… they’re never gonna play double-headers to shorten the season;
… they’re never gonna play day games during the World Series (unless the A’s are in it and it is against an Eastern opponent);

So, my solution to the problem is Spring Training kicks off in February. Scottsdale can be nice in February, so I’m okay with that.

banks are going to force them to do so… have you looked at your credit limit on your credit cards recently? Still the same as usual? Give it a couple of months.

as a side note, im pretty pumped for this mini-game tonight. should be decent drama.

1) Blame Finley for World Series games being played at night.

2) Selig was right not to shorten Game 5.

3) Game 5 should never have started. Selig admitted to having “significant trepidation” about allowing it to start. And how often, exactly, do any of us do something that we are significantly trepid about doing?

4) Yes, the All-Star Game deciding who gets home-field is a joke, and yes Bud’s decision to make it “count” is a result of the Great Tie, but let’s say, just for fun, that the home-field was determined by best record. (Hey, just like the rest of the playoffs!) We’d still be exactly where we are now.

5) And for you traditionalists, let’s say home-field was determined the old-fashioned way, alternating each year between each league. This may be even dumber than Selig’s idea, and yet it lasted until 2002! Imagine Game 1 of the 1988 World Series being played in Oakland?? But, yeah, let’s say we alternate each season, and guess what? This year was the AL’s turn anyway! So we would still be right where we are now.

6) OK, so I have tried to sell this idea before, and it’s been treated with silence (or great laughter; can’t tell on the Internet). Play the World Series at a neutral site. Like, say, California. Call it World Series Week, and make it the event it deserves to be, like that one football game they play in January. Let Pepsi and Bud fight for air time (I assume they do anyway, but we don’t pay attention to WS commercials the way we do Super Bowl ads). Let’s show football fans that we can party too, and not just one game, but seven! (Well, at least four). And what happens to those poor fans that supported their team all season? “Hey, hon, didn’t we always talk about a California vacation?”

But seriously, you can ask the same of me, who went to twelve Raider games in 2002 (incl pre-season and playoffs) and when it came time for the Super Bowl, well, let’s just say my lotto number didn’t come up. This happens every year to loyal fans, but the NFL doesn’t seem to lack for paying customers.

Besides when the WS MVP says he’s going to Disnelyland…great, he’s already here!

1) Move the WBC to November
2) Shorten the # of off days during the postseason
3) For the all star game I would have a few pitching reserves only for cases where its gone to 10 innings or longer
4) I think Bud has done a lot of good things that are just not noticed because he looks like such a dork in public
5) I’d like to investigate putting teams in Portland and maybe San Antonio
6) I’d like to bring back once or twice weekly ESPN west coast games
7) I’d jack up the revenue sharing
8) I’d allow trading of draft picks
…..and so on

I think the way to solve the All Star Game problem is to add 3-4 young starters from each league to the rosters. The pitchers would be told that they are only on the team to throw 2 innings each if the game reaches a point that the rest of the staff has been used and the game is in extra innings. Each pitcher would be used for 2 innings max (to appease the guy’s team and to protect arms) and would ensure that the game could go about 18 innings (assuminng the regular staff is done by innign 10 or 11) without having a pitching issue. These pitchers would be treated as if they are full members of the team (pay, festivities, team pictures, jerseys, etc) and be able to take in the whole All-Star game weekend, but it would be very clear they would only pitch if needed. What young pitcher wouldn’t relish the chance to spend the weekend as an All Star with all the festivities and gettin to know and learn from the stars of the game? And the managers would have a safe feeling knowing they could use their pitching staff with the knowledge they have these young guys in reserve.

Also, I would add a roster spot, but it would have to be a for a catcher and each team would be required to have 3 catchers. This position would be allowed to have re-rntry into the game. This would avoid the crazy 10 innings someone like Russell Martin ended up catching this year. The manager could get all the catchers in for 3 innings if he wanted and know he could bring another catcher back in the game for extra innings to avoid one guy geting stuck with a crazy workload.

this is the World Series 2 of the games are on the weekend and then you are telling me that people on the east coast can’t stay up late 3-5 times to watch the world series. This isn’t something that goes on throughout the year it is the world series.

38 degrees with a wind chill of 31

and next year they’re going to play even later in the year

Move Spring training to February or have less off days during the season and playoffs. Make the World Series earlier!

Eliminate the playoffs entirely and completely separate the two leagues again. The winner of each league earns a trip to the World Series. There’s no need for two levels of postseason tournaments that send weaker teams to the Series and force the likes of Joe Buck and Tim McCarver on us for weeks.. The winners of each league have already proven themselves worthy over the course of a 162-game regular season. We have pennant races again for the first time since 1968 and the World Series ceases to be an anticlimactic afterthought.

There will be no off-days during the World Series so the participants can’t bury the back end of their starting rotations and their bench. The World Series becomes a 25-player effort for each team.

Barring bad weather, the World Series will run from October 1-7 (shorter if the full seven games aren’t needed, naturally) and October 8 will be a national holiday on which the champion’s victory parade will be held. The first Sunday after October 8th is the opening day of the NFL season.

even though the weather was likely to be sucky there at this time of the year

I might consider buying a used car from you. Hell, if you smiled nice I might even shell out for the undercoating.

if anyone wanted to see innings 1-5 1/2

…is based upon the expectation that the playoff schedule will follow the same pattern that it did this season. But Selig has already said that he plans to remove a few off days from the playoff schedule next year to compensate. So, although the regular season is starting a week later (Monday, April 6th), the World Series probably won’t end quite THAT late, even if goes seven games.

I’d wager that the ’09 WS will be scheduled to end (Game 7) Nov. 1 or so, with 3-4 playoff-off days removed.

The problem with starting Spring Training in Feb. is that it would probably need to be collectively bargained, since it means cutting in to the players’ off-time. And the players probably strongly feel they need that off-time, since they basically “work” every day for eight months straight.
There’s also a second problem with starting ST in February, and effectively beginning the regular season in March (to avoid bad-weather World Series in late-October):

League-wide, the weather is probably just as bad in March as it is in late October!

That’s why he’s bumping the regular season opener back one week (April 5-6) next season in the first place – to have less April rainouts.

So really, Selig’s already enacting a very reasonable solution – less playoff off-days.

If there are two East Coast teams, like we have this year, start at 7:05 ET.
If there’s a Central Time team in there, start at 8:05 ET.
If there’s a West Cost team in there, start at 8:35 ET — at least allow them to get home from work first!

Those are for weeknights. For weekends, I echo baseballgirl — no later than 6:05 p.m. ET.

(These probably require collective bargaining, but I’m assuming absolute power in this hypothetical):

1. Allow the trading of draft picks and institute “hard” draft pick slotting (NBA style), which would instantly ensure that the projected best talent is always taken in the first round as it should, and as it is in every other sport with a draft. Slotting and trading of picks go hand-in-hand, because if you’re going to tell the team drafting No. 1 that they HAVE to pay the top player an $8.5MM signing bonus, it’s only fair to allow them to trade out of that position if they think they can find better value in a lower slot.

Obviously the specific slot figures would be written into the CBA and would increase each year with inflation and with the continued health of the game, just as FA prices do. In addition to the obvious benefits, it would mean that players would simply sign their deals immediately (since there’s no dollar figure to negotiate) and get a few extra months of minor league development instead of holding out and not playing until the following spring.

I have a wild hunch this could become a hot-button topic after the ‘09 draft. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Strasburg demand $15-20 million if he has a healthy, dominant junior season. If he falls past No. 1, and someone ends up paying that figure, that might create enough animosity in the Player’s Union and among small-market owners that they’d actually agree to bargain the issue of “hard slotting” draft picks. And draft pick trading is a logical short step from there, for the reasons stated above.

2. Include International players in the Rule 4 (North American amateur) June draft. There’s certainly enough intelligence and resources league-wide to make this a possibility now, even if there wasn’t a few decades back. This would help to remove some of the ethical concerns associated with agents, bonus-skimming, and broken promises that currently give a black eye to the International scene. Critics say this would “ruin” baseball in Venezuela and the Dominican Republic; I highly doubt that two incredibly passionate baseball countries would simply quit playing over this.

3. Completely revise the archaic ELIAS player ranking system and the FA compensation system. I’m pretty sure they’ll do something with this in the next CBA (2011). It’s a good idea to compensate teams for lost free agents; it’s a really bad idea to use things like fielding percentage and batting average as key determinants for that compensation. It creates crazy inequities like this, where Juan Uribe is worthy of compensation, but Jason Giambi isn’t.

4. Eliminate ALL playoff off-days.

You can’t really eliminate regular season off-days, because you need buffers for rainouts, and you occasionally need an off day/travel day for the quality of play to remain high and for players to remain sane.

But no one should have trouble getting up adrenaline for two and half weeks of playoffs.

What if teams had to actually use their 25-man roster in the playoffs? That’s what got them there, isn’t it? This also helps allieviate the rainout problem. The season could still still start on April 6 and be comfortably done before Halloween if there were no scheduled playoff off-days.

Allow 5 days for the division series, 7 days for the LCS, and 7 for the World Series = 19 days total.

You want a day or two off? Kick your opponent’s ass early.

Let’s look at how this would play out in in the ’09 season, when the season begins on April 5th and ends on Sunday, October 4th.

*Allow Monday for Game 163/one-game playoffs that decide the race.
*The Divisional Series each start on Tuesday, Oct. 6th. Eighteen days later, Game 7 of the World Series would be played on October 24th, with perhaps no rain at all.

Sure, there’d be four playoff games every day for the entire first week of the playoffs. Isn’t that kind of awesome though? The NCAA seems to think so each March, and so do thousands of people who skip work on the first Thursday and Friday of March Madness, and millions who watch their productivity plummet with the office TV on.

In fact, here’s a revenue-generating olive branch in the direction of those networks who lost ratings by playing daytime playoff games:

You could make the Division Series a best-of-seven in this proposal, and it would still end by October 26th. That’s a few extra games of revenue for the stations to compensate for inferior time slots.

Or, the league could treat the Division Series the way CBS treats Day 1 and 2 of March Madness – play two playoff games simultaneously, and the network can pop back and forth, covering the most interesting one. During blowouts, rainouts, and pitching changes, there’s still some relevant action to switch over to. With four daily games, two of them could start at 5:30 and two of them could start at 8:30 Eastern., kind of like Sunday morning NFL coverage.

What do you guys think?
(Wow, this turned into a mammoth “comment”. I might re-post this as it’s own thread at some point for some more feedback).

The WBC, while flawed in execution (hoping they get it together to be the best it can be), helps expose more people abroad to the sport and generates interest for the future, short and long term.

The removal of baseball from the Olympics after this year is a blow. I know Selig is adamant about not letting any active roster MLB players attend the games, and ideas of an extended All-Star break allowing the best players to represent their country in the games have been floated. Don’t know what the best solution would be, but it’d be nice to see some support for getting the game back into The Games.