HOUSTON — Just about everyone in baseball agrees on the need for a new kind of schedule, with more intradivision games and September matchups among contenders. How to do it is another matter.

        And that's why major-league owners have put off a decision on realignment until June. But commissioner Bud Selig promises changes will indeed be coming.

        “There will be some realignment,” he said Monday night after owners cut short their spring meeting, having completed their agenda in one day. “We'll go to an unbalanced schedule, rotate divisions. Everything I wanted to do, I will do.”

        Since each league split into three divisions in 1994 and interleague play began in 1997, each schedule has become a patchwork. Teams in the same city are home at the same time, teams crisscross the country on long road trips, intradivision games dwindled.

        “The biggest problem we've had is clubs really don't like the schedule,” Selig said. “They've grumbled.”

        So Selig, working with Boston Red Sox chief executive officer John Harrington, Philadelphia Phillies CEO Dave Montgomery and NL senior vice president Katy Feeney, settled on this as the best option for 2001:

        Arizona would move to the AL West, Texas would move to the AL Central, Tampa Bay would move to the NL.

        The NL would have four four-team divisions; the AL would have six teams in the Central, four each in the East and West.

        The Reds would play in the Southeast Division with Atlanta, Tampa Bay and Florida.

        “The National League works out pretty well,” Selig said. “The only real negative one has heard is there's no wild card.”

        Under this plan, each NL team would play 20 games against each division rival; AL East and AL West teams would play 18 each, and AL Central teams would play 14 each against three division rivals, 15 apiece against the other two.

        Filling out the schedule would be interdivision and interleague games.

        But teams in the AL Central object to a six-team division. And some NL owners don't want to lose the wild card, which allows more teams to remain in contention until the season's final weeks.

        Harrington said three plans remain under consideration, with more possibilities ahead. Under most plans, the NL remains with 16 teams. But one plan has 15 teams in each league — with at least one interleague game nearly every day.

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