Just the idea of major league baseball teams playing interleague games is weird enough; but I read last week the NL and AL Presidents no longer exist–that is, the office has been discontinued. Is that accurate? Is there just one league now–like the NFL? It seems to be a case of Tweedledum and Tweedledee…
Yes, the office of league president was abolished last year. All baseball opertaions are now conducted under the MLB umbrella. The division of baseball into two leagues is now pretty much historical/arbitrary.
Zev Steinhardt
Yeah, about the only difference between the two now is the designated hitter.
See jab1, we can agree on something! (reference to a GD we’re having)
Zev Steinhardt
I’m also looking forward to watching Enterprise.
Not only the DH, but the fact that, in order to perpetuate the All Star Game and the World Series, which are big money-makers and PR events for MLB, they have to continue with the two different leagues.
Even though Zev is correct in his assessment of the division of the two leagues, I can’t see it changing too much. Schedules will still allow for inter-city rivals and long-standing grudge matches between AL and NL teams, but I’ve heard a number of commentators mention that nobody is really going to come out to see the Tigers play Philadelphia, or the Angels play the Mets. There are bigger draws within each league (e.g., Boston/Yankees, Atlanta/Mets) that it’s not worth watering it down.
That’s not to say MLB won’t get some gerbil-headed idea about “improving” the game that will prove disastrous/laughable/shameful/moronic/alloftheabove. But my feeling is, keep the obvious interleague games in the schedule and keep the schedules heavy on same-division play within the league, so as to make winning within your division that much more important to the standings.
From a business standpoint, maintaining two separate league offices with individual functions made no sense. It’s much more efficient to have one set of umpires and one set of administrators.
Baseball has big 21st Century type problems to fix and maintaining the artifice that the 16 teams in the NL operate as a separate entity from the 14 AL teams is a pretty expensive one.
Like money is a problem to those bastards! It is Power for the owners and not money that’s caused the change.
I would assume that power and money are pretty much the same thing in this situation. If the owners make more money, they have more power. Streamlined operations reduce overhead. It also makes it easier for them in the collective bargaining process.
There isn’t an NL Players’ Association and an AL Players’ Association.
I don’t have any love for baseball owners, but this particular move by them to streamline their operations makes a lot of sense. It is one of the few sensible things that baseball owners have done.
I wasn’t dogging you, just saw a chance to say something nasty about the baseball owners and couldn’t resist.
Actually, I agree with this to some extent. Perhaps the Dodger-Angel, Giant-Athletic, Cub-White Sock series, for example, would be relevant. (I know that at least before World War I the Cubs and White Sox–in the regular World Series in 1906–regularly played an intercity series; and the Angels and Cubs seem to have had something of a rivalry in spring-training games.) But I am hard put to see that a game between the Dodgers and the A’s, or the Royals and the Expos, or the Orioles and the Mets should count in the league standings or in things like players’ batting averages, for example.
There’s a Cub-Angels rivarly in the Cactus League? It must only be talked about in Chicago. I’ve never heard anyone from Southern California talk about that. Go figure.
Also, as a nitpick and this is a mistake that I make at times, but the Cubs-White Sox and Yankees-Mets are INTRAcity rivalries, not INTERcity rivalries. L.A. vs. San Francisco is an intercity rivalry.
I attended a Cubs-White Sox game last week at Wrigley and that series is far more heated than the Dodgers-Angels “Freeway Series”.
But getting back to the OP, if it weren’t for the fact that baseball owners historically haven’t gotten along with each other has been the main reason for keeping two leagues. After the NL and AL signed their “peace treaty” in 1903, they really became one entity with the ability to prevent other teams from impinging on their territory and able to keep players under contract almost forever with their mutual use of the reserve clause.
I rarely hear anyone from Southern California talk about the Angels, period!
why discuss this at all when they still allow ASTROTURF in major league games?
this shit actually changes the outcome of games so who cares about scheduling or anything else?
a game on astroturf is simply not a real game (the ball behaves differently than on grass and dirt)
so who cares about all the rest? this is what people should be upset about, but it is just accepted as normal
Not as many stadiums have artificial turf anymore:
Metrodome (Minnesota)
Skydome (Toronto)
Tropicana Field (Tampa Bay)
Veterans (Philadelphia)
Olympic (Montreal)
Compare this to just ten years ago, when St. Louis, Kansas City, Houston, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati and Seattle all played on artificial turf in addition to those five teams.
Except for Toronto and Tampa Bay, all the teams that play in those stadiums want new parks with real grass. Since Tampa is such a new team, it won’t have the bucks or the political clout to get a new stadium any time soon. Of course, if they don’t start winning and putting people in the seats, it’ll be moot because the team will fold or move. SkyDome could get real grass, but it would be really expensive to retrofit the stadium and they spent too much on the place to replace it so soon. (It’s only 12 years old.)
Any way, the point is that artificial turf is not the factor it used to be, and it may be limited to just two parks in five years or so.
Philadelphia and Tampa Bay use Field Turf, not Astroturf, which is actually much more like grass than Astroturf.
I don’t think Astroturf has nearly the same effect on competition as does the playing of 81 games in Denver.
All baseball stadiums have some sort of quirk that changes the way the game is played. Dodger Stadium and the Oakland Coliseum have a lot of foul territory, is that bad? Enron Field has a short fence in left. Comerica Park has deep gaps.
The success of the Twins and Phillies this year owes very little to the presence of artificial surface in their stadiums. If it did, they should have been better before.
Hey, I lived in St. Pete in the last half of the 70’s and can testify that winning isn’t a requirement for pro sports teams in Tampa Bay.
In fact, I still make the joke about Doug Williams being the “Man Who Could Overthrow the Shah” whenever his name comes up.
[sub]Yeah, no one else laughs, either. Don’t worry about it.[/sub]
I must be showing my age. In the mid-60s, the Angels usually started their spring-training season with the Cubs, and it was particularly relevant in 1964–because of the saddening of players and fans when Cubs rookie Ken Hubbs, two years after setting a fielding mark at second base, died tragically in a plane crash. There was a minute of silence before the opening game between the two teams. (Worse still, according to The Baseball Hall of Shame, a bubble-gum company issued a card with the stats of Cubs pitcher Dick Ellsworth–but the picture was of the deceased Ken Hubbs!)
Maybe the Angels and Cubs don’t meet much anymore in the “Cactus League”…
The Angels and Cubs do play a lot in the Cactus League. They both train in Mesa, but I don’t think any spring training game is particularly heated these days.
I would say that, in the Arizona desert, EVERYTHING is heated in the spring. RIM SHOT