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I loved the 60 game season where I could watch teams from the Southwest play each other over and over. But I realized that I know the National League pretty well but don't know the American League partially because teams I would root for due to my affiliation with their location, Angels (they have fabulous players so I do try to watch them) and the Oakland Athletics are really doing badly. So I root for the Dodgers and the Giants. Therefore I am mostly watching the National League. And one can dream of seeing the Yankees play in person at Oracle Stadium.
I liked the old separation between the leagues. Interleague play has watered down the schedule and ruined more rivalries than it created. Yankees-Indians used to be a great rivalry and now they only play 6-7 times per year. Who cares if the Indians play an extra series against the Diamondbacks? The old way of non-interleague play made things more interesting. Are the Dodgers really the best team in baseball? Or is the American League just better? Now we don't have that. And the gimmicky mid-season ideas? I hate them.
I love the idea of seven inning games. I didn't think I would but those double headers last year with seven inning games were great. I love baseball but I can't watch for three hours. I got stuff to do.
Why did the Astros & Brewers switch leagues? I always thought that made no sense since the AL already had a Texas team in the Texas Rangers. The Brewers won the AL Pennant in 1982 and the Astros played a memorable NL Championship Series with the New York Mets. I'd love to know the rationale behind these two moves.
In 2010 the NL Central was a 6 team division (Milwaukee had already moved back to the NL) and the NL West had 4 teams. Taking advantage of the new ownership in Houston, the Astros were moved to the AL and placed in the West to balance all 6 divisions. At the same time interleague play was changed - previously there had been two (four?) weekends every year when all interleague games would take place. With an odd number of teams in each league, there was now an interleague game virtually every day, further taking the shine off of interleague play.
Someone closer to either of those teams please correct me if I’m missing anything, but in 2011 the Astros were up for sale, and as part of the sale the new ownership agreed to move to the AL. Bud Selig, commissioner at the time, had been owner of the Brewers previously and wanted them in the NL so it seemed like this was a way for him to accomplish that goal - make the Astros prospective owner agree to the move if he wanted the sale to go through. Selig considered Milwaukee a National League city because the Braves had played there before moving to Atlanta in the 60’s - a move Selig tried but failed to stop.
The Astros had been in the NL for 50 years, the Braves were in Milwaukee for 12, but I guess that’s how it goes when the commissioner of the sport had long ownership ties to one of the teams.
To correct myself, Selig had orchestrated the move of the Brewers to the NL for the 1998 season, when he was commissioner and his daughter was running the team. That season was when Arizona and Tampa Bay were added. So in 1997 each league had 14 teams, but with expansion and the Brewers move in 1998 the NL had 16 and the AL 14.
By 2011 MLB had decided they wanted 15 teams in each league. At that point Selig forced the incoming Astros ownership to agree to switch leagues, even though it was his move of the Brewers years earlier that caused the 16-14 split.
Bud Selig having his daughter running the team was a three card monty act. It amazes me that that the lords of baseball allowed another the team owner to run the league. There had to be heavy smoke and mirrors in the furthest backroom one can find where that skullduggery transpired.
Thank you, for a great response to this question. Talk about about an abuse of a League Office to garner a favor for the team that the League Commissioner has ownership nexus to. That sounds like a Used Car Salesman trick to me.
MLB has been entertaining significant changes for years, and putting some of them into effect. Most of the ideas have been bad -- "we've gotta change something, let's try this." You know, I find with this LIV thing that I'm not really interested in watching any golf presently. I have a feeling something like this might happen to me with baseball, if it just becomes a bunch of gimmicks instead of real baseball. It would be a very sad day if I realized that baseball had changed so much that I didn't like it anymore.
I'm from Jersey City where nobody had a lawn. We were yelled out to stop playing stickball, boxball of touch football in the street that part of our field was near or in front of their house/apartment building.
What the Lords of the Game need to think about is, what makes baseball great. Or, put differently, what do we love about baseball (if only someone could write a book about that)?
In terms of the baseball season, what I love is the drama of the pennant race. From August to Sept (and maybe even earlier), every game matters. Did you win today? Did the teams closest to you in the standings win? Are you up a game? Are you making up ground? Do you have an upcoming series against them to make up even more?
For teams in the race, that makes every game start to feel important. And since a game is never over until the last out is made, and since any batter can lead to a run, any baserunner to multiple runs, that makes every pitch of every game matter, and feel dramatic.
Of course, for the 75% of the league that wasn’t in a pennant race in any given year, there wasn’t that drama.
One thing that I think has been lost (we can debate why) is the story aspect of baseball; the players as characters in a quest to achieve a difficult goal, overcoming the obstacles in their way. There have been many aspersions cast on that way of constructing a “narrative,” but what those criticisms overlook is the power of storytelling to make for compelling fandom. What we get a lot of now instead of stories is highlights, Statcast features, and quirky bits, but not a lot of setting the events of a particular game as part of a broader narrative about a player or team’s season. I worry that we then lose some of the drama that makes baseball a sport we want to watch.
What is with the constant push for less baseball? And it's all coming from one group, the media. The media keep pushing for 7 inning games, the media is all-in on the free runner in extra innings, the media has been more than occasionally advocating for a mercy rule.
I get it, everyone wants to work less. But please, I am begging you, stop trying to change the sport because you think there's too much of it.
I wonder if fewer division games will be a drain on overall attendance. Many people travel to other ballparks to watch their home team. Now more of those parks will be a lot further away and fewer dates to choose from for the closer ones.
Except if your "home team" is on one coast and you live on the other. New schedule means you maybe have more opportunities to watch the team(s) you want to see.
More inter-league games might seem like a good idea until you realize that for every Mets-Astros series, how many Reds-Royals (Chili -BBQ?) series will you get? And not to pick on those teams in particular - pick two any below average teams and what’s the interest of either team’s fans in seeing that game?
At least with division games each fan base has a chance to build up a healthy dislike of the opponent. A Rockies fan would probably have some interest in playing spoiler against the Dodgers in mid-September, but would they care at all if it were the Twins?
So the Royals play the Reds instead of playing the Tigers again? That's a plus as far as fan interest goes, even if the they are both bad teams. Maybe not nationally, bu locally for sure. If you are a fan of a team in another league, they come to your park once every two seasons, with the opportunity for you to take a road trip to the other city if you wan to see them there (If you like both your home team and the other team.)
In addition, this makes the division title a little bit more of a thing, as all the teams will basically be playing the same schedules. No "natural rival" series or any of that crap, which has affected division races before when one team's natural rival was a very good team, and the other one's was crap. It increases national interest as Joe says, because if you follow a team closely you will get to at least see all the other teams.
It makes the wild card a bit more competitive as well. Before maybe one team was playing a crap team for their rival, a crap division for their interleague games, and in a mediocre to bad division themselves. Another team might be better, but they play in a tougher division and have a tougher natural rival and NL division. In all the only played about 60% of their schedule against similar teams and 40% against different teams. Now about 88% of their schedule will be the same, just about 20 inside their own division games different.
I get a kick out of fun gimmicky ideas - sure, have tournaments where extra inning games are decided by HR derby, or take away two fielders but give the batter only one strike, or add an optional 5th base where your run counts double if you touch it too. It's cool to see people adapt to new strategies, or to have different skills suddenly be more valuable.
What I don't understand is "fun" ideas that just consist of taking the game as it is but making it more random. Sure, you could raise drama by making all runs count triple in the 9th... but it doesn't change how people play, all it does is take away any incentive to pay attention in the early/middle innings, and make the better team win less often. The best-of-three-set idea seems like one of those.
I'll be honest: I hate pretty much everything Major League Baseball has done with the playoffs & the leagues. Making divisional play matter less is an awful idea: I do not think baseball lends itself to NFL/NBA/NHL style play.
But I'm a grouch, and I'm skeptical.
Personally I'd prefer it if baseball attempted to emphasize its differences instead of trying to make itself into something that it's not.
To go along with the new schedule ESPN should visit a different ballpark each Sunday night so in a full season almost the entire gets a home Sunday night national broadcast.
This is a great idea for the fans, but there's no money in it, because people by and large will not tune in for a Twins-Marlins game or a Royals-Rockies game.
I get it. It’s a pipe dream especially with ESPN decreasing their inventory of over the air games. But the fact you will now visit every ballpark over the course of two years allows for this if you follow one particular team. And even with just one streaming service (ESPN+ or Apple TV) it’s pretty hard to not see every stadium during the season.
I just think it would be fun to have every franchise showcased during the season and it could easily be entertaining TV regardless of the match up.
Hate the midsummer tournament. The All Star break is bad enough. The baseball season is what makes baseball the great American past time. If it's summer there's a baseball game that means something being played.
I would prefer the baseball regular season going the first week of April to last week of September. I don't care if it is 162 games. It can drop back to 154, or to 148.
Make the games quicker, figure out how to reduce strikeouts and walks and the game will take care of itself
I loved the 60 game season where I could watch teams from the Southwest play each other over and over. But I realized that I know the National League pretty well but don't know the American League partially because teams I would root for due to my affiliation with their location, Angels (they have fabulous players so I do try to watch them) and the Oakland Athletics are really doing badly. So I root for the Dodgers and the Giants. Therefore I am mostly watching the National League. And one can dream of seeing the Yankees play in person at Oracle Stadium.
I liked the old separation between the leagues. Interleague play has watered down the schedule and ruined more rivalries than it created. Yankees-Indians used to be a great rivalry and now they only play 6-7 times per year. Who cares if the Indians play an extra series against the Diamondbacks? The old way of non-interleague play made things more interesting. Are the Dodgers really the best team in baseball? Or is the American League just better? Now we don't have that. And the gimmicky mid-season ideas? I hate them.
I love the idea of seven inning games. I didn't think I would but those double headers last year with seven inning games were great. I love baseball but I can't watch for three hours. I got stuff to do.
terrible horrible god-awful ideas, every one of them!
Did this change "come out of nowhere"? I thought we knew about this when the lockout ended.
Why did the Astros & Brewers switch leagues? I always thought that made no sense since the AL already had a Texas team in the Texas Rangers. The Brewers won the AL Pennant in 1982 and the Astros played a memorable NL Championship Series with the New York Mets. I'd love to know the rationale behind these two moves.
In 2010 the NL Central was a 6 team division (Milwaukee had already moved back to the NL) and the NL West had 4 teams. Taking advantage of the new ownership in Houston, the Astros were moved to the AL and placed in the West to balance all 6 divisions. At the same time interleague play was changed - previously there had been two (four?) weekends every year when all interleague games would take place. With an odd number of teams in each league, there was now an interleague game virtually every day, further taking the shine off of interleague play.
Sorry, that was the 2013 season that Houston moved to the AL West, not 2011
Someone closer to either of those teams please correct me if I’m missing anything, but in 2011 the Astros were up for sale, and as part of the sale the new ownership agreed to move to the AL. Bud Selig, commissioner at the time, had been owner of the Brewers previously and wanted them in the NL so it seemed like this was a way for him to accomplish that goal - make the Astros prospective owner agree to the move if he wanted the sale to go through. Selig considered Milwaukee a National League city because the Braves had played there before moving to Atlanta in the 60’s - a move Selig tried but failed to stop.
The Astros had been in the NL for 50 years, the Braves were in Milwaukee for 12, but I guess that’s how it goes when the commissioner of the sport had long ownership ties to one of the teams.
To correct myself, Selig had orchestrated the move of the Brewers to the NL for the 1998 season, when he was commissioner and his daughter was running the team. That season was when Arizona and Tampa Bay were added. So in 1997 each league had 14 teams, but with expansion and the Brewers move in 1998 the NL had 16 and the AL 14.
By 2011 MLB had decided they wanted 15 teams in each league. At that point Selig forced the incoming Astros ownership to agree to switch leagues, even though it was his move of the Brewers years earlier that caused the 16-14 split.
Bud Selig having his daughter running the team was a three card monty act. It amazes me that that the lords of baseball allowed another the team owner to run the league. There had to be heavy smoke and mirrors in the furthest backroom one can find where that skullduggery transpired.
Thank you, for a great response to this question. Talk about about an abuse of a League Office to garner a favor for the team that the League Commissioner has ownership nexus to. That sounds like a Used Car Salesman trick to me.
MLB has been entertaining significant changes for years, and putting some of them into effect. Most of the ideas have been bad -- "we've gotta change something, let's try this." You know, I find with this LIV thing that I'm not really interested in watching any golf presently. I have a feeling something like this might happen to me with baseball, if it just becomes a bunch of gimmicks instead of real baseball. It would be a very sad day if I realized that baseball had changed so much that I didn't like it anymore.
GET. OFF. MY. LAWN!
I'm from Jersey City where nobody had a lawn. We were yelled out to stop playing stickball, boxball of touch football in the street that part of our field was near or in front of their house/apartment building.
What the Lords of the Game need to think about is, what makes baseball great. Or, put differently, what do we love about baseball (if only someone could write a book about that)?
In terms of the baseball season, what I love is the drama of the pennant race. From August to Sept (and maybe even earlier), every game matters. Did you win today? Did the teams closest to you in the standings win? Are you up a game? Are you making up ground? Do you have an upcoming series against them to make up even more?
For teams in the race, that makes every game start to feel important. And since a game is never over until the last out is made, and since any batter can lead to a run, any baserunner to multiple runs, that makes every pitch of every game matter, and feel dramatic.
Of course, for the 75% of the league that wasn’t in a pennant race in any given year, there wasn’t that drama.
One thing that I think has been lost (we can debate why) is the story aspect of baseball; the players as characters in a quest to achieve a difficult goal, overcoming the obstacles in their way. There have been many aspersions cast on that way of constructing a “narrative,” but what those criticisms overlook is the power of storytelling to make for compelling fandom. What we get a lot of now instead of stories is highlights, Statcast features, and quirky bits, but not a lot of setting the events of a particular game as part of a broader narrative about a player or team’s season. I worry that we then lose some of the drama that makes baseball a sport we want to watch.
What is with the constant push for less baseball? And it's all coming from one group, the media. The media keep pushing for 7 inning games, the media is all-in on the free runner in extra innings, the media has been more than occasionally advocating for a mercy rule.
I get it, everyone wants to work less. But please, I am begging you, stop trying to change the sport because you think there's too much of it.
I hate the 7 inning game, and I hate eve more putting a Base Runner on 2nd in extra innings. Two phony acts that diverge from the game way too much.
I wonder if fewer division games will be a drain on overall attendance. Many people travel to other ballparks to watch their home team. Now more of those parks will be a lot further away and fewer dates to choose from for the closer ones.
Except if your "home team" is on one coast and you live on the other. New schedule means you maybe have more opportunities to watch the team(s) you want to see.
That'll just make those rivalry games more important and more special, and will of course allow them to jack up the prices for them.
More inter-league games might seem like a good idea until you realize that for every Mets-Astros series, how many Reds-Royals (Chili -BBQ?) series will you get? And not to pick on those teams in particular - pick two any below average teams and what’s the interest of either team’s fans in seeing that game?
At least with division games each fan base has a chance to build up a healthy dislike of the opponent. A Rockies fan would probably have some interest in playing spoiler against the Dodgers in mid-September, but would they care at all if it were the Twins?
So the Royals play the Reds instead of playing the Tigers again? That's a plus as far as fan interest goes, even if the they are both bad teams. Maybe not nationally, bu locally for sure. If you are a fan of a team in another league, they come to your park once every two seasons, with the opportunity for you to take a road trip to the other city if you wan to see them there (If you like both your home team and the other team.)
In addition, this makes the division title a little bit more of a thing, as all the teams will basically be playing the same schedules. No "natural rival" series or any of that crap, which has affected division races before when one team's natural rival was a very good team, and the other one's was crap. It increases national interest as Joe says, because if you follow a team closely you will get to at least see all the other teams.
It makes the wild card a bit more competitive as well. Before maybe one team was playing a crap team for their rival, a crap division for their interleague games, and in a mediocre to bad division themselves. Another team might be better, but they play in a tougher division and have a tougher natural rival and NL division. In all the only played about 60% of their schedule against similar teams and 40% against different teams. Now about 88% of their schedule will be the same, just about 20 inside their own division games different.
If the Mets -Astros series were so important, then why did Houston move to the AL?
I get a kick out of fun gimmicky ideas - sure, have tournaments where extra inning games are decided by HR derby, or take away two fielders but give the batter only one strike, or add an optional 5th base where your run counts double if you touch it too. It's cool to see people adapt to new strategies, or to have different skills suddenly be more valuable.
What I don't understand is "fun" ideas that just consist of taking the game as it is but making it more random. Sure, you could raise drama by making all runs count triple in the 9th... but it doesn't change how people play, all it does is take away any incentive to pay attention in the early/middle innings, and make the better team win less often. The best-of-three-set idea seems like one of those.
I'll be honest: I hate pretty much everything Major League Baseball has done with the playoffs & the leagues. Making divisional play matter less is an awful idea: I do not think baseball lends itself to NFL/NBA/NHL style play.
But I'm a grouch, and I'm skeptical.
Personally I'd prefer it if baseball attempted to emphasize its differences instead of trying to make itself into something that it's not.
To go along with the new schedule ESPN should visit a different ballpark each Sunday night so in a full season almost the entire gets a home Sunday night national broadcast.
This is a great idea for the fans, but there's no money in it, because people by and large will not tune in for a Twins-Marlins game or a Royals-Rockies game.
I get it. It’s a pipe dream especially with ESPN decreasing their inventory of over the air games. But the fact you will now visit every ballpark over the course of two years allows for this if you follow one particular team. And even with just one streaming service (ESPN+ or Apple TV) it’s pretty hard to not see every stadium during the season.
I just think it would be fun to have every franchise showcased during the season and it could easily be entertaining TV regardless of the match up.
Hate the midsummer tournament. The All Star break is bad enough. The baseball season is what makes baseball the great American past time. If it's summer there's a baseball game that means something being played.
I would prefer the baseball regular season going the first week of April to last week of September. I don't care if it is 162 games. It can drop back to 154, or to 148.
Make the games quicker, figure out how to reduce strikeouts and walks and the game will take care of itself
They already created rules to speed up the game.