If you’ve ever felt the Major League Baseball season is too long, Rob Manfred and friends have great news.
Ahead of a likely work stoppage, the league announced Thursday that it plans to pitch a 154-game season and an expanded postseason during the next round of bargaining talks. Most teams would have either Monday or Thursday off, depending on whether they play Monday.
“A shorter regular season unlocks making October even better for our fans — with fewer weekday afternoon games, a longer Division Series, and more opportunities to see the game’s best pitchers on the biggest stage,” MLB spokesperson Glen Caplin said in a statement.
In addition to that, the league is pitching adopting a seven-game division series. And the No. 3 seed in each league would choose between playing the No. 5 or No. 6 seed in the postseason. “And allowing the top seeds to select their opponents in the first two rounds would create compelling storylines, intensify existing rivalries, and create new ones.”
We have plenty of thoughts, and let’s start with the positives.
What we like about MLB’s proposed changes
A 154-game season trims the schedule without a drastic cut
On the topic of work stoppages, a lockout forced the 2011-12 NBA season to start Christmas Day, and teams played 16 fewer games. Everything went as planned: The Finals ended in mid-June as they always do, and we didn’t see a season stop or shorten until the pandemic hit in March 2020.
The reason we bring this up is that basketball fans loved the idea of shorter seasons and a Christmas tipoff. Adam Silver instead decided that the season should begin earlier and feature an in-season tournament because teams had embraced load management. Thankfully, we don’t imagine that Rob Manfred or his eventual successor need to worry about teams sitting their best players during a nationally televised July game.
So no, we’re not against eight fewer games in a six-month regular season. You’re talking about a five percent drop, whereas NBA teams lost roughly 20 percent of their games during that 2011-12 campaign.
More off days could ease the strain on pitching staffs
Meh, this probably will not happen, but we can only hope. Enough has been said about teams pulling their starters early, and Red Sox players made it clear how much they despise the trend after their Wild Card round loss to the Yankees. So in theory, you’d hope that a guaranteed weekly off day would result in managers considering letting pitchers face the lineup a third time.
Unfortunately for baseball fans, we’re skeptical some of these organizations — especially those who are overreliant on analytics, most notably the Red Sox and Rays — would completely change their philosophy. Keep your fingers crossed!
Players would keep their full salaries
The typical social media complaint is that lockouts are millionaires vs. billionaires, but it’s nonetheless good to know that a shorter schedule wouldn’t impact salaries. Teams would likely need to adjust some contracts that have incentives tied to playing time, though that’s not a major issue. It’s a positive to us though. These guys shouldn’t be penalized because the league chose to reduce the season.
What we dislike about MLB’s proposed change
The record-book backlash misses the point
We initially planned to mention this in the “what we like” section, but this is an incredibly important conversation. Social media users spent Thursday arguing that records would be “tainted” or not mean as much if the league reverted back to a 154-game schedule, which, as a not-so-wise teenager once said, only revealed their own ignorance.
Let’s take a quick trip back to 1961, when Major League Baseball first had a 162-game schedule. If the situation sounds familiar, it’s because Yankees teammates Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle spent the year in hot pursuit of Babe Ruth’s single-season home run record; arguably the greatest player in league history hit 60 homers over 154 games in 1927, and critics — most notably journalist Dick Young and commissioner Ford Frick — argued that Maris’ 61st home run should have carried an asterisk because he needed more games than Ruth.
The NFL expanded to 17 games in 2021, and there haven’t been many arguments about records or statistics not carrying the same impact. Take a deep breath and use some common sense.
A seven-game Division Series could make October drag
Allow us to understand. Major League Baseball wants to continue the best-of-three Wild Card Series, then expand the Division Series to seven games, and keep the Championship Series and World Series at seven games. In theory, a team could play as many as 24 playoff games over five or six weeks.
Teams picking their playoff opponents is another conversation entirely, and that’s not even the problem in my opinion. There’s just too much baseball, and we urge Manfred and the league to learn from the NBA’s mistakes. Creating the Play-In Tournament helped dilute the significance of reaching the postseason.
Then again, Silver also signed off on putting a significant amount of playoff games on Prime Video, so what do we know?
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