"This is how the world ends..."

 ...not with a bang, but with Rob Manfred."

Enjoy this season's shotgunning of the Birds. We will never have it so easy again.

A passing remark by David Cone caught my attention yesterday: as part of the new general agreement, baseball will be moving to a "balanced schedule."

Turns out, it's true:

https://www.mlb.com/news/more-interleague-games-on-balanced-schedule

Instead of the 19 games currently played against division rivals, your New York Yankees will play only 14 games against Birds, Rays, Jays, and the Succubus from Hell, and 10 games against every other American League team.

So decreeth MLB's own Vishnu, destroyer of worlds.

Well, hey. For all my calamity howling, baseball had a roughly "balanced schedule" from 1979 through 2000, with teams playing almost the same number of games against everybody in their league.

People such as Cone seem to feel this is "fair," in that it evens up the playing field. And much as I will miss the tomato cans from Bal'mere, the Yanks play in a relatively tough division, so it probably won't hurt our boys.

But here's the rub: Il Duce Manfred ALSO wants to add interleague games. A lot of them. 

Starting in 2023, the Yanks will play 46 games against the National League—all of 4 against the Mets, 3 against everybody else. Every team will now play every other team.

It's not all Baron von Manfred's fault. MLB has been moving this way for a long time, first with interleague play itself, then getting rid of the league presidents.  

But the current commish has accelerated the drive to destroy baseball's traditions, starting with the unpardonable destruction of the old minor leagues and the deep-sixing of dozens of teams there.   

Now we get another move away from traditional rivalries, and toward what might be called "Slow Basketball" or "Slow Football." That is, a regular season that is an interminable slog of mostly meaningless games against interchangeable opponents from all over the country.  Followed by a months-long playoff that most clubs will qualify for.  More and more to be viewed on "Cable's Cable"—pricey streaming services that we can barely keep track of.

Oh, joy.

This is yet more of the shift toward what might be called, "Divorced Dad Sports"—with all the traditions that the committed fan has always loved ripped away.  Everything oriented instead toward major leagues attended mostly by divorced dads dutifully driving their kids to a once-a-year-outing. 

Once again, MLB refuses to fix any of the problems that truly alienate its fan base—ridiculous prices, arrogant and undercapitalized owner/grifters, churlish athletes, and an interminably slow, mangled version of the game itself—in favor of "fixes" that its overlords think will reap even bigger profits for them.

How they will succeed is hard to discern. Like so many "improvements" of the past—blasting ads and head-banger music between innings, Three Truly Boring Outcomes, the Manfred Man, etc.—the "balanced schedule" is most likely to keep driving attendance numbers and TV ratings down.

I suspect MLB thinks it will recoup through the likes of legalized gambling. And what could possibly go wrong there?