So we got football season approaching around the corner. And all the attention in the sports world will shift to the NFL although there is a great season of Major League Baseball still occurring. And that’s fine, its acceptable. Although baseball is my personal favorite sport, the NFL is just a much easier sports league to follow, and football is the representation of American sports. And whenever a sports season drags on too long, we shift focus—look at what happens in the spring when the NBA season is STILL dragging on and baseball can be felt in the air. But I had a random thought a couple days ago while thinking about the scheduling in baseball and how it can be improved: what if MLB was only done on weekends?
Now, for those avid readers of my blog, I have already done an outlook on how I think MLB should be scheduled in the coming years. But another idea popped into my head that just might be crazy enough to work. Picture this:
1) Baseball is only played on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays (with a few exceptions here and there, special games, make-up games, etc.).
2) Four games a week, with the double-headers occurring on Saturdays.
3) 2 bye weeks, to even out the playing field. This scheduling scheme can only work fairly if the proposed re-alignment plan of moving an NL team to the American League to even out the number of teams actually occurs.
4) Only four weeks a season will all 30 teams play, and that’s during Interleague play, when this is indeed possible. The Interleague system I have discussed before, but I strongly believe we should keep the interstate rivals (Mets-Yankees, Marlins-Rays, Royals-Cardinals) and always repeat the World Series of the year before.
5) 15 of the weeks will two teams have a Bye. Later in the season, 5 weeks will give six teams a bye week. That way every team in baseball has the same number of resting weeks.
6) Crunching in the numbers, it totals to a 24-week season, and 88 games per team overall.
Now, if you want a better visual representation of what the weekly breakdown of the games played will become under this format, here it is coming right up.
As for the playoffs, well, I’ve already discussed it in this article. Keep it the same; just add a second wild card to have a one-game playoff before the real playoffs start. Its simple, but it will definitely work. Now the question is, why on earth would we dip the season from 162 games to 88? Now I am not 100% serious on wanting this insane decrease of games and far more structured format, but if we played baseball on weekends, then it would be much easier to follow, and would be a much smoother addition to daily life as opposed to seeing the games bounce all over the place in the calendar and by the time you blink, you’ve already missed three-four games of baseball. And just like my other proposal, which would dip the season to a more modest 126 games, each game would hold far more weight as opposed to one-of-162 ballgames.
Football’s biggest appeal is the fact that it simplifies everything schedule-wise, and hands massive weight on each and every game. Almost all games on Sunday, one on Monday, later in the year we got one on Thanksgiving, and then a few sprinkles of Thursdays but everyone else still stuck on the Sundays. The average American can honestly adjust their life so that they can fit in a viewing of their favorite team without sacrificing too much from their daily routine. Baseball is 162 games, and without the playoffs that’s already 40-44% of your year. With football, the 16 games is barely past 4%.
If you pit baseball on weekends, then we can track our favorite teams better, and perhaps even plan out the weeks so that we can make a better effort to go to the games. While this doesn’t apply to your higher-market-high-fanbase teams like the Yankees, Phillies, Giants, and Cubs, this definitely applies to the Marlins, Orioles, Rays, Athletics, and especially the Rays (worth repeating). Of course the biggest problem is that this would utterly destroy every scheduling tradition in the book, and we all know baseball is about the tradition. Think of how the record books would be tarnished if we shanked the season to 88 games. So here is the other potential solution, although the players would probably hate me for it. A lot.
5 games a week. Double-headers on Friday and Saturday, with the potential series-tiebraker on Sunday nights. What would the total of games be? 24 X 5, which are 120 games. My other scheduling idea? 126 games. Not too far off, and baseball players would get 4 days off a week, while we fans still get 5 ballgames a week. Decent trade-off if you ask me. Last time any baseball league had this few number of games? 1886 National League. Yes folks, baseball goes this far back. And with all these days off, it gives us plenty of time for make-up games and potential tiebreakers towards the end of the year.
Bottom Line: Major League Baseball was a smash hit back in the day because it was chock full of legends, stories, history, rivalries, and memorable moments. But most of all, the world was of a slower pace, and allowed for us to enjoy baseball at its finest form. That was then. This planet is a far faster and more chaotic society today, and its one that doesn’t have time for 162 games of baseball unless you are a hardcore-hardcore fan. While my scheduling ideas are a bit on the drastic side (this one far more than the other) , why I am trying to accomplish is a way to make baseball more relevant without removing some of its Cracker Jack flavor. One thing is certain though, the sports world is evolving rapidly and there’s no way baseball can participate in the evolution if it sticks with its current scheduling guns.
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