MLB Offseason: Fixes to the Game That Major League Baseball Should Consider

We have just finished up another baseball season and the Fall Classic has probably been one of the best ever.  There have been controversial managerial moves, late-inning heroics and great pitching performances.  In fact, Game 6 may have been the best baseball game I have ever seen.  However, the ratings for the World Series have been in steady decline over the last three decades. 

People are watching—in the cities with teams in the playoffs, but they are not necessarily watching when their team has been eliminated.  According to Nielsen.com, both Philadelphia and St. Louis are over 20 in the ratings department when the Phillies and the Cardinals have still been in it.  However, the rating in a good baseball town, Philadelphia, plummeted to less than five after the Phillies were eliminated according to ESPN radio’s Colin Cowherd, who has access to the ratings.  To put that in perspective, that is less than CBS’s Two and a Half Men gets for a normal show.

I love baseball.  It makes the spring and summer tolerable at work because I can put day games on the radio or on MLB-TV while I work.  I believe that one of the best phrases in the English language is “pitchers and catchers report.”  I took my two young sons to their first San Francisco Giants game this summer and it will be a day I will never forget.

But I worry about baseball.  We live in an age of technological advancement, complexities and being able to keep up with an ever-changing world.  One might argue that baseball is the refreshing break from the fast-paced world in which we live.  This works for people who don’t like to text, think Twitter is for idiots or want to see the return of the brief-case sized cell phone.  I used to be one of them.  I was the last one of my friends to get a cell phone and scoffed at Facebook.  However, reality always rears its ugly head, and I adapted.

Baseball is horrible at changing.  Why is “Shoeless” Joe Jackson not in the Hall of Fame?  Why did the New York Yankees play in, by modern standards, a dump until 2009?  Why do “baseball people” shudder at the thought of Mark Cuban owning a baseball team?  The reason for this resistance to change is the romance with nostalgia that many baseball fans cling to.  However, I see baseball entering serious financial trouble in the coming decade and beyond because MLB has the wrong attitude toward change.  With the changes I propose here I don’t think it is going to alter the basic allure of the game, but they will make it better to a wider audience and a new generation of baseball fans.

Shorten the Season

Let’s be honest: If the Atlanta Braves and the Boston Red Sox had not been awful this September, the final month of the season would have been unwatchable in 2011.  Frank Deford makes a very compelling argument for shortening the baseball season here http://www.npr.org/2011/08/31/140034507/too-many-days-hath-september-and-baseball, and I largely agree with him. 

School does not start after Labor Day anymore and we saw way too many empty stadiums in the last month of the season.  Why?  Baseball lacks importance in September for the majority of the league.  College and pro football are starting (but aren’t into pivotal games, yet) and sports fans wander away from baseball when it isn’t the only major sport available to watch. 

Be honest with yourself, please.  Once your team is out of realistic contention you aren’t making an effort to watch games in September.  Or if you are watching the games you are flipping the channel more frequently between the game and Man vs. Food.  Let’s go back to 154 games so the season ends around September 20^th so that records (more on that later) won’t be affected and more teams are in it (more on that later, too).

Contract 2 Teams

For those of you who are reading this in Oakland and Tampa Bay you may want to go to the next slide.  Baseball has so many games it takes either a very large city like Los Angeles or a very devoted fanbase like St. Louis to support a baseball team.  The expansion experiment in the 1990s resulted in only the cites that either really care about baseball or are winning being viable franchises.  For example, Chase Field in Arizona was less than half full when the Diamondbacks clinched the National League West in 2011. 

Baseball needs to put a good product on the field in all its cities and not just a select few.  MLB should contract two franchises where the fanbases have proven they don’t care about the team: the Tampa Bay Rays and the Oakland Athletics. 

Sorry guys, but if you can’t get a new stadium and all the cities that can support baseball have a team it is time to go.  The MLBPA wouldn’t want this, I know, but it would not be hard to expand each roster from 25 to 27 so no Major League jobs would be lost.  Every team could use an extra pinch-hitter or bullpen arm.  Or, some teams might go to a six-man rotation.  Two National League teams would have to move to the American League, but if it is for the good of the game it shouldn’t be hard.  My choices would be the Milwaukee Brewers and the Colorado Rockies.

Plan B: Move Teams to Places That Care About Baseball

Don’t like contraction, you say?  MLB could consider moving teams to places that care more about baseball.  For example, the Tampa Bay Rays can’t get people to the games and don’t do well on television.  Move the team to the Northeast where people care more about baseball.  What happened when the NHL tried to get hockey in the south by putting a team in Atlanta?  Twice, via the Flames and the Thrashers, the teams moved to a place where the people actually cared about hockey (Calgary and Winnipeg, respectively).  

Move a team to northern New Jersey or Brooklyn, build a stadium that is modern but not the corporate center that Citi Field and Yankee Stadium are and market the team as the inexpensive alternative to the Yankees and Mets.  Other cities that could be considered for another team could be Philadelphia, St. Louis and Boston.  Heck, in Boston you could actually build a stadium that has modern amenities like no limited view seating.  Imagine that.

It Is Time To Dump Your Old Ballpark

In the interest of full disclosure I should mention that I am a Giants fan.  I grew up freezing my patooty off at Candlestick Park night games.  AT&T Park is such a difference that it is nearly inexplicable.  However, it is pathetic the way that some baseball fans cling to old pieces of garbage.  Two of the biggest money franchises in baseball play in dumps: Wrigley Field and Fenway Park.  I have been to the former and it was nice to have cheap Old Style and watch a woman in a Padres’ jersey knock a guy out in the bleachers in the seventh inning.  But, come on.  Do you think that the Redskins would want to play in RFK Stadium because of nostalgia?  Did the Lakers want to stay at the Great Western Forum because Jerry West and Kareem played there?  Even the Maple Leafs moved to a modern stadium in Toronto. 

If you play in an old stadium, do something similar to what the Yankees did, please.  If you have an old stadium, make a reasonable modern stadium (the costs at new Yankee stadium have priced out a lot of fans) with the same name and dimensions and join the modern world, please?

Get over the Fascination with Records and Statistics

This might be the first of my suggestions that are “baseball culture” changes.  As fans, I think we need to modernize our mindset a little bit.  Basketball has added limited replay, the three-point line and instant replay on certain calls.  Hockey has eliminated the red line, added the trapezoid and manipulated the crease.  The NFL, probably the most innovative of North American sports, is constantly looking for new ways to make the game better.  Baseball has exploded with statistics in the computer age and I think it has been to the detriment of the sport.  Felix Hernandez won the AL Cy Young award in 2010 with a 13-12 record.  Why?  Because he had a great WHIP and ERA on a lousy team. 

Does anyone know the number of yards Brett Favre had in his career?  No.  Does anybody know how many career points Wayne Gretzky had?  Probably not.  However, we all know what 755 (err, 764), 3000 and 300 mean.  We need to be able to adjust our view of these records in the 21^st century if the sport is to survive, because we are living in society that largely cares about wins and losses rather than stats.  Who needs to remember who played third base for Pittsburgh in 1960 when you have an iPhone?

Create More Urgency in the Season by Adding a Wild Card

This would partially be taken care of by having a 154-game season because more teams would be in the race later in the year (at least potentially).  However, I advocate the addition of a second Wild Card that would leave more teams in it at the end of the season.  This way, if there was a team way ahead in the wild-card race like there should have been in 2011, or in 2001 when the Athletics won 102 games, there would still be enough teams in it for the second Wild Card to make September important for more teams. 

The wild-card qualifiers should play a three-game playoff series before the start of the LDS and the winner of this series should play the No. 1 seed regardless of whether or not they are in the same division.  This way, the No. 1 seed gets an enormous advantage in the LDS because they will face the No. 3 or 4 starter of the Wild Card in Game 1 of the LDS.  In addition, the division leaders will have a reason to play hard for the No. 1 seed.

Increase Interleague Play and Decrease Divisional Play

How many times have baseball fans heard the argument that it isn’t fair that the Orioles and Blue Jays have to play in the same division as the Yankees, Red Sox and Rays?  I remember Chipper Jones griping about having to play the Red Sox every year in interleague play while other teams got easier schedules in the “rivalry” weekend.  After contraction, teams should play a three-game series with every team in the other league. 

Each year, the home and away would alternate so fans would be guaranteed to see every big league star at least every other year.  In addition, I would keep the "rivalry" weekends where the cross-town or cross-state rivals play.  Baseball’s best regular season attendance each year is during interleague play so add more of a good thing.  This is going to decrease the number of divisional games, but are we really going to miss the mid-September Pirates-Astros series?  Probably not.

Embrace Technology and Do Not Be Scared of It

MLB took a major step in the right direction with allowing instant replay on home runs in 2009.  It has helped get a few calls right, which is what Major League Baseball claims they want.  However, in Game 5 of the World Series a mistake that could have been corrected stood as wrong.  Armando Galarraga should have had a perfect game in 2010 and umpire Jim Joyce should not be attached to that bad call.  Little League has a workable challenge system for replay.  A manager gets one challenge per game (and this can include home runs) and gets another one as long as he keeps winning challenges. 

Please don’t tell me that it will slow down the game when baseball’s marquee matchup, the Yankees and the Red Sox, often lasts over four hours.  Also, don’t tell me that blown calls are part of the game.  They were part of the game during the Roosevelt administration.  In 2011, every game is televised so we can eliminate as many mistakes as possible.  I’m not advocating replay on balls and strikes and one or two challenges per team per week will only add about three to four hours of game time to the season, at most.  The best way to turn off the next generation of fans is to be an “old man’s game” by being scared of technology.

Find Ways To Continue To Speed Up the Game

We are all busy and getting busier by the day.  Maybe it is because I am a Giants fan and have become accustomed to two-hour pitcher’s duals, but I want everyone to speed up the game a little.  I think that this can be accomplished by speeding up the battery.  MLB can limit the number of timeouts a player can take in the box (remember that the umpire does not have to grant a timeout) and start calling balls if a pitcher takes too long between pitches. 

I realize that MLB has tried this before, but with better data collection at games they can reprimand umpires that let games go too slowly.  In addition, limit the number of throws over to first base to three per at bat, resetting with each new hitter.  How exciting would it be for fans to have Jose Reyes on first base knowing that the pitcher could not throw over there again? Of course, purists will say that this will ruin the strategy of the game, but the game would adjust.  Those same purists said the same thing about the live ball, the designated hitter and lowering the mound. 

Find Ways To Make Baseball a Better TV Show

The NFL is the most popular sport in this country because it is the best TV show of all the major sports.  Hockey, although much better on HD, is better live.  Basketball works pretty well on the boob tube.  However, the nature of baseball makes it worse for TV than the other sports. 

Baseball has tried innovation like the camera mounted in the bases and Fox’s heat cam in this year’s World Series.  However, I think that many baseball fans are resistant to changes in the broadcast just because they are changes.  Let’s be more open-minded, shall we?  I think that if MLB and the networks world work on other things, like speeding up the game and adding urgency to the season, it would help the TV product.

Hogtie the “Baseball Men”

There are too many “Baseball Men” running baseball that manage the sport with archaic thinking.  Because Frank McCourt was viewed as a good baseball guy he was allowed to buy one of the sport’s most iconic franchises on credit.  Because Mark Cuban is viewed as someone who is not afraid of change and will think outside baseball’s very tiny box he has been shunned from owning the Cubs, Pirates and Rangers. 

Now, with the Dodgers being up for sale, I can promise you that MLB would rather have an owner closer to Frank McCourt  than have a  “troublemaker” in Cuban.  I wish I knew how to fix this, but the owners in baseball have to be pliable to change with changing times or the sport is going to collapse.

Change the Luxury Tax System

It is a joke that the owners of the Pittsburgh Pirates or the Kansas City Royals can just pocket the money that they receive from large-spending teams.  In the next collective bargaining agreement there needs to be an effort to show that the money is going to improving the franchise as a whole. 

Revenue sharing can do a lot to improve scouting, Dominican baseball academies and minor league systems.  If the vultures that are running the small-market clubs put all the money into improving their squads they may have a good enough team to be able to pay to keep the players that they develop, rather than watching them go to the Yankees and Red Sox.

Conclusion

Because of the tradition that is so entrenched in baseball I doubt that MLB would ever consider many of these changes, but I think baseball fans need to start calling on their owners to work toward modernizing the sport.  If you think baseball is so much of an institution that it couldn’t possibly fold, remember that other wildly popular sports have disappeared to the fringes. 

If you said to someone in the 1930s that no one would care about horse racing in the future, they would have said you were nuts.  If you had told a sports fan as recently as 1970 that something called “Mixed Martial Arts” would make boxing irrelevant, you might be put in a straight jacket.  Sports have to adapt to the times in order to continue to be relevant.  I want to have a great World Series like we have had this year in 2020, 2030 and 2040.  If baseball doesn’t look at modernization, there might not be a World Series in 20 years.  Or it will be on Versus right after the highlights from the National Judo Championship.