Creative Ideas for MLB to Spice Up Its Boring August Calendar

Unless we are talking about suspensions coming down for the biggest stars in the sport, August is very much a transitional period for Major League Baseball and the world of professional sports. 

The NBA and NHL finished their seasons two months ago. The NFL and college football are starting up once again and grabbing all the headlines. 

Meanwhile, MLB is littered with fascinating stories that aren't yet commanding the kind of attention they deserve because August is a month that elicits anger (school starts up again, the dog days of summer, etc.) or ambivalence. 

The stories and playoff races, while certainly worth paying attention to every single day, don't get face time because there are still two months left to play. September is when everything comes into focus. 

If the Tigers-Indians series that starts on Monday night in Cleveland was being played on September 5 instead of August 5, it would be one of the top stories on SportsCenter. Instead, it isn't even a blip on the radar right now. (Biogenesis and Alex Rodriguez also play into that, sadly.)

Yet that should not prevent us from enjoying the daily trials and tribulations that Major League Baseball provides no matter the month. All we want to do is present Bud Selig and Co. with a solution that they can use to generate more buzz and excitement in the month before the month sports fans really care about. 

Give us the marquee interleague series

One of the benefits of having the Houston Astros move to the American League is it gives us a chance to see interleague play all season. For some, that might water down the product, but there is still a feeling that you are going to see something different when an NL team plays an AL team. 

I mean, the Rays actually drew over 30,000 fans for two games over the weekend against San Francisco. That's more a testament to how bad the Tampa market is for baseball than anything about the Rays, who trail only Boston for the best record in the AL, but speaks to the level of interest there still is in a big interleague series. 

This year we have seen some marquee series like the Yankees traveling west to play the Los Angeles Dodgers, Phillies vs. Red Sox, Cardinals vs. Angels and several others.

But you don't have to bunch those marquee events so early in the season. If MLB would space those kinds of series out more, the attention would stay with the games throughout the summer. 

We will get a few of those big series this month, most notably Boston going to Los Angeles for a series against the Dodgers on August 23-25, but there is also a lot of filler that will just get us through until September. Braves vs. Phillies, anyone?

Perhaps there is a thought that the sport needs those series in May and June to draw buzz, ratings, tickets, etc. away from the NBA Finals and Stanley Cup Final. But that leaves the cupboard pretty bare once you get into late July and early August. 

Just imagine what kind of talk there would be on talk radio, websites and blogs if there was a Cardinals vs. Red Sox series about to begin in Boston. We might actually be hearing more things about what's happening on the field instead of the shenanigans off of it. 

Try to plan some big intraleague series

Setting up schedules for Major League Baseball can't be easy. There are a certain number of games each team has to play against their division, at least one home series against New York and Boston (if you are an AL team outside of the East division) and you never know how things are going to shake out for a team once the games start. 

If you thought Pittsburgh would have the best winning percentage in baseball on August 5, you either need to buy a lottery ticket or were trying to make a joke that everyone found funny. 

And since the biggest interdivision series are (usually) reserved for September—occasionally you will get a series like Detroit-Cleveland in early August—it would be in the best interest of the sport to poke around and see if it can get those big intraleague matchups. 

For instance, imagine if the people making the schedule thought that Boston would have a nice bounce-back season to at least be competitive. Those same people would also be able to assume that Oakland, a team that won the AL West last year, has a strong chance to be very good again. 

Think about what a Boston-Oakland series would look like at this point in the year, instead of just before the All-Star break when all the talk is focused on the Midsummer Classic.

Plus, by planning a few notable intraleague series, MLB can save even more divisional matchups for the final month. You can have Boston and Tampa Bay play more than just three times in the final month, or Arizona not end the season against Washington. 

Again, so much of this depends on teams being able to meet their preseason expectations, which doesn't often happen. You can't factor in the great unknowns that go into baseball, but you can try to plan for what will be the most compelling stories. 

Move the draft to August

This one is the most outside-of-the-box idea, but it is also the one with the most potential. Despite some fan insistence that the MLB draft take place during the offseason, that isn't viable because college and high school players will have had too much time off from games to show what they can do. 

And unlike football, which doesn't have as many players eligible to be drafted and allows you to put all of the draft-eligible players in an enclosed space to have them work out, baseball requires a lot of space and the right venue to bring everyone together to work out. 

There are 1,500 players who get drafted and thousands more who get seen at various levels of college and high school baseball around the country, so just the idea of a scouting combine is silly. 

It also isn't ideal because it would take away from time that these players could have to play games this season, unless you push the start of the Arizona Rookie League back a month. There would be a lot of schedule shifting going on, but it is something that could work. 

Also, by moving the draft from June to August, MLB ensures that all of the players selected will be able to negotiate and sign in a more timely fashion than they are under the current format. 

Granted, the current system isn't terrible, but there are players whose teams are still in the College World Series, which prevents them from having any contact with the team that drafts them until it ends. 

It also allows the draft to stand out much more on the sports calendar than it does currently and can help it become a bigger event for the sport, which is good because the players drafted are the future of the game and you want casual fans to know who they are. 

Look back at this year's draft, which happened on June 6. That was the same date as Game 1 of the NBA Finals between Miami and San Antonio, as well as Game 4 of the Western Conference Finals in the Stanley Cup Playoffs between Chicago and Los Angeles. 

To say that Major League Baseball wasn't getting a lot of attention on draft day would be a major understatement. Hardcore fans knew exactly where to find it and who the top picks were going to be, but the rest of the world had to dig deep on their TV channel guides and radio dials to get any information. 

Moving the draft to August, before preseason football really kicks into gear (there are actually people who watch that junk) and while college football has just started practice would generate headlines and buzz for it that has been severely lacking. 

MLB has taken great steps to make the draft a bigger deal, like televising it and bringing prospects to the MLB Network studios to shake the commissioner's hand after being picked, but there is still work to be done. 

Some of the showcase events that start in August involving next year's talent might have to be pushed back a bit to get the full attention of talent evaluators, but it is a small step that could be taken to make a good event that much better. 

This idea would be the most difficult to pull off for so many reasons, but I feel like if MLB really put its head down to create a solution it could work really well. 

If you have ideas to make August a little better, or anything else you want to talk about baseball related, feel free to hit me up on Twitter. 

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