MLB schedule is out, and there's a twist for '23

[Vamos Rafa]

Playing everyone in the league once -- and radical realignment based on geography later -- is bad for travel, despite MLB claiming the opposite. And it's bad for TV times. It's also bad for attendance and bad for fairness.

TRAVEL
You're eliminating nearby road division games (2 of them), so you can play half the other league on the road too (farther distances).

You're also shrinking league series by a game to create more road series vs interleague opponents. Aka, you're playing MORE SERIES TOTAL, which is more flights; more time on airplanes.

TV TIMES.
You're going from 5 road series to the opposite division (W vs E, E vs W) to 7 one year, 8 the next.
The West teams are going from 12 road series vs the teams in East/Central divisions to 15.

Literally everyone in baseball gets more road games at 4 pm, 5 pm, 9 pm or 10 pm and less at 7 pm.

FAIRNESS
By reducing the number of four game series and playing more 3 and more 2 game series, you're increasing the chances someone misses an opponents' best starter. Huge difference between facing the Mets' Scherzer, deGrom and Bassitt vs the Mets Walker, Peterson and Williams.

Yes, everyone plays everyone now, which SOUNDS fairer, but it's now WHEN you play a team is going to matter a lot more. Baltimore, Seattle, Arizona... those teams were terrible in April, but are playing really good now. The Braves were mediocre the first two months and are playing .800 baseball now. While San Francisco, Milwaukee, LA Angles, NY Yankees... those teams were a lot better the first half of the season than the second.

ATTENDANCE
The reason that some interleague series draw really well is because those series are special events that happen once a year, or once every six years. You circle your calendar because if you don't go see Trout/Ohtani NOW, you've got to wait six years.

We can see this with Houston and Texas. Houston switched leagues. Here's average attendance for HOU vs TEX (both stadiums combined; removing COVID and Hurricane effected series) over 8-year spans

Both in AL: 31,293 (139 games from 2013-2019, plus 2022)
Interleague: 36,743 (48 games from 2005-2012)

And that's an in-state rival for bragging rights.


Everyone loves to point to the Trout/Ohtani or Crosby/Ovechkin effect. But for every team with an elite superstar, there's four teams without one. Sure, each team has good players, but Ohtani is a unicorn.

Not to mention that players change teams so much, you DON'T have guys who never visited somewhere. How many HOF guys played for just one team?

Baseball-reference HOF monitor leaders for players not yet eligible:
SEVEN of the top 10 hitters played in both leagues. The other three (Molina, Altuve and Trout) have played at least a road game at every MLB team. Molina's played in like 37 different stadiums; and Williamsport and San Juan.

EIGHT of the top 10 pitchers have played in both leagues. Other two, Kenley Jansen has pitched on the road vs everyone; and Kershaw has pitched on the road at 28 places. He's missed BAL, BOS; and his 4 starts at Texas were during the COVID neutral site World Series.

But sending the Dodgers to 15 AL cities every year doesn't guarantee he pitches at each stadium anyway; You've got a 40% chance of him not being scheduled to pitch!


Furthermore; the Trade Deadline. If it was so important to get everyone in every city... why do NO LEAGUES make sure that all interleague games are done BEFORE the trade deadline? Obviously, with 15 teams in each league, you need at least one interleague series happening at all times. But surely they could figure out a better rotation and then make the non-rival division series be early and the rival ones late?

Radically changing the schedule based on the argument that "Seattle fans deserve to get a visit from the Washington Nationals so they can see Juan Soto more than once every six years" only works if Juan Soto is guaranteed to show up. But that series was Aug 23 & 24 and he got traded to San Diego August 2.

That’s wayyy too much whining about interleague play.

 

[KevFu]

I will take more games against any of these teams vs seeing more mets, nats, phillies, and fish any day of the week. Im a braves fan but i don't need 50% of a 162 game schedule against 4 other teams im so happy for this change

I agree with you on "too many vs division" but (a) the division is more important per the playoff format and (b) and the league, with three wild cards to compete for, is waaaaaaaaaaaaaay more important than interleague play.

Why should 30% of our games (48 games!) be against AL teams when we're not allowed to compete for AL playoff spots? That makes no sense.

If you wanna reduce division games, to add league games.

 

[KevFu]

That’s wayyy too much whining about interleague play.

Has nothing to do with interleague play, it's about inefficiency and bad business decisions.

Tradition for tradition's sake with no practical logic is bad. Every league is trying to find the balance between fairness and money, and money usually wins.

But breaking tradition for something which lacks practical logic, no meaningful goal, and doesn't lead to more money is the worst of both worlds.

 

[Vamos Rafa]

Has nothing to do with interleague play, it's about inefficiency and bad business decisions.

Tradition for tradition's sake with no practical logic is bad. Every league is trying to find the balance between fairness and money, and money usually wins.

But breaking tradition for something which lacks practical logic, no meaningful goal, and doesn't lead to more money is the worst of both worlds.

Bad business decisions lol. Where are you getting these sources, MBA degree holder? If money wins, then why are you calling it a bad business decision? And what do you mean your long whining post had nothing to do with interleague play? It has everything to with it.

It’s a 30-team league in a country that is over 3 million square miles. Time zones are always gonna be a factor.

Also, speak for yourself. I was happy when I finally got to see the Dodgers play the Yankees and Red Sox in 2004. And I’ll be even happier now that I will get to see those games every year.

Your argument that MLB.TV is enough to see other teams’ stars or your city’s other stadium is an easy access to seeing stars from the other league is quite dumb (in this case, only two MLB cities technically have two stadiums). It still hits different when it’s your own team. After all, watching your team is the main reason why you watch the sport in the first place.

Another laughable argument is when you brought up “Oh there’s no guarantee this superstar will play against our team since he might get traded or he’ll be injured or the rotation will likely not make him available for our series.” Well no shit. But you’re playing the percentage game. I’ve got news for you. A 40% chance is better than a 0% chance.

And lastly, I was surprised you didn’t overemphasize anything in CAPITAL letters like you did in your previous post. Man, that was annoying af.

 

[KevFu]

Bad business decisions lol. Where are you getting these sources, MBA degree holder? If money wins, then why are you calling it a bad business decision? And what do you mean your long whining post had nothing to do with interleague play? It has everything to with it.

It’s a 30-team league in a country that is over 3 million square miles. Time zones are always gonna be a factor

It's a bad business decision. 2023 teams will be playing more games out of time zone, which you correctly said were always a factor. Instead of playing 3-5 teams on the opposite coast (East vs West), you're playing 5.5 to 7.5. More games at 10 pm ET or 4 pm PT are bad for business.

Time zones are a factor. There are 22 teams in the Eastern two time zones; and 8 teams in the western two time zones. The Central Time Zone doesn't want to be tied to the West, which is why they went from 2 division per league to three.

Max efficiency is four leagues of eight. The Western 8 teams are one league, playing a lot, sacrificing the AL/NL tradition and "divide and conquer" cornerstone for the money of local start times.

And the other 24 teams after expansion (Nashville and Montreal) become three 8-team leagues. The old NL and AL and a new South: Texas/Houston (glad to get out of the AL West), the Florida teams (glad to get away from the big spending NY teams), Atlanta, Nashville, and two others. That makes perfect sense. You can solve every single problem with that.

 

[Vamos Rafa]

It's a bad business decision. 2023 teams will be playing more games out of time zone, which you correctly said were always a factor. Instead of playing 3-5 teams on the opposite coast (East vs West), you're playing 5.5 to 7.5. More games at 10 pm ET or 4 pm PT are bad for business.

Time zones are a factor. There are 22 teams in the Eastern two time zones; and 8 teams in the western two time zones. The Central Time Zone doesn't want to be tied to the West, which is why they went from 2 division per league to three.

Max efficiency is four leagues of eight. The Western 8 teams are one league, playing a lot, sacrificing the AL/NL tradition and "divide and conquer" cornerstone for the money of local start times.

And the other 24 teams after expansion (Nashville and Montreal) become three 8-team leagues. The old NL and AL and a new South: Texas/Houston (glad to get out of the AL West), the Florida teams (glad to get away from the big spending NY teams), Atlanta, Nashville, and two others. That makes perfect sense. You can solve every single problem with that.

It took you almost a month to finally come up with a response and you still end up not making any sense.

 

[KevFu]

It took you almost a month to finally come up with a response and you still end up not making any sense.

Yeah, I got better places to talk baseball than here. It "took me a month" because my baseball team won 101 games and my hockey team made zero moves.

MOD Who's you're baseball team? You got a St. Louis Rams avatar, so I'm gonna assume it's the St. Louis Cardinals...

The Cardinals were in the NL East from 1969-1993 because Wrigley Field did not have lights and there weren't enough off-days in the season to put the Cubs/Cards in the West (no one wanted to break up the Cubs/Cards rivalry). So ATL-CIN went to the NL West and MLB signed a corporate sponsor/official airline deal with Delta, who has hubs in CIN and ATL.

So we get to MLB screwing up and ticking off Tampa/St. Pete in 1993, by giving an expansion team to Miami, and vetoing the sale of the Giants to Vince Naimoli. Florida politicians called MLB anti-trust hearings, and MLB decided to expand to Tampa to get Congress off their backs.

Cincinnati, Atlanta, and the other Central Time Zone teams didn't want to be part of the West Division; because division road games were on 2-3 hours later and they lost TV revenue because of it. So MLB came up with the 3-division system.

Texas got screwed by that, in the AL West with three Pacific time zone teams. Then the schedule makers said a 16-14 league split was really hard to schedule, so when the Houston Astros were for sale, MLB said the new owner had to agree to move to the AL West. MLB chopped $75 million of the price tag to schedule easier.

And that's where we end up today.


The Central Divisions exist because the CTZ teams would rather play the ETZ teams at 6 pm for road games than the PTZ at 8 pm. Road games 2 hours away are BAD FOR TV CONTRACTS.

If you can't see that, then why do the Central teams have an average payroll of $126 million while the other four divisions average $158? (Same is true in hockey, the Central division is $78m vs $83m for West, and all East combined).


It's bad economically for Central/Eastern teams to play more teams out West. It's bad economically for Western teams to play games at 4 pm local time... Every earthquake expert said that the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake had less loss of life than models because so many people left work early to watch the SF Giants-Oakland A's World Series game.

THEREFORE, the more you can reduce East vs West, the better you are economically. So shaving games off of league opponents in the Central/Eastern division so they can play more interleague games, when 22 of 30 teams are CTZ/ETZ is bad economically.

And that's before you factor in fan feelings that no one has cared about non-league games vs non-local opponents for 125 years. More interleague games is stupid in all sports.

MLB had an advantage on the other sports, because the dueling leagues of the 1880s divided the sport artificially, and no fan really cared that the Braves didn't play the White Sox for 94 years... while the leagues grew so big that it was inefficient to play everyone.

Fans care about Dodgers-Mets, Braves-Cubs, Cardinals-Phillies. No one cares about Angels-Mets, White Sox-Marlins, Royals-Nationals. And since those are time zones away, it was good for baseball.

And I haven't even started on travel, which would be a much more nerdy argument.