Beyond what other people have said about the “days off” mainly being travel days, the league also needs a bit of flexibility in the schedule to make up rain-outs and suchlike. I’m not a huge fan of November baseball, either, but the league would pretty much have to outright drop regular-season games to have the playoffs end earlier. 154 games was good enough for the Babe, right?
Well, opinions. Where’s the evidence?
People who like baseball and aren’t fond of football, like me, are going to watch baseball. People who like football and aren’t fond of baseball weren’t going to watch baseball much anyway. People who like both will watch both; after all, they don’t usually conflict on TV.
I don’t want less of my favourite sport because some people like football.
At the risk of repeating to some extent what’s already been said, I don’t think you understand what you’re being told.
Nobody is saying the baseball season shouldn’t be compressed because ballplayers aren’t paid enough. It doesn’t matter what they’re paid. The issue here is what impact season compression would have on the quality of the game and the ease with which it could be watched. It doesn’t matter if ballplayers make $10 million or $10,000. To be honest I personally don’t give a shit what they make.
Taking away off days and adding doubleheaders would beyond any doubt whatsoever increase injuries and reduce players’ ability to stay in the lineup. Baseball is hard. I know it doesn’t look that hard; I know that every once in a great while some fat guy like David Wells will come along and play well. Baseball is very, very tough. Physically it is incredibly hard on your joints; it’s a game of constant starts and stops, where the muscles and joints are asked to spring into action after periods of inaction, and with a lot of twisting and turning. It’s incredible hard on the shoulder - pitchers mostly, of course, but it’s hard on everyone’s throwing arm, really. And mentally the game is really, really draining. Playing a game every day in a sport where failure is a constant companion, where the tiniest change in technique will screw you up, takes a lot out of you. And at the major league level you’re training all the time anyway, so it’s not like it’s just the games.
If you don’t believe me, then join three or four softball leagues next year so that you have to play six or seven games a week. Go ahead and train all winter so you’re in the best shape you can be in. Two weeks into the season you’ll be afraid you’re going to die, and two weeks after that you’ll be afraid you won’t. Go ahead, give it a shot. You’ll learn how hard it is.
If you compress what is already the busiest season of all team sports, you’re just going to increase that. Salaries have nothing to do with it. You’ll increase injuries and fatigue and reduce the quality of the sport. And for what? So some people who prefer football can… what, exactly? Screw football.
Weekend games draw more fans and make more money than weekday games. The loss in revenue would far outstrip any alleged loss in revenue from football fans not going to the games.
Even if true (which is highly debatable) this is really irrelevant to the OP. The question is how many days can be eliminated from the season. As has been pointed out, there are very very few actual “off” days during the baseball season.
I was going to make this point as well. Scheduling 162 games each for 30 teams is extremely complex, particularly when you have to account for teams in the same metropolitan area wanting to avoid playing on the same day, and having their marquee matchups with rivals at good times during the season. Having occasional days when no games are scheduled for certain teams is probably necessary to ensure the overall league and interleague schedule works out.
While eliminating some games would shorten the season, it would also cut team revenue, so its not an option they want to consider.
If you are talking scheduled doubleheaders with a single admission, then you are also going to cut team revenue. There is a reason teams no longer schedule doubleheaders in advance of the season.
As it is now, doubleheaders are normally makeup games for rainouts. If you schedule doubleheaders, you reduce your options for playing makeup games. And what do you do when your doubleheader is rained out? You need spare days in the schedule to accommodate makeup games.
It might also be mentioned that spring training adds a month or more to the time commitment of a baseball player when they have games or at least practice every day. Between the last week of February and the first week of November, most players probably average less than one day “off” per month.
I wish.
Yesterday saw wins by the Giants, Eagles and Jets. Yet when flipping around between the NY and Philly sports talk stations this morning, there wasn’t a word spoken that wasn’t about the Yankees or Phillies.
It used to be that I could at least count on the Philly stations to talk football on a Monday morning, but now that the Phillies don’t suck anymore, they’re just as bad as the NY stations. I hate October.
I meant first week of October (except for members of playoff teams).
Some evidence that football games negatively impact baseball revenues would probably help your case. The suggested solutions would still be totally unrealistic mind you, but it would make the argument at least mildly more rational.
It would be good to have cold weather World Series teams play in a warm neutral site. But that might give a home field advantage to southern teams, whose fans could get there easier. But baseball in Canada or northern US in Oct. can be ugly.
I think that would be awful.
Yes, it can be cool in October in the north, but i don’t want the World Series turning into another Superbowl, where most of the crowd consists of rich people and people with corporate connections, rather than the actual fans of the two teams involved.
This problem would probably be even worse for baseball than it is for football. At least the Superbowl is only one game, so if you need to travel to Florida or California from Chicago or New York, you only need to budget a single weekend. But the World Series is a minimum of four games, and as many as seven, which would require fans to take more than a week off work and to pay all the massive expense associated with a week or more in hotels, eating out, etc.
Ask season ticket holders and other actual baseball fans in places like Boston and New York and Chicago and Detroit whether they’d prefer a warm-weather neutral site to a cool-weather home series, and i’ll bet at least 95 percent would put up with the cool weather in a heartbeat.
I would think that there is a great deal of intense working out for baseball players. How else would they have the ability to maintain their reaction time while at bat? I believe that it’s about .4 from the pitcher’s release to the plate, giving the batter maybe a fraction of that time to decide to swing, and less than .2 to take the swing.
Sure there’s lots of standing and waiting, but then there are moments that require immediate reaction and to be done so with a maximum effort, be it running after a ball, or throwing a ball 50 yards (outfield throw to the plate), or sprinting to first base on an infield play. Players need to maintain their conditioning, or they run the risk of muscle strains or tears while performing these feats.
Also, hitting is a bit more difficult than it may seem imho. Try getting into a batting cage some time; spend twenty minutes taking hacks in the 80 mph cage and see how you feel. As it has been said, the most difficult thing to do in sport is to hit a round object squarely with another round object.
I do understand the goal of ending the season sooner, and I think it’s a good idea, but not because of professional football, and not in the ways suggested by the OP.
The long layoff before the beginning of the NLCS was annoying, to say the least. Had the Giants/Braves series gone 5 games, it would have ended on Tuesday, and the NLCS didn’t kick off until Saturday. I wish that MLB would stop letting Fox dictate its schedule; I have zero statistics on this, but I would bet the decrease in ratings from starting the series on “non-optimal” days is at least partly offset by flagging interest due to the long layoff. There’s no momentum.
If you trimmed some of the off days from the postseason schedule, it would help. Every playoff series should start on Tuesday or Wednesday after the season ends (arrange them such that potential one-game playoffs feed into the Wednesday series) rather than Wednesday or Thursday, and there shouldn’t be an off-day between home games.
Even the above suggestions will only shave 3 or 4 days from the schedule, but it’s a start. Ultimately if you want greater gains you would have to take more drastic action, such as shortening the season, starting it earlier (already a problem due to weather concerns in April) or scheduling more doubleheaders.
Easy solution: ban football. That way there’s no overlap to worry about. It’s a stupid sport anyway. 
Better idea – let MLB take a page from football: 16-game seasons, and then a single-elimination postseason. They can wrap the whole boring mess up in little more than a month.
LOL - this sounds seriously arduous and draining, and appealing as an argument…until you compare it to the real physicality of and ridiculous schedules of games like basketball and hockey. Baseball players have it realllllllllllly easy.
Funnily enough, if we’d taken this approach this year (ending the season on April 18), we would have ended up with the following teams in the playoffs:
AL:
Yankees
Rays (wc)
Twins
Athletics
NL:
Phillies
Marlins (wc)
Cardinals
Giants
Not far off from what we actually got. Of course, this is more a fluke than anything else - baseball has 162 game seasons for a reason. But I was amused. 
Ray Chapman
Ray Fosse
Tony Conigliaro
Steve Yeager
These are a few baseball players that might not agree with your assertion.
Do you ever travel for work?
I take several trips a year of about a week or so, usually to place nicer and more interesting than Cincinnati, Kansas City, Baltimore, or Detroit. I stay in nice hotels, probably as nice as most ballplayers would. The idea of spending three or four months of every year in those hotels actually sounds pretty crappy. It’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t traveled a fair amount for work.
But I agree: the season should be shorter. The whole playoff system is nuts, and having the World Series in November is a joke.
What do you mean by “ridiculous schedule” (unless you mean “ridiculously easy”)? The Knicks, for example, have 13 days in November without a scheduled game, 18 days in December, 16 in January, 18 in February, and 14 in March. While a lot of those are travel days (since the NBA doesn’t play series, but only one game against each opponent at a time), during that stretch it looks like they have at least 25 “off” days at home when they are not traveling - five times more than baseball players get. Hockey teams are similar in having lots of “off” non-travel days at home.
Operative word here being “few.”
I was mainly referring to the travel schedule…41 mostly single-night trips during the season. Baseball teams have ~25 or so where they are typically parked in a posh hotel for 2-4 days at a time. Basketball players travel much more often, and their sport is inarguably more physically demanding.
From what I understand about hockey, their season involves fewer games but they’re still one-night road trips.
How often do places like Detroit or Minnesota actually get a lot of snow in October? I’m sure it’s happened, but it’s rare, and to be honest I don’t see why you’d go through such a massive headache as shortening the season to mitigate such a tiny risk.
Have you, in fact, played baseball 13 out of 14 days for an extended period of time?