbalance. That evidence gives real meaning to his argument that the expiration of national broadcasting contracts in 2028 creates an opportunity for reform. His proposed five-year transition, which would require approval from 23 owners, shows the same understanding of how professional baseball actually operates. Readers with an established knowledge of the game will appreciate his considered approach, and I highly recommend this to anyone interested in baseball’s future.

When I watch a baseball game on television, I rarely sit through the whole broadcast. The game can last hours, depending on what happens on the field. Between innings, they cut to promos for shows or commercials selling everything from pharmaceuticals to cars to bath products and legal sports betting. I didn't realize how important the broadcast revenue is to Major League Baseball's bottom line until I read J.B. Manheim's Relegation & Promotion. This book is a must for any baseball fan who wants to understand why the national pastime is what it is, and why it may have to change its present structure to survive in the near future. Manheim has deep knowledge of the game's history, the mechanics of free agency and the reserve clause, and the new rules designed to speed up the game. But keeping teams and retaining fans is tremendously expensive. It costs the average family of four $200 to go to the ballpark. Will baseball as we know it survive? The author offers a possible solution in the book's title.

J.B. Manheim does not mince his words. Using statistics on each team's ticket sales, advertising revenue, and the financial disparity between large-market teams like the New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers and small-market teams like the Arizona Diamondbacks and the Tampa Bay Rays, he argues for restructuring the National and American Leagues. There is so much for a baseball fan to discover about how the game evolved and how the business side will shape its future. Compare the Premier League of Football (Soccer), which is very popular and the way their league is set up, with Major League Baseball, where attendance has dropped, and you will get a sense of where the author is going with his book. With another labor fight between the players' union and the owners looming next season, Relegation & Promotion offers an informative, well-written blueprint to save the game for us all.