Then home again to host...the Pirates?
Yeah.
Well, get used to it, because coming up is yet another of MLB's "fixes" that carefully elide fixing everything that is really wrong with the game.
Welcome back, BALANCED SCHEDULE!
That's right: next year will feature a "balanced schedule" for all major-league teams. This will include 46 games against NL teams for the Yankees, including that traditional home opener against the San Francisco Giants.
Games against divisional rivals will drop from 19 to 13 apiece. If you'll notice, the Yanks don't play Tampa Bay after the end of August—or Baltimore after the end of July. Believe it or not, there are no home games against Boston after August 20th.
The last home games are a three-game set against those D-backs—in baseball since 1997!—while the campaign concludes with three in Kansas City—much as it does this year with four in Texas.
O! Joy!
Yes, once again it's MLB trying its best to hammer any remaining tradition out of the game, and slavishly imitate football and basketball—two sports to which it does not bear the slightest resemblance, either in action or heritage.
Major-league baseball's rock was always its stability. Sixteen teams in 11 cities for 50 straight seasons. The big leagues, and everything else was bush league. World without end, amen.
All right, that had to change. But how, exactly?
The grifters broke countless hearts in Harlem and Brooklyn. And those were the smarter ones. How's that working out for ya, move-from-still-the-country's seventh-largest metropolitan area in Philadelphia to Kansas City...and then Oakland...and then who-knows-where Athletics?
As previously noted here, there is STILL, 61 seasons and 14 teams later, not a single expansion team with a winning record. Think it might have been better to keep things more-or-less the way they were, start competitive new leagues, and then have the winners play the World Series winners? I think so.
Of such atrocities as inter-league play and the wild card, I can barely speak. There has not been a real pennant race since 1993—or maybe 1968—depending on how you count it. But the wild cards keep coming.
Interesting how this year, even with 40 percent of the teams making the playoffs, there are virtually no real races going on, even for those wild cards. As attendance and television ratings continue to tumble. I can't remember a non-Covid season when I've seen so many empty seats, in so many different parks.
And yet, MLB goes on, in its determination to hammer and smash everything in baseball down to a dull parity. Promote play that makes the players more indistinguishable than ever. Dress them up in all kinds of clown costumes every so often, just to sell more gear.
And now have them play everybody and anybody, even at the most important times of the year.
Remember when you could name every team in every sport? Now, in the NBA and the NFL, the regular seasons are just a blur of anonymous teams in ever-changeable locations, coming in for a quick and usually meaningless game until playoff time, when the real action begins.
This works—more or less—for these sports, because people are entranced by the violence or the sheer athletic feats (the last of which, incidentally, are actively discouraged by the Sabremetricious in baseball).
In football, almost nobody can afford the tickets, and who wants to be out in the cold anyway? It's a big-screen sport. You have friends over once a week, to sit in your living room and drink beer, and watch the games. The NBA is a spectacle, and little else. Bright lights, deafening music, celebrities at half-court, and everyone taking 50-foot shots and thunder dunks. Yay.
That's not the appeal of baseball, though the people who run it can't grasp that. So now they'll give us the balanced schedule. That will probably help the Yankees, situated as they are in a tough division.
But at the same time, their appearances in other cities will no doubt help the parasites of the sport, the undercapitalized or just-plain-cheapo owners in "small markets" hang on, with more home dates against a team people want to see. And the thrill of the stretch run will fade even more, as the top two or three teams in the best divisions coast into the playoffs every year.
No doubt, MLB will come up with more "fixes" for this—such as still more wild cards, a shorter regular season but a postseason that extends to about Thanksgiving, etc.
It won't save them.
Brockmire was prescient. Baseball will keep losing fans and the geniuses in charge will ensure that even more of them stop following the sport.
ReplyDeleteIt's so weird that common sense is in such short supply, both in the Yankees front office and the offices of MLB. The stewards of the game act like they're always stewed, finding new ways to fuck up what was a near-perfect sport in the constant greed for more, more, more money. Unlike other sports, baseball calls for curation and guardianship, not constant novelty and "innovation." I can see why the ruling class may not think so, and there's nothing wrong with a little fun sometimes, but the watering down of the talent level through overexpansion and the ridiculous resulting playoff structure is just terrible.
There's an interesting phenomenon regarding traffic. When highways are crowded, the powers that be often widen the roadways to add more lanes and, theoretically, alleviate congestion. Instead, the opposite happens. The roads become more congested than before and traffic is snarled worse than ever.
I think that's what's happened to baseball. We now have too many lanes, and instead of raising the popularity of the sport, it's causing it to erode.
A 162-game grind just for 12 teams to make the playoffs is such a slap in the face.
ReplyDeleteWhat is the point of the regular season? Every team that reaches 86 wins is going to make the dance. Only around 12 teams are even trying each year; the rest are in rebuilds or perennial (and profitable!) 4th place finishes.
All the drama died with expanded playoffs. The "balanced" schedule just recognizes that death.
For a grand conclusion, the MLBPA will form their own single league. Team names will be replaced with simple city names, playing in football stadiums. Financing will come from Goldman Sachs. The player owned league will devise some sort of guaranteed revenue to players percentage, and then perhaps a profit share, and sell the teams they create to emasculated vanity owners.
ReplyDeleteMaybe Saudi Arabia should go for baseball next.
ReplyDeleteJust like the LIV league they could offer huge guaranteed salaries that are not based on performance. So a guy like Donaldson could get like, 25 million a year and not have to hit over.225 and still get the money... Oh... Uh, never mind.
Ah, they already tried that, Beauregard. 1890, with the Players' League. They essentially killed the American Association (one of the two big leagues existing at the time), and were on their way to throttling the NL, but the National League owners bluffed the money men behind the players into selling out.
ReplyDeleteWhat I wish is that the cities would seize control of the teams. Make them all publicly owned. No luxury boxes unless they are given out in a lottery system...
My fantasies aside, MLB chases every possible, short-term revenue source because they need them to meet their ridiculous payrolls.
ReplyDeleteWhat's needed is for the owners to more seriously assess players, rein themselves in, and then bring prices and TV fees back to a sustainable level. Never gonna happen, but there you are.
Sir Sweat A lot is back on the active roster.
ReplyDeletePrepare to stress, brux and eye roll.
Oh - and everything Hosssssss-ssssssssaid above.
Time to get the Rolaids out...
ReplyDeleteI like the balanced part of the schedule. No more NL or AL Central teams getting an easy wildcard slot for beating up a bunch of Quad A rosters.
ReplyDeleteUnionizing the minor leagues were a big step towards a player owned league. If they could it in 1890 as HC claims, then they can do it again.
ReplyDeleteI don’t know about socializing baseball…. I’m talking about something that requires only greed, not political unity lol.