# How would you improve popular (and not-so-popular) sports? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [December 13, 2000, 5:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-would-you-improve-popular-and-not-so-popular-sports/45312 "2000-12-13T05:36:31Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 7\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![RTFirefly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/c77e96/32.png) [@RTFirefly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RTFirefly)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2000, 12:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-would-you-improve-popular-and-not-so-popular-sports/45312/41 "2000-12-15T12:24:23Z")
**ALL SPORTS:** Allow the cities to buy the teams directly. This business where a private partnership buys the team, then tells the city, “build us a new stadium/arena/playing venue, with lots of skyboxes that corporate honchos can take their cronies to, and deduct from their taxes, or we blow town with ‘your’ team” is for the birds. (Repeat every 15-20 years.) If the city’s going to shell out hundreds of millions of dollars for a sports franchise, they ought to be able to **buy** it, lock, stock, and barrel - and build new stadiums, etc. when they’re needed or when they’ll pay for themselves (with the rent on the skyboxes). **Baseball:** Boy howdy, do I have a list. **1) Get rid of the wildcard!** Bring back pennant races that are _really_ pennant races, where one team goes on, and the other goes home. 162 games is damned well enough to settle who deserves to go on, and who doesn’t. And if it isn’t, **five** games is _certainly_ not enough. It isn’t so much what the wildcard _gives_ that’s the problem - it’s what it _takes away_ from baseball. When I was a baseball fan, what had me sitting on the edge of my seat on a hot August night was the game’s role in part of a larger (and very compelling) drama: one game ahead, at the end of the season, sent your team to the LCS; one game behind, and they went home for the winter. What baseball has done is to sacrifice the quality that gave regular-season games their peculiarly riveting grip, for one extra five-game round of playoffs. Fucking philistines. **2) Weekend day games in the World Series.** I second this! Late October nights really _aren’t_ baseball weather in most ML cities. And the World Series, if they heed some of the other suggestions in this thread, is quite capable of competing with football on weekends. And **WS night games should be started no later than 7:30pm** , local time; get the damned thing over with before midnight, if it doesn’t go 14 innings. **3) Don’t have more postseason baseball than one person can watch.** Three or four playoff games in one day is overexposure (and overkill). Baseball should take a clue from football’s current playoff structure, if it’s going to insist on having three rounds. In order to limit the number of playoff games to two per day, football’s first round only has eight teams, just like its second round. Since in baseball, teams play on consecutive days, rather than once a week, the analogous structure would be for baseball’s first and second rounds to have at most **four** teams each. Baseball could have three divisions in each league, with the team with the best record in each league getting a first-round bye. (Or, if they insist on keeping the abomination…er, wildcard…they could do two divisions in each league plus the wildcard team, with a bye for the best record in each league.) Besides, if your team’s in the playoffs, you should be able to see the game on broadcast TV. Cable should be an option, not a necessity. **4) Speed up the games.** A 9-inning game should take 2.5 hours, plus or minus half an hour, not 3-4 hours. There are about a jillion ways of accomplishing this. Allow only one minute of commercials during each change of sides. Allow a batter only one stepping-out-of-the-box per at-bat; second time, you’re out. For the pitchers, second time they step off the mound in between throwing the ball to home or a base with a runner on it, it’s a ball. Get rid of the balk; baserunners these days don’t need that much help. Call the high strike; the letter-high fastball used to be what the sluggers _wanted_, during the Mays-Mantle-Aaron era. **5) Structure in a way to give fans a place at the table in baseball’s deliberations.** There are two ways to do that: one is at the top of this post - let cities buy the teams; a second is to require the baseball commissioner to be someone who hasn’t had an ownership interest or an executive position in baseball for, say, at least 10 years. Guys like Ueberroth, Giammatti, and Vincent were good for the game as commissioners; Kuhn and Selig, considerably less so. **6) Revenue sharing.** It works for football. The big cities should have an advantage, but it should never be overwhelming. ---
**Author:** ![RickJay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bb73d2/32.png) [@RickJay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickJay)\ **Post date:** [December 15, 2000, 2:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-would-you-improve-popular-and-not-so-popular-sports/45312/42 "2000-12-15T14:13:15Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Dignan \* > \*\*RickJ. said: > > > [@](#): > > > > Well, in basketball, no there isn’t. All of those wanna be rappers that think they’re so hard (Kobe, Iverson) act like they’re going to fight once everyone is on the floor and holding them back. > > But they don’t, because it’s illegal. (Well, fights do break out now and then. But they’re suspended, so they’re rare.) > > > [@](#): > > > > In baseball and hockey there is absolutley a need for it. > > And yet fighting is NOT allowed in baseball, and beanballs are quite rare. What’s strange is that the one way you could retaliate against a pitcher for hitting someone is to hit a pitcher when he’s batting… and yet the National League, where pitchers bat and can be retaliated against, has far more hit batsmen, the exact opposite of what you would expect if retaliation was a “check” or a “Balance.” > > IF you want to cut down on stickwork and the resulting injuries in hockey, make everyone wear facemasks and call the goddamned high sticking penalties. Allowing fighting to make up for the fact that you’re not enforcing the friggin’ RULES does not strike me as being the first and best solution. > > Lots of pro sports are fast and violent and involve contact, and yet hockey is the only sport that allows fighting. Lacrosse is very similar to hockey, very violent, with more high stickwork, and fighting isn’t allowed in lacrosse. > > It’s like a system of checks and balances. You can’t just let pitchers go up there and hurl a hard ball 90 mph at someone’s head without them knowing there’s going to be retaliation coming. Same with hockey, those guys are skating around with sticks and can get wild with them at times, those guys need to know that if they’re going to be reckless with their sticks they’re going to have to watch out for themselves. Yes, stick work and bean ball games go on, but because of fighting it isn’t nearly as common. \*\* ---
**Author:** ![Mr.Blue\_Sky](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/d26b3c/32.png) [@Mr.Blue\_Sky](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mr.Blue_Sky)\ **Post date:** [December 17, 2000, 6:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-would-you-improve-popular-and-not-so-popular-sports/45312/43 "2000-12-17T18:19:57Z")
While at my daughter’s basketball game last night, this thought came to me: At random intervals, force the teams to switch ends of the court. ---
**Author:** ![RoboDude](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bbe5ce/32.png) [@RoboDude](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RoboDude)\ **Post date:** [December 18, 2000, 5:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-would-you-improve-popular-and-not-so-popular-sports/45312/44 "2000-12-18T17:32:38Z")
All water sports would be more interesting if they were played in a wave pool with the wave generator turned up all the way. ---
**Author:** ![Gunslinger](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/4491bb/32.png) [@Gunslinger](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gunslinger)\ **Post date:** [December 18, 2000, 6:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-would-you-improve-popular-and-not-so-popular-sports/45312/45 "2000-12-18T18:30:30Z")
NASCAR: remove all engine and bodywork restrictions. Remember the '69-'70 Hemi-powered Superbirds? 😃 ---
**Author:** ![RoboDude](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bbe5ce/32.png) [@RoboDude](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RoboDude)\ **Post date:** [December 19, 2000, 12:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-would-you-improve-popular-and-not-so-popular-sports/45312/46 "2000-12-19T00:56:07Z")
Boxing: make hitting below the belt legal. High dive: fill the pool with something besides water, like pudding, Cheez Whiz, or oil. ---
**Author:** ![tracer](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tracer/32/20578_2.png) [@tracer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tracer)\ **Post date:** [December 19, 2000, 1:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-would-you-improve-popular-and-not-so-popular-sports/45312/47 "2000-12-19T01:39:14Z")
RTFirefly wrote: > [@](#): > > It isn’t so much what the wildcard _gives_ that’s the problem - it’s what it _takes away_ from baseball. When I was a baseball fan, what had me sitting on the edge of my seat on a hot August night was the game’s role in part of a larger (and very compelling) drama: one game ahead, at the end of the season, sent your team to the LCS; one game behind, and they went home for the winter. What baseball has done is to sacrifice the quality that gave regular-season games their peculiarly riveting grip, for one extra five-game round of playoffs. Hell, why stop there? Back in the first half of this century, they didn’t even have a League Championship Series. Whichever team won the most games during the regular season **was** the league champion, **period**. The World Series was the only variety of “championship series” in Major-League Baseball at the time. The “Wild Card” was introduced because there are now too many teams in each league to have only 2 divisions, but there are still too few teams in each league to have 4 divisions. With only 3 divisions, you’ll have a hell of a time coming up with a way for “play-offs” to be even remotely fair without introducing the concept of the wild-card team. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-would-you-improve-popular-and-not-so-popular-sports/45312.md?page=2)