thomas leverett weblog

MLB get your act together

I got sucked into the baseball playoffs this fall, and in fact I'm watching the Astros-Yankees series, game 2, as I write. Astros are winning. It's good to see them win since the Yankees beat my team, the Guardians, but at least the Guardians wore them down so they couldn't keep on winning. What I'm saying is that because of the Guardians, I got drawn into watching the later playoffs, even after the Guardians have been eliminated.

But this post is really about MLB and its schedule. Why are we trying to watch the best of baseball after it's become too cold? The world series won't even start until about Hallowe'en, and by then it's too late; we're bundled up; we have the car scrapers out; we're figuring out how to plow snow. This is not a time to watch baseball. Northern teams like New York have to ask people to stand out in the cold to watch them. This may be ok for Green Bay football, but it's not ok for baseball.

How did this happen? Greed, basically. Their season was too long. They made the playoffs longer. They couldn't cut off time at the beginning, couldn't cut the season's length. Why not? They needed the money, I guess. Everyone was ok with longer playoffs but nobody was ok with fewer games. So, now baseball goes through Souls' Day. And the ironic thing is, this being peak of football season, people care a lot less the later it gets. Baseball is a summer game and they just can't keep up their concentration while they're cutting wood.

There are three natural solutions: Make the season shorter; start earlier, and cut the playoffs back to where they were. Of the three, I like the first two better than the third, as playoff baseball is pretty good; I just don't want to be watching it when it's snowing. Actually the best solution would be both of the first two, making the season slightly shorter and starting slightly earlier. Maybe the hotels in Florida and Arizona would be opposed to that, but, for baseball's survival, they have to do something.

If you think about it, there's a metabolism factor going on in late October. We're either fanatically running around cutting wood and plasticking windows, or we're getting a book and crawling in bed preparing for a long hibernation. Football does ok with this. It's like it feeds off the energy of the first and relies on the couch-potato nature of the second; it's made for television. Baseball is not, so much. When we watch baseball it's because we want to be there, at the stadium. But we don't want that in late October.

Choose among the solutions above, MLB. Your survival depends on it.

posted by tom @ 6:31 PM