OT: What if every MLB team made the playoffs?
and the ice cream cones afterwards. Lotsa tears if those aren't happening.
I'm sure Padres and Mariners fans would love that change. It's been a while since they were in the post season.
They already play too deep into the fall as it is. I guess I'm on the opposite side of this as there're things I'd like to see rolled back:
- Interleague play
- Some Teams
- The Wild Card
- The DH
- Hell, the League Championship Series, too
In the past, the World Series started the first week of October, and was done by the second. Of course, they didn't need all the playoff games they have today - because they had less teams and no interleague play and could actually pretty much decide the dominant teams during the season by playing everyone enough to leave little doubt (most years).
In 1950, the Tigers played each American League team 22 times. In the 2017 season, they played their Central Division foes 19 times each, and the other American League teams just 7 (Bal, Bos, Hou, LAA, Sea, TB) and 6 times (NY, Oak, Tex, Tor). That's a pretty big imbalance. Playing a team that has your number (or vice-versa) an additional 15 or 16 times could make a big difference!
Meanwhile, they played 20 meaningless interleague games against National League opponents.
Yes, I'm old. And Get Off My Lawn
Eleanor Roosevelt could fly?
Well, that really changes my beliefs.
are too many
with a giant walnut for a ball?
might move more like baseball
I thought this was going to be the dumbest thing when I read the headline. BUT im all for it.
Knows what it is doing. That's why the ratings are at an all-time high. They are embracing the demographic today, games moves quick (other than the last 5 minutes), and characters are allowed to be themselves.
In the 100+ years baseball has been played, the sport has evolved at a snail's pace. The younger generations just do not have the patience to sit through a slow, 3 plus hour game, for 162 games. There are very few personalities in the sport.
I have always considered myself a fairly patient man. I can sit through conversations for hours and hold interest. But even I start to lose attention during a baseball game. I appreciate the chess match and the gradual build up of events, but it moves too damn slow. The unwritten rules kill the game. Mound visits, stepping away from the plate, taking an eternity to get the other team on the field between innings, letting new pitchers get 3-5 minutes to warm up even though they've been warming up in the bullpen for multiple innings before getting called.
If baseball does not change quickly, it will be in trouble.
If the moon were made out of spare ribs would you eat it?
What if we all lived under the sea in giant domes? And, since our parents had taken fish spouses, we were all half-fish and half-human?
Baseball literally exists as a sport so you can go drink outside for 4 hours on a nice summer evening or weekend. The winning or losing of any given game drives like 40% of fan interest in the games. Baseball isn't a sport where the majority of fans really care about the meaningfullness of an individual game. Of course if a team is really bad for a period of years that will hurt fan interest, but being in the playoffs every few years is enough to keep most fans around for baseball.
Fans love watching playoff games and fans love watching the drive to make the playoffs.
Have 16 teams make it, do four rounds of 7 game series. End the regular season Labor Day weekend which probably means a season has 140 games or so.
This solves the season dilemna, next need to speed up the games.
except shortening any season will cost teams, owners, players, cities, retail, restaurants and entertainment establishments a lot of money and/or will result in increasing prices for everything to compensate for lost revenue. Who signs up first?
Will be fine.
Forgive me if I don't shed a tear for some guys who earn what I will make in my entire career in a single week. Same goes for owners. Those dudes wipe their ass with my salary. I think they would actually probably embrace playing 20-30 less games and losing 500k or whatever small cut they'd take.
The city isn't just going go dormant in the two-four weeks the season cuts off. In fact, those business will probably do BETTER because there will be major influx during the peak of the season and there will be a much higher demand, rather than Comerica showing out with 2,000 fans during a regular season game.
Would. The TV contract is still going to be massive regardless.
The opportunity for the players to cut out 30-40 games would be hard to turn down. They basically play baseball 24-7. It's an incredibly long season, and then they have like a month or two off and then start spring. It's endless. The other sports at least have a decent-sized gap.
I will now synthesize everyone's suggestions into one brilliant solution. Change the rules of baseball so the sport is played with a big orange bouncy ball that the players throw through a hoop. Cut the season in half to about 80 games or so. Form a new league called the NBA (National Baseball Association). I guarantee this will make the sport more popular.
I hope you understand why people like myself are saying they need to emulate the NBA more.
NBA's popularity is going through the roof, and the ratings bear it out. It was an after-thought the NBA could catch the NFL; now, it's not that far-fetched.
The NBA has some of the most forward-thinking minds running the league, and MLB is stuck in place.
I'm predisposed to prefer baseball over basketball -- i.e., I'm old -- but the baseball leadership is doing nothing to address the many problems with their sport. Every proposed change -- e.g., shortening the season to less than 12 months and 1,000 games -- is met with the objection that we won't be able to make apples-to-apples comparisons with statistics from games/seasons dating back to the last millenium. Yet, every sport (including baseball) has endless arguments over players from different eras, so what is the problem exactly?
Sadly, is that the front offices and higher ups in baseballs are a lot of those classical-minded thinkers that do not want to push the sport forward.
It took a revolutionary guy to introduce small ball, it took organizations decades to embrace new metrics (WAR, etc), and some STILL won't embrace it; ultimately, baseball is very scared to try new things, out of fear they will lose that nucleus of fans (older generation).
I think in the short term, there are a lot of solutions that can fix the problem: shorter season, time between innings, time between reviews, pitching changes, but like everything else, it will take 5-10 big pushes before SOMETHING moves.
While every team makes the playoffs, the best team in each league is automatically in the LCS - everyone else is basically in a "play-in" tournament.The end of the regular season for the top teams runs concurrently to the post season for the worst teams. It both values the regular season more than we currently do and makes a more bonkers post-season that makes tanking less appealing.
While every team makes the playoffs, the best team in each league is automatically in the LCS - everyone else is basically in a "play-in" tournament.The end of the regular season for the top teams runs concurrently to the post season for the worst teams. It both values the regular season more than we currently do and makes a more bonkers post-season that makes tanking less appealing.
May 1 to August 30.
Playoffs and World Series completed by end of September.
Night game's start at six. Including post season.
Weekend contests are all played in the afternoon. Including post season.
Reduce game's to 7 innings.
Get rid of designated hitter. ( especially the Tiger's dh ).
A car giveaway at every home game.
Kissing booths would be cool.
I have other ideas.
Veck.