I say go the baseball route: directly from HS *or *3 years in college.
Baseball:
1- Start the freaking World Series games at 7:30 ET
2- No DH, of course
3- Between innings=60 seconds max.
4- Mound visits not resulting in pitching change= 60 seconds max
5- Manager must call the bullpen from the dugout to have the new pitcher start walking in before he heads to the mound.
6- Intentional walks- just wave them over
7- Once batter is in box, he can’t leave.
8- Replay official for bang-bang plays at first.
9- Pregame player intros to be done by regular stadium PA man, not Joe Buck
10- No more interleague play. Send Houston back to NL.
11- Rebalance schedule so that each team visits each city twice each year.
12- No patriotic 7th inning musical interlude
13- No silly changing of the bases every few innings
Another for eliminating the DH.
Unless there is a man on third.
Agreed. It’s “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” or NOTHING.
Bob-Agree with the odd numbered ones. My take on the evens:
2: Watching pitchers hit is painful to watch
4: OK, an even we agree on 
6: Takes away possibility of wild pitch, as unlikely it is
8: On all 4 bases (IOW, we agree again)
10: Base interleague on divisional finish
12: You don’t like “Sweet Caroline”? 
Plus, it was in response to 9/11
Association Football: the worst thing is having people who watch about five games every two years drone on about how the game (‘futbol’) could be better, more fun, more watchable, higher-scoring, and so on, and become indignant when fans dismiss their helpful suggestions as ignorant. Other than that, it’s perfectly fine.
Hockey, I’d make it a minor for any after the whistle facewashing or pushing, its getting more and more out of hand and stupid.
You don’t think you need a distinction between losing in regulation and losing in overtime or a (gag) shootout? For starters, you’d have to drop the shootout. You couldn’t have a team come away with nothing after losing in something as silly as that. It’s ridiculous. Then, you don’t think the teams with less offensive weapons and a good goalie wouldn’t start trapping in OT to avoid a loss and zero points? Then what does NBC do? Are they obligated to broadcast these 100, 120 minute games in their entirety? If this ends up being the system, you have no major american broadcasters once this contract ends, I promise.
For me personally what I’d prefer is to drop the overtime completely and just let the result stand after regulation. Leave the overtime for the playoffs.
Add the DH to the national league.
I’m just kidding, baseball is not my favorite sport.
Make football players sign a waiver acknowledging that what they are doing is potentially devastating to their health so they can’t destroy the game through lawsuits like they’re about to.
In addition to baseball, I have these for CFB:
1- Have a 16 team playoff with all conference winners plus some at large teams
2- All teams must schedule 2 non-conference road games, one of which must have a winning record in the previous year.
3- Drop the overtime and go back to having ties
Nope.
If you lose, you lose. If you want to get credit for it, win. Nobody cries about not getting a “point” for losing in extra innings. I’ve never heard of basketball players saying they should get a point for losing in overtime. They don’t give a tennis player a special You Tried Hard sticker if he loses 8-6 in the fifth set. One team wins, the other team loses.
I agree the shootout is a problem, which is why another thing I’d change is I’d go to a full 4-on-4 overtime period. 20 full minutes. You’d reduce, though not eliminate, shootouts.
Not any more than they do now. There’s two gaping holes in your logic here;
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The existence of the loser point encourages trapping and conservative play NOW, in regulation. At 2:00 of the third period of a tie game there’s a rather obvious slowdown in play, as both teams start to play to guarantee the loser point. It’s perfectly logical for them to do that and so I can’t blame them for it, but it’s there. It’s crazy to say taking away the loser point might encourage trapping while ignoring the fact that it already DOES encourage trapping.
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A team with few offensive weapons and a great goalie will trap anyway, won’t they? Isn’t that how they win? Why would the loser point change that?
I despise ties, but I admit that ties are, at least, fair in terms of points awarded. Reintroducing ties would be better than loser points.
Baseball:
- Speeding up the game:
a. Put a cap of 10 pitchers on a team. That would limit the number of pitching changes all by itself.
b. Short of being hit by a pitch or other foreign object, a batter can only call time out once during an at-bat, so he’d better try to save it for the possibility that he might actually need it. If he steps out of the box a second time, it’s an automatic out.
c. 60 seconds between innings. If the defense isn’t out there and set by then, with the pitcher ready to throw, a ball is called. If the batter isn’t in the box and ready to swing by then, a strike is called.
- The shape of the season:
By God, 162 games should settle something. If your goal is to pick the ‘best’ team by any reasonable yardstick, and you’re sending 10 teams into the postseason, you really only need maybe 100 games to ensure that the ‘best’ team is in that top 1/3 that makes the postseason; the rest of the regular season is superfluous.
Anyway, here’s my idea for a season/postseason structure for MLB:
a) We keep the current divisional structure, or something pretty close. I’m OK with Houston going to the AL, for instance.
b) The regular season runs from the second Monday in April to the Sunday before Labor Day weekend. However many games that consistently allows for (125, maybe?) is the length of your regular season.
c) The three divisional winners and the three wild cards in each league play a 30-game mini-season, each team playing every other team in this mini-league one 3-game series at home and one away, to determine the two playoff teams from that league. Team with the best record gets home-field advantage in the playoff series, of course.
d) From there, the playoff structure is as it was from 1985-1993: overlapping 7-game playoff series in each league to determine who goes to the World Series, then the WS. All playoff games to be broadcast on free TV or streamed over the Web.
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Revenue sharing, up to a point: the big-market teams should have a cash advantage, just not an overwhelming one. Figure out a system where the ratio between the richest and poorest teams’ revenues after redistribution is 3:2, with everyone else on a sliding scale in between. It’s no fun to hate the Yankees unless the Yankees have the money to consistently be one of the top teams, but every team should be able to compete periodically if they are smart with trades, player development, and the occasional free agent signing.
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The DH: everybody does it. It’s not the AL that’s the exception anymore; it’s the NL that’s the archaic holdout. Practically all amateur baseball has gone to the DH, the low minors are exclusively DH, and the high minors (AA and AAA) are DH except when two NL farm teams play each other. In keeping with trying to reduce the number of pitching changes, we’re taking away that particular excuse to have to take out a pitcher. DH everywhere.
DH nowhere, and any attempt to “speed up” baseball must be fought tooth and nail. You want fast, watch hockey.
And pull down the lights at Wrigley, dammit!
Yeah, I want baseball to be the blindingly fast sport that it was back in the 1960s and 1970s, when an average game took two and a half hours, a pitching duel might finish in just under two, and a three-hour game meant there had been a shitload of men on base, and probably a lot of scoring.
And postseason games lasted a little longer, but not much.
Now, especially in the World Series, a desultory 5-1 game can take four hours. It’s like watching paint dry. My 5 year old will be in his teens before he’s allowed to stay up late enough to watch an entire World Series game, because it seems that they usually end around midnight, Eastern time.
Yeah, I want baseball to be faster than it is. It’ll always be the slowest-paced major sport, and I’m cool with that. But it used to be a good deal faster than it is now, and it could certainly stand to be that fast again.
Just how long do you think the average game is now?
Football games are much longer than baseball games and nobody complains about the length of those games. It’s not length, it’s pacing.
And ban snowboards.
F1: Shitcan DRS, crappy tires (on purpose!), KERS and crap like that.
Fair enough. A win-win that I think everyone can agree to.
Horse racing:
- All horses must race at least until the end of their four-year-old seasons in order to be eligible for either stud or broodmare duty. If a horse is too frail to race for that long, it’s too fragile to pass on its genes.
- The Kentucky Derby field is now limited to a field size of 16. The sport’s biggest race need not be decided at the starting gate.
- Add one week off between the Derby and Preakness, and one extra week between the Preakness and Belmont. Take away the excuse of short rest to skip the Preakness for the Derby losers.
- No races scheduled for the turf may be moved to the dirt for any reason.
- Increase all weight allowances for races to a minimum of 120 pounds carried. Jockeys don’t need to be bulimic in order to make race weights.
American football: find a way to protect players’ heads and reduce concussions and head injuries, while at the same time keeping the speed and violent hits aspect of the game. The game is dangerous and players know that, but we don’t need today’s stars being tomorrow’s vegetables or suicides.
RIP, Junior Seau and Mike Webster.