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.
