Moving baseball back up in the standings

Anyone who knows me or has even engaged me in a drunken conversation at a bar can tell you that baseball is my favorite thing in the world. As a lover of many sports, I appreciate things like football, hockey, golf, etc. But ever since I started watching Phillies games on television as a kid, every other sport has been in competition for a very distant second place on my list of priorities.

For a sport that is just a few decades away from turning 200 years old, there are plenty of things that baseball nailed right from the start. Athletes have gotten a little better, but 90 feet between bases is still the perfect distance to make for close plays on balls hit in the infield. Similarly, 60 feet, 6 inches is still a perfectly measured out space for the drama between pitchers and batters to play out with both sides able to claim their victories throughout an afternoon of play.

Of course, there have also been misfires. For all of their character, those wacky old parks with 250 foot foul lines, 480 foot power alleys, hills/flagpoles/light towers in the field of play, and scheduled doubleheaders were probably bad for players and fans alike. And that’s just talking about integral parts of the game. We could go on forever about ‘Disco Demolition Night’, uniform trends of the 70s and 80s, and most of the Expos/Nationals’ franchise history in general, but that’s all easily fixed.

I personally have no problem with the way today’s game is played. I take some exception to absurdly large contracts causing specific players or positions to be over or underutilized because of preconceived notions of what a power bat or closer should do, but the game is still pretty much perfect to me.

Unfortunately, that’s not what a lot of sportswriters will tell you. Those guys will say that games are now dragging on far too long. They’ll also complain that later and later starts for the season’s most important games are costing the game a new generation of fans who are asleep well before the final out of the World Series.

This sentiment is shared by the powers that be at ESPN. It used to be that a normal spring or summer morning brought highlights from just about every MLB game and took up the majority of airtime on SportsCenter. Nowadays, only front-running teams or thrilling finishes will make the highlight reel and baseball in general is taking a backseat to NBA/NHL playoff games and even offseason NFL news.

I think that the rationale behind all of this is relatively simple. The nature of baseball doesn’t lend itself to plenty of opportunities for enthralling television. The ball spends the majority of the game not in play and when there is action – especially on balls hit into the outfield – the runners and the ball often aren’t on the screen at the same time and it’s hard for people without a firm grasp of the game to fully grasp what is happening.

Compare that to basketball games where all 10 players are on screen or football, where the ball is as big as everyone’s head and is always the focal point of the camera. Specific drawn up plays and telestrators are tailor-made for a great television viewing experience.

These advantages and disadvantages flip-flop when you look at these sports as viewed from a seat in the stadium.

Taking in a baseball game from the bleachers puts all of the action right in front of you. Additionally, the overall atmosphere of sunny days, entertaining stadium vendors, and cheesy organ music is Americana at its finest. Hockey – another sport that suffers when viewed through a single camera – is similar in that the hard-hitting action and constantly moving puck are much easier to track when you’re actually at the game.

Meanwhile, football games can be a bit boring to watch in person if you can’t afford the insanely expensive premium seating or you aren’t a student at a college powerhouse.

Where these discrepancies hurt baseball is that its allure as a television broadcast is lacking. That leads to lower ratings, which leads to less valuable contracts for broadcasting rights. With these deals growing exponentially and now easily reaching billions of dollars, baseball is missing out on plenty of money that sports like football are all too happy to pick up.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that baseball is suffering. Attendance throughout the league is doing very well aside from a few struggling teams and going out to games has become a much more fashionable thing to do. Even the economic struggles of the last few years haven’t stopped fans from showing up all summer long.

But there’s only so much that seats worth a few dozen dollars each can do to make up for nine and ten-figure television contracts. Add in the continued droning of some talking heads who insist that the game is boring and unsuited for television and the hits will eventually start to hurt worse throughout the league.

So what can be done about all of this?

Old-school guys aren’t going to want to hear this, but there are a couple of things that baseball could do to retain some of its mainstream appeal without changing the nature of the game. Both ideas will have some purists cursing my name, but (even as an old-school guy myself) I really think that these relatively minor concessions are worth it to make baseball more enjoyable for some fans who may have strayed away while keeping all of the best parts of the game that I love.

A 138 game season

Baseball is a grind. There’s no disputing that. Baseball players don’t endure the contact of football players and they don’t run nearly as much as basketball or soccer players, but they do stay in peak athletic condition while going out there just about every day through the hottest months of the year.

But this isn’t about that. Baseball players have been playing their 162-game schedule for over half a century and today’s medicine and nutrition are light years ahead of the 60s as far as keeping guys in playing shape is concerned.

The reason that baseball needs to hack a month off of its schedule simply has to do with making a given game more important to any given viewer or fan. It takes repeated matchups between division rivals to find out which teams are most deserving of playoff spots, but 138 is enough to do that. These 18-game season series against every division rival in the weighted schedules that have been used for the last 10 or so years are more than enough. It gets a bit stale when teams play over 40 percent of their schedule against the same four teams.

Eliminating six of those games (one home series and one away) still gives division rivals plenty of chances to go head-to-head and cuts out the necessary 24 games from the schedule.

Here is where things really start to get beneficial. By starting the season at the same time as usual, this will put end of the regular season in the first week of September. Throw in the playoffs as they are currently set up and we’re left with a full season that ends right around October 1.

Bumping up the World Series by just 25 days or so will make a huge difference as far as ratings are concerned. This is because there are less important competing games for baseball to contend with at the beginning of October than there are just a few weeks later.

On October 1, the nation’s best college football teams are largely still beating up on non-conference cupcakes. At the end of the month, conference matchups and rivalry games are in full swing and dominate the national headlines. The NFL is also playing throughout the month, but – as with the college game – the games that would be occurring in mid-September and early October would still be very early in the season and not take up as much of the news cycle with previews.

If MLB used this period to conduct its postseason and avoided most of its clash with the NFL by not scheduling playoff games for Sundays, baseball could reclaim its hold over much of the nation’s attention span as its most important games are being played.

Cutting about 15 percent of the regular season out would basically render records as they currently stand useless, but baseball has always been the only sport that focuses so heavily on its old marks. Besides, just think of how fun the first 20-30 years of the new setup would be with all of today’s best players desperately scrambling to fill the new, totally empty record books.

Add the DH in the National League

I’ll just stand over here for a few moments while some of you toss your computer out the window and start downing the hard liquor.

…

I’m well aware of the fact that this is a hot-button issue for any baseball purist. Make no mistake. I’m fully in Crash Davis’ corner when he calls for an amendment to the Constitution outlawing AstroTurf and the designated hitter.

But this isn’t about appeasing those who are already die-hard fans of the game. This is about drawing in new fans or regaining those who have wandered away recently. Simply put, the designated hitter leads to more offense and – as proven in every sport – more offense leads to more excitement and happier audiences.

We can talk all we want about how all nine guys should be responsible for both offense and defense, but it is unwise to just ignore the benefits of the DH. Not only is there more offense, but never having to worry about hitting can also improve the talent level of pitchers. Without having to grab a bat, pitchers would be free to focus more on their main role for the team and wouldn’t have to spend any extra energy on a scorching summer afternoon like they currently do when they find themselves on the base paths.

It’s really gotten bad for some National League teams. A resurgence in dominant pitching throughout all of baseball in the last few years has left scoring down across the board. For offensively challenged NL squads, this has left virtual black holes at the bottom of their batting orders.

No one is going to get drawn into watching games when every third inning is basically punted away by offenses.

Changing over to the DH in the National League would be a big shift to be sure, but it’s not as if we’d be fundamentally altering the game. Half of MLB has played with the DH for 40 years and it has led to higher scoring without giving a definite advantage or disadvantage when playing NL teams.

This change is even more necessary now that there are exactly 15 teams in each league.

Teams can no longer shelve their worries about finding a DH or getting their pitchers to swing a bat only during a few weeks set aside for interleague play. The new division setups ensure that there will always be at least one interleague series going on at any given point of the season.

I’d much rather see pitchers have to pull their own weight at the plate and I think it hurts the game to see older guys totally give up on playing defense or hitting for average in hopes of becoming a well-paid, all-or-nothing DH in the middle of the order. I don’t think that either of those things makes the game more enjoyable, but plenty of people on the fence about baseball do. Baseball already has my money and interest. The only smart move is to go after those who aren’t flocking to the ballpark or shelling out money for the Extra Innings plan.

There are plenty of other tweaks that could be proposed, but I think that just these two changes would make baseball a bit more attractive to the general sports fan without causing a mutiny from current fans.

Baseball gained its status as our nation’s pastime back when there weren’t as many options and there just wasn’t as much to do.

But America has grown, and our citizens are now wrapped up in the huge demands of everyday life and the millions of different entertainment options vying for their attention. If someone is going to invest upwards of three hours on a baseball game, the game had better live up to our big expectations.

The good news is that – for all of the heat it takes from some talking heads – baseball is still one of the most ubiquitous things in this country.

The average person might not know how to calculate slugging percentage or that Will Meyers is supposed to be the next big thing in the sport, but it’s almost impossible to go through a normal day without having some aspect or terminology from the game enter your life.

Entrepreneurs will continue to swing for the fences, nervous college graduates will often strike out in their first real job interviews, and high school kids will never cease to try and make it to second or third base with their date.

Baseball is firmly engrained in our culture. Even as some say that it can’t compete with flashier sports for the public’s interest, it is still everywhere around us. Maybe the game just needs a little kick in the pants to give it a way to confidently put itself out there for the country to see.

I’ll go ahead and let Terence Mann bring us home:

“This field, this game: it’s a part of our past. It reminds us of all that once was good and that could be again.”