Major League Baseball publicly revealed part of a proposal to the MLB Players Association on Thursday ahead of the expiration of the current collective bargaining agreement (CBA) this coming offseason. The league has done this multiple times during the season and this is just the latest. It includes some playoff proposals -- including extending the Division Series from a best-of-five to a best-of-seven -- while the current postseason is ongoing and on the minds of fans.
MLB also proposed cutting down the regular season from 162 games to 154. As for me, I'm going to run through some of the pros and cons of the latest maneuver from ownership and the league office. Here's a forewarning: if you get angry about opinions or "bias," you can probably stop reading.
This is a discussion full of opinions. There's certainly a history-loving, Hall-of-Fame voting part of me that would prefer to stick with 162 games. We've had so many seasons with 162 and have gotten used to certain benchmarks with that specific number of games.
It seems weird to go backward. Of course, anyone who knows history realizes that the American League had a 154-game schedule from 1920-61, and the National League had a 154-game schedule from 1920-62. There's plenty of precedent and we've historically adjusted with our numbers just fine.
Further, 162 games are more than enough. We can drop the "more than." Baseball is a game that needs to be played in large samples, so I'd protest pretty strenuously if there was a proposal to knock this thing down to something like 80 or even 100 games. All the way up to 154, though?
And guess what, we'll even get a few more teams hanging around in contention later on the calendar, and that's a good thing. Again, Major League Baseball is a marathon of a sport where small samples can provide fluky outcomes. The one-game wild card was never the best decider on which team should advance to the divisional round, but at least we could say, "hey, if you don't like it, win your division." Now that there are three wild-card teams per league, we could end up with all kinds of weirdness in the Wild Card Series and I think three games is far too short for those series.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
