That could certainly happen, yes. I’m sure a hundred arguments could be made against using the teams’ records. It’s still less arbitrary than what has been out there thus far.
Are you taking a position on what would be the best way to make such a determination?
Name three additional equally meaningful rivalries.
Dodgers / Angels, Giants / A’s in some years. I don’t know how the Chicago folks feel about their crosstown rivalry.
I suppose I ought to ask you your definition of “meaningful” though.
Fair enough. I guess its a regional thing.
I too am wondering if “now” means 1978.
I like that one because if I were at home I could look up who it is. But this isn’t unique to baseball, it is just an artifact of computerized record keeping
I don’t hate inter league, but I hate the unbalanced schedule it results in. If it were just two “natural rivalry” series I’d be much better with it. But 25 games (or whatever it is) is too much, it really unbalances the season (some team had to play two series against the Tigers while another team got the relatively easy assignment of two series against Tampa Bay).
I’d prefer the World Series advantage be decided by participant records, but don’t think the All Star thing is horrible. Actually, my real preference would be that they add a “first to 7, win by 2” requirement to the World Series so that a 162-game season grind doesn’t ultimately come down to something that might be a complete fluke. But that’ll never happen.
Meh. I don’t care so much. The Giants & A’s play a preseason series right before the real season starts every year, split between the home ballparks, and that was good enough for us. Personally, I’d rather see more Dodger games than A’s games (well… maybe not this year…). Plus, it makes those rare Bay Bridge Series (or Subway Series) that much more exciting. I also hate the DH, so I hate seeing teams that play real baseball having to use one.
“Meaningful” is kind of a slippery term, I’ll admit. I guess I had in mind some sort of combination of “historically and emotionally significant.” As far as I’m concerned, the long-standing rivalry between the Dodgers and the Giants, within not just the same league but the same division, dwarfs the matchups between the geographically coincident cross-league teams. Sure, Los Angeles fans can work up a bit of heat when the two hometown squads face off, but it’s a reach compared to the actual rivalries.
Cubs and White Sox, I’ll definitely grant, though it’s more about the fans than the teams. After that the pickings get sort of slim.
As illustration, the baseball powers have tried to set up something beween my hometown Mariners and the Padres, on the paper-thin premise that the teams share an Arizona training facility and see a lot of each other in March. Sorry, boys, but the fans ain’t biting. If y’all wanted to manufacture a matchup, we might have a skosh more animosity toward the Diamondbacks because of Randy Johnson, but that era has passed (and it wasn’t about the team anyway) so the feelings would be marginal at best.
Interleague is sort of fun in a couple of places but overall it’s a gimmick that was tried out of sheer grasping desperation at a time when ownership saw a few financial clouds on the horizon and was looking for novelty to boost revenue. The game is healthy again; the schtick has outlasted its welcome.
The reason I said “now” was to clarify the headline, it did not always suck.
Astroturf is shit, whether on one field or 1000.
Bowie Kuhn may be dead but his policies and philosophies were not lost on Bud Selg. His influence was lasting.
Pete Rose - is not bad for baseball just because he gambled, he is the quintessesntial example of the “anything for money and nothing for free” attitude that permeates professional sports.
As i said, the thread is for you to say what you don’t like about it. If you want to have a great debate on various aspects of the game, create your own.
Yeah, good luck with that.
OP? We don’t need no steenking OP! Especially since just about everybody who has replied so far thinks you are living in the distant past. We seem to think that there is nothing, or not much, wrong with baseball today.
Show of hands?
The OP is out-voted. 
Did anybody else see Bonds’ after-game “interview” yesterday? He seems a little miffed with himself. Poor baby.
I agree, and not to hijack this hijack, but who did more harm to baseball, Bucky F*****g Dent, or Pete Rose? 
SSG Schwartz
But he’s not IN professional baseball anymore. They kicked him out. Isn’t that a good thing for baseball?
It’s almost never been the case, throughout the history of the All-Star game, that all players got to play. There’ve always been a few pitchers held out, and position players didn’t always get into the game. It didn’t happen before the All-Star game “counted” either, so how can this possibly be an argument against the current system? Nothing has changed. Today’s All-Star games get as many players into the game as has ever been the case.
I humbly stand corrected, then. I was under the impression that managers in prior All-Star contests had set up a rotation of players to make sure everyone got to bat or be on the field at some point, and that this was a motivating factor in limiting the number of extra innings that could be played, since you’d run out of players. I obviously haven’t been paying much attention to the games before now.
I still think it’s a silly way to determine home field advantage, but as you say, perhaps no worse than any other.
It’s fun, it’s a great chance for Cubs fans to see what tailgating is like, and for Sox fans to see what having 50 great bars jammed into a 4 block radius of the ball game is all about. The tickets sell out in a heartbeat and it’s a great reason for both sides to go to a bar and watch the same game, talk a little shit, and eat buffalo wings.
As for the rest, me, I’d have home field advantage for the fall classic decided by total number of runs at the end of the regular season.
Good luck with that.
A little more details into the argument against the way interleague is played now. Initially when interleague play began the NL and AL divisions were matched up in a balanced scheduled. This meant that all the NL East teams played all the AL East teams. After a couple of years, some people said they wanted to see some of the teams from the other divisions, so they rotated which divisions played which. But then MLB got the idea to have one team be the ‘rivalry’ team for another every year.
Usually this was geographic in nature. NYM vs NYY, WAS vs BAL, TAM vs FLA, etc. Incidentally ATL was matched with BOS because of the history of the Braves (I’m most familiar with the NL East, but the other divisions had similar pairings).
What this means though is that the Braves get to play the BoSox every year while Florida gets to play Tampa. Over the LONG term (say 100years) this may balance out, but over the short term (say 30 years) this is unfair to both the Braves and the BoSox.
But see, if they don’t hold players back, then if the game goes into extra innings, whether it counts or not, it has to be called off and end in a tie. When that happened in 2002, everybody cackled and clucked and said it was a big embarrassment and the people who ran baseball were doofuses for allowing such a thing to occur. So they can’t win on this one, can they?
Certainly. It means you see each team in your own league less and it cheapens the World Series if the two teams had met earlier in the year. I’m a Yankee fan, and a Mets-Yankees World Series would have a lot more appeal if the teams hadn’t met since the last Met-Yankees World Series.
In my opinion the schedule has gotten too unbalanced, you see too many games with divisional rivals and too few with other divisions in your league. You used to see each team in the league come into town twice a year, now for other divisions it’s once a year. So I only get a chance to see one Yankee series a year in Detroit, for example. I’d rather see them chuck the interleague games and make each team come to each town in the same league twice, like they used to. While we’re at it, bring back the Sunday doubleheaderes, allowing the postseason to start a week earlier.
As a visitor I didn’t find my $20 seat at Yankee Stadium such poor value (though it is lucky I don’t suffer from vertigo :eek: ). Last year I saw a AAA game in Memphis. Seats were excellent and only cost $8 - that’s almost free IMHO - plus an insurance company was giving dollar bills away as a promotion 
Nitpick- Los Angeles has not had two hometown squads since 1965.
That is a good point. In the last few years, a tie game in an exhibition game doesn’t seem like such a big problem. 
Well, don’t they now have two LA teams, since the non-Dodger club changed their name to the Los Angeles and Anaheim Angels of The Greater Metropolitan Basin Encompassing Zip Codes Between 90001 And 92899 Among Others?