I like the All-Star game. Not because the game itself it particularly entertaining, but that it rewards very good players along with the greats. The guys who aren’t gong to win MVP or Cy Young or get inducted into the Hall of Fame. They guys who are having a really fucking great season right now. Making just one, or hopefully several, all-star squads is a pretty cool achievement.
Why would you want to get rid of it?
I like both interleague play and the All Star game. I could care less which method they use to determine to decide who is the World Series home team, but I’m glad they don’t give this dead horse to sports talk radio to beat to death any longer.
If you want a break from a brutal winter, get on YouTube one night and stream an all star game from your youth, they’re still fun.
I wish they would dump the DH, expand (ugh) to 32 teams, 8 divisions of 4 teams each. Have a slightly unbalanced schedule with no interleague play. Go back to Sunday doubleheaders. Carry fewer pitchers with more available pinch hitters. Quit the boring “let’s get a guy on base so that the clowns behind him, who have four strikeouts between them already might put one over the fence” strategy. Bring back Billyball, which was a hell of a lot more fun than today’s game. Have the managers tell the players “Hey, see that enormous hole in the defense when they shift against you? Get your head out of your ass and slap one the other way.” While we’re at it, cut down on the ridiculous varieties of uniforms. One white uniform for home, one gray uniform for the road.
And bring back Ladies’ Day!
That means no beer, you know.
What, no more $10 watered-down Bud Light?!?!
Why have double headers? Many Yankee, Redsox, etc games takes as long as a doubleheader did in the 70s and before.
Charlie Finley had a Hot Pants Day once. Genius, he was.
This is a bit tougher than you think. How do you do it and stick to 162 games?
If you go 18 times in-division that’s 54. That leaves 108 games against 12 teqams, which is terrible; it’s 9 each, which means uneven home and away and it’s 5 games and 4, necessitating a lot of 2 or 4 game series.
You could do 12 against everyone, and… no, that’s 180 games. 16 in division (all 4-game series?) is 48 games, which leaves 114, which sucks.
14 games in division is 42 total, leaving 10 against each extradivisional team - again, was too many 2 game series.
If you work from the outside in, 6 games against extradivisional opponents works; that’s 72. But then you’re playing divisional opponents 30 times.
Personally I’d like to see further expansion. 40 teams sounds about right.
I completely support interleague play, and have grown to accept the DH. Not only does it save us from a pitcher having to hit, it also allows a team to give a player a rest (which is nice if it’s a Sunday game and he’d be relegated to pinch hitting duties on his day off and you’ve been looking forward to watching him)
I’d certainly be in favor of more doubleheaders, more days off ( to help when there’s years with no spring and there are lots of rainouts/snowouts) and a 154 game season. In a perfect world, without time considerations, we’d have a balanced schedule. But the unbalanced schedule works. Yes, it gives ESPN more Yankees/Red Sox and Cards/Cubs games, but it also reduces the number of late night starts on the West Coast for East Coast teams and vice versa.
And I’m certainly in favor of wrapping up the World Series before Halloween, I love baseball but dragging it out so late is just tempting the weather gods.
Hell, Oakland and Miami can’t support the teams they have. Where are we going to put 10 new clubs? Especially without so diluting the talent pool as to make the new teams perpetual Padres.
The Cubs need to stop this nonsense with the semi-platooning of Kyle Schwarber. Tonight he’s benched against a right handed pitcher. Just let Schwarber play, it’s not like Ben Zobrist is going to make a difference.
However, Joe Maddon has won a World Series and I haven’t, and he does like to change the lineups up, even with the Cubs on a hot streak.
Do the Yankees still have the dress code? They look so neat and scrubby clean (as they are kicking the Nats’ butts).
Oddly enough, they do. More a hair code then a dress code though. I think it is officially called a “appearance policy”.
“All players, coaches and male executives are forbidden to display any facial hair other than mustaches (except for religious reasons), and scalp hair may not be grown below the collar. Long sideburns and ‘mutton chops’ are not specifically banned.”
There’s lots of large cities without a major league team: Vancouver, Charlotte, Portland, Orlando, Salt Lake City, San Antonio, Sacramento, Oklahoma City, Las Vegas, Indianapolis, Austin, Memphis. Not to mention Montreal (which is larger than any of the others), because … well, we all know how well that one went. Maybe not all those cities will want a franchise, but I’m sure several of them do.
That’s the real issue.
Play of the night in MLB: Jean Segura makes a dramatic backwards no-look tag out on Luis Valbuena. Absolutely perfect throw by Mitch Haniger to set it up. It was #2 in Sports Center top ten and I don’t know why it wasn’t #1.
Nice play, but the biggest factor in that out was the base-running of Luis Valbuena. He ranks 419th among the 447 qualified players in sprint speed. Plus, he deserved to be out for that stupid bat flip.
I literally disagree with everything you wrote.
Oakland and Miami don’t lack for fans. Oakland has a shit ballpark and Miami is a dysfunctional pile no one in Miami trusts, for good reason.
You could have three or four teams in greater New York. Another team in LA. Montreal could have a team; again, their problem wasn’t the city, it was disastrous ownership and a stadium I, a drooling passionate baseball fan, would not have crossed the street to watch a game in. Portland, Austin for sure. (Austin is the biggest city I nthe USA with no major sports team. Why is no one snapping it up?) Memphis. Maybe Vancouver. Charlotte? There’s lots of places that could support a team. Mexico!
The barrier isn’t markets. There are lots of good markets. The barrier is owners. You can have a city with a hundred million people and they’re all rich baseball fans but unless you have an owner with billions and either the money or political pul lto get a stadium built, it’s irrelevant. Major League Baseball teams are about OWNERS more than cities. I’m fantasizing that there would be 10 owners available, but let me have my dreams.
Previous expansion have not significantly diluted the talent base, and the more jobs there are, and the most MLB organizations there are, the more effort there will be to find and develop talent. If the 10 teams were added over a space of 6-12 years, the difference in talent level would not be noticeable.
It takes an experienced baseball fan to notice the difference in talent level between AAA and the majors. Slowly incorporating the best third of AAA level players - and it wouldn’t even be that because there’d be more emphasis on acquiring top overseas talent - would really not change much.
The talent gets better every year anyway. There’s 30 teams now, more than ever, and to my eyes the quality of ballplayer is the highest it’s ever been.
The Miami problem is pretty much the same as the Montreal problem - an owner named Loria.
Except pitching, overall there is too little already.
I am not sure I follow ? Pitchers have been getting better in recent years. ERA’s used to be about 4.5, now around 4, strikeouts per game are climbing steadily::