I'm pretty sure this post will be dated April 14 by blogger. You may be thinking, "Have the aliens introduced time travel to Rob?" Oh, there are many possible explanations--who am I to say that the aliens DIDN'T cause me to time travel, then brainwash me regarding the details?
But posted dates notwithstanding, the important thing is the "PART 2" component of this title. It will be followed soon by PART 3, and was preceded by
PART 1. Check out that link for an introduction to this post. Then continue reading ways to fix all that is wrong with MLB according to unbiased intergalactic perspective.
2. CHANGE POST-SEASON QUALIFICATION AND FORMAT. With 32 teams, you really do need 8 teams per league to qualify for the post season to keep enough fans interested. But instead of the current arrangement of 3 division winners plus 1 wild card team making the playoffs, use the four-divisions-of-8-teams arrangement and switch that to 2 and 2 (division winners and wild card teams).
This is a little outside the box for a lot of people. Most proponents of expanding to 32 teams have suggested 8 total divisions of 4 teams each, while doing away with the wild card altogether. There are 2 big problems with that.
First, it becomes a lot more likely that a team with a .500 or worse record will qualify for the playoffs because they were the best of only 4 teams in their division.
Second, no matter how you split up the divisions, the Yankees and the Red Sox will be in the same division. Do we want them to be in a 4 team division that is rationed only 1 playoff spot? Any volunteers to join that division as teams 3 and 4? Rays, you in? Orioles? It’s already considered an anomaly when EITHER the Yanks or the Sox DON’T make the playoffs—Blue Jays fans, want to wait for NEITHER of them to make it?
It’s quite conceivable that the 3 best teams in a league could all be from the same division, and if only one of them made the playoffs each year, most fans would notice this pretty quickly and become disillusioned about it. So make it 2-and-2, and if both Wild Cards come from the same division, so be it. It just means all the more that they’ve earned it.
If the Wild Cards come from 2 different divisions, let them play the winner of the other division in the first round of the playoffs. If they’re from the same division (i.e., one division would have 3 playoff teams), pair the best win/loss record among division winners with the worst win/loss record among wild card teams, regardless of their divisions.
Once you’ve got the teams qualified, for the love of all that’s good,
let them play a 7-game series! I already talked about how silly it is to have a 5-game series as the first round of the playoffs.
To summarize: It’s REALLY silly.
It serves as “the great equalizer” for playoff qualifying teams.
That sounds vaguely appealing, but the time for equalizing is actually when you’re establishing things like revenue sharing, team payrolls, balanced schedules, and fair drafts.
The postseason is the time you want the best teams to, well, win—based on the talent they have demonstrated for 162 games.
It’s NOT the time to create an artificially level playing field with short and oddly scheduled series that (at best) only marginally favor the team with the best record.
So make the first round 7 games, just like the other rounds. Interesting thing: I’ve done a lot of research for these posts, and have seen a lot of point/counterpoint arguments on almost every topic. And it may be out there, but I did NOT come across a single argument in FAVOR of the 5-game series. It may literally be the case that not a single person likes it. So just add 2 games already.
One of the objections to adding the 2 games is that the season will run too long. Since the 5-game series take either 7 or 8 days to play, it’s a little hard to take this objection TOO seriously, because obviously the powers that be don’t care THAT much about shortening the season. But post-season compression is relatively un-trodden ground. So let’s trod there.
Want a shorter season? Play the first 2 rounds of the playoffs in 8 days each. That’s a 7 game series in 8 days, which is REALLY bucking tradition, since 7-game post-season series are ALWAYS: 2 games, travel day, 3 games, travel day, 2 games. Back when pitchers pitched on 3 days rest, this allowed a team’s ace to pitch games 1, 4, and 7. That doesn’t happen anymore. With pitchers needing 4 days off between starts, you’ve got to start 4 different pitchers in a series anyway. Why not play the series with one day off? The day off actually doesn’t even need to be a travel day: Players spend all season playing in one city one night and another the next. Why do they suddenly need time to sight-see during October? If you really want to keep the World Series as a 9 day event, fine. But if you compress the games in the first 2 rounds, you could actually add the 2 more games to the first round and STILL have the first 2 rounds take fewer calendar days than the current arrangement does.
The added bonus is that this arrangement will allow for games to be more reflective of the regular season, since teams had to play 7 games in 8 days pretty much the whole season in order to get to the post season.
SPINNING THE NEW POST SEASON TO THE PLAYERS: Might not be much to spin. I would think the players would generally be in favor of having the post season more accurately reflect the results of the regular season. I also suspect they wouldn’t mind being done with the whole season a couple of days earlier than usual. I’m not sure what the objections would be.
SPINNING THE NEW POST SEASON TO THE OWNERS: Owners would be drawn to the financial allure of 2 more playoff games. However, they would probably risk losing some funds from the networks who get to call the shots on how the playoffs are scheduled. The networks couldn’t care less about playing 5 games series in 8 days, or 7 games series in 10 days, for that matter. What they and the owners DON’T want are 2 things: 1) series that overlap start times, and 2) too many day games. ‘Cause those things hurt ratings and lose money.
Probably, the owners would want to have their cake and eat it, too, meaning adding 2 more games to the first round of the playoffs but still letting the networks schedule the games in whatever manner they think will net them the most funds.
Since Bud Selig’s idea of taking a stand against the networks’ gauging of fan interest as a guide for scheduling games (and, thus, indirectly influencing their outcomes) is declaring that the World Series will NOT be scheduled for November, we may want to lower our hopes just a smidge on how likely this schedule compression is going to happen.
Owners, of course, want their money now, and the idea of sacrificing cash today in order to build a loyal fan base that will provide more cash tomorrow is lunacy. But maybe they could be persuaded of the wisdom of this approach? Possibly? Since cold hard numbers supporting this “investment for a lucrative future” notion would be impossible to provide, maybe a subjective argument could be at least mildly persuasive?
Here’s one: I remember the Rays playing the Phillies in the World Series a couple of years ago. I remember pulling for the Rays, thinking it was about time they had something to show for their years of futility, as well as for their devotion to scouting and player development. I, like much of the country, saw the Rays as David to the Goliath that was the Phillies, and it was an intriguing story. And what I remember about the World Series is this: the teams sloshing around in near-freezing rain while the announcers wondered if the Series clinching game could be won a team sitting in the clubhouse after the umpires declared there would be no more baseball that day. That’s really it. That’s all I remember. And I’m a baseball fan with a pretty good memory. It should have been as embarrassing to MLB as the infamous tie-game all-star game was, because at least the all-star game was unapologetically a show more than it was a competition.
So, owners, was it worth the few extra bucks you got for letting the networks insert days off into the post-season schedule? Selig’s decree that November is off-limits for the World Series is fine, but with a little aggressiveness, we could be talking moving things back by 2 WEEKS rather than 2 days. Squish the calendar days in which the first two rounds are played, and cut the days off in between each round (if the teams want more than 1 day off, tell them to sweep!).
Owners, this will help keep the postseason from being a joke. At some point, that might pay off financially.
Also, this compact post-season scheduling will keep fans interested in the series by keeping in the forefront of their minds that this IS actually a series, and not just some games scattered around by networks—which is what it seems like.
It’s also OK for games to overlap. If you have to have 4 games scheduled on the same day, how about 12:00, 2:30, 5:00, and 7:30 (Central Time). (Side note: if you do that, don’t automatically schedule New York/Boston/Philadelphia for the prime time game, which is good for ratings, but bad for the integrity of the series.) The integrity and continuity of the series that you save will make up for (possibly even financially) the lost advertising dollars for those 30 minutes when baseball fans who would normally be watching all 4 games consecutively (a lot of those types, are there?) will have to pick one or the other.
Here's a visual as to how the first round of the post season could be scheduled. Notes:
a) The days at the top of the column are arbitrary--I don't really know or care which day of the week the series start on. But it's one day off after the regular season, and one day off before the next round.
b) I'm still not crazy about one series having just one game before a day off, but that could be tweaked.
c) Keep in mind, also, that odds are at least one of the series will NOT go all 7 games, so scheduling of games 6 and 7 could be shifted later, losing the earlier and less profitable start times.
d) Though this table doesn't indicate it, the start times for each series would rotate, so everyone gets at least one game at each time slot.
| Sun | Mon | Tues | Wed | Thur | Fri | Sat | Sun | Mon | Tues |
ALDS1 | OFF | 12:00 | OFF | 2:00 | 2:00 | 2:00 | 12:00 | 12:00 | 12:00 | OFF |
ALDS2 | OFF | 2:30 | 2:00 | OFF | 5:00 | 5:00 | 2:30 | 2:30 | 2:30 | OFF |
NLDS1 | OFF | 5:00 | 5:00 | 5:00 | OFF | 8:00 | 5:00 | 5:00 | 5:00 | OFF |
NLDS2 | OFF | 8:00 | 8:00 | 8:00 | 8:00 | OFF | 8:00 | 8:00 | 8:00 | OFF |
So now that the post-season is fixed, let's move on to the regular season.
3. STREAMLINE SCHEDULING. When I was your age, we didn’t HAVE to walk barefoot through 10 feet of snow to get to the baseball stadium. In 1985, the baseball season started on April 8, with game 7 of the World Series being played on October 27. 2011’s World Series is scheduled to end on October 27, but the season started on March 31. It is actually to MLB’s credit that they’ve only added 8 days to the season despite adding an additional round of playoffs (especially if you let yourself forget that the additional round of playoffs is only 5 games long).
But condensing should be explored, preferably on the back end of the season. Chop off a week of the season. Don’t just cut the number of games, though—even I’m not THAT extreme. The easiest and most obvious solution is to add a few more double headers back into the schedule. Those stopped getting scheduled a few years back when owners realized that they could make more money charging two separate tickets. Of course, they can, but then they went and added that extra post-season series, drawing out the season on two separate fronts.
But if each team had, on average, one double header scheduled each month, and if MLB could decide to be a little more aggressive with scheduling the post season on their terms, the season could open on March 31, and game 7 of the World Series could be scheduled for right around October 15.
SPINNING A STREAMLINED SCHEDULE TO THE PLAYERS: So far the players have looked remarkably cooperative in my efforts to improve Major League Baseball, and again I’m not sure what the objections would be from the MLBPA, or at least what objections that may have that wouldn’t get trumped by the benefit of being done with the regular season a week sooner.
SPINNING A STREAMLINED SCHEDULE TO THE OWNERS: It’s that whole revenue thing again, and again I would suggest that in the long run, ensuring that the World Series will not be mistaken for a motocross event is a suave financial move.
But in the short term, it would be hard for the owners to look past the loss of 3 home-dates worth of attendance per team. Roughly, the average, league-wide attendance is about 30,000 per game, which means that’s about 90,000 tickets lost per team.
Of course, there are a thousand variables for what a team makes per ticket sold, and those variables vary from team to team. But for argument’s sake, let me suggest a few ways in which those tickets can be made up for.
a) Establish a marketing push to point out to fans the bargain of getting two games for the price of one. Maybe some people like the idea of getting two games for the price of one, and would buy a ticket to a double header when maybe they otherwise wouldn’t have bought a ticket at all. Let’s say that adds about 5,000 people worth of revenue, and decreases our initial 90,000 figure to 85,000.
b) Remember that the dates that would lose scheduled games are coming straight from the end of the season. Attendance for those games is generally below average, sometimes by quite a bit. So owners aren’t really losing 30,000 a game—probably more like 20,000. So that drops the 85,000 figure to about 55,000.
c) Schedule double headers for Memorial Day, July 4th, and Labor Day, and spin them as “celebration events,” complete with things like fireworks or concerts in between games (turning these double headers into something in between traditional double headers and day/night double headers). Conceivably, attendance could be given an additional boost for these games, up another 5,000. That brings us down to 50,000 lost fans.
d)
If the double header plan were accompanied by the
expansion plan, then MLB could make a new concerted effort to open the season in warm weather cities.
This has been tried before, but it was already difficult to work out a schedule with 15 teams per league—adding this extra variable made it all the more difficult.
With 32 teams, warm-weather scheduling shouldn’t be too difficult, though. Then, the number of early-season rainouts could be reduced, lessoning the risk of scheduled-in-advance double headers competing with the make up dates for rain-outs as the season progressed.
Also, with teams playing nothing but 3 or 4 game series, their days off are more likely to coincide, adding more flexibility for rescheduling rain outs.
So fewer rain outs, accompanied by more flexibility in rescheduling those rain outs, could translate into another 10,000 fans coming to games that they otherwise would have skipped.
We’re down to 40,000 lost fans.
e) OK, fine—one of each team’s scheduled double headers could be a day/night double header, with a separate ticket for each game. Not very traditional, but it saves a game’s worth of revenue. So let’s say that’s another 30,000 fans passing through the turnstiles, reducing the “lost fan” total to 10,000.
Of course, this math is all very speculative, and some teams would be hurt more than others by losing a home date, even one in October. But my point is that the adding of 3 home double-headers per team is not so simple as “losing 3 dates”. Major League Baseball is nothing if not painfully uncreative in building a money generating fan base, and “losing 3 dates”, if accompanied by a little bit of creativity in scheduling and marketing, could very possibly result in a financial wash for MLB.
MLB's problems are getting close to being solved. Stay tuned...
-THP
