The end of February will be here very soon, next Tuesday to be exact. Baseball should be on the minds of fans right about now, but the idiocy of the owners (that’s right, they are the ones locking out the players) is keeping us from getting ready for the 2022 season.
Being a huge fan of the sport, we realized how much we were detached when Marcus Semien was mentioned in an article, and we had to look up what team he was going to be with this season (it’s Texas).
It has been so long since any player movement or talk of who will be contenders this season, this kind of news fell out of our consciousness.
And that’s sad.
We aren’t going to get into a huge discussion (at least more than we already have) about who is right and who is wrong in this dispute. We will only say this–if you think small market owners are really losing money owning Major League Baseball teams and can’t spend the same as big market teams? We would strongly disagree.
We do like the universal DH. The so-called strategy involved is overrated. In the National League, if a runner is on base and the pitcher comes up? He’s more than likely bunting. That’s not really mind blowing.
And executing a double switch doesn’t qualify you for MENSA.
However, the expanded playoff system proposed by the owners just makes us shake our heads.
We understand other sports have bloated post-seasons because the networks pay them a lot of money to broadcast them.
How many times does a team that reaches the NBA playoffs as a 7th or 8th seed win a title? We know the Atlanta Hawks were a 5th seed last year and went to the Eastern Conference finals, and Miami went to the NBA Finals the prior year as a fifth seed. But if the league made the cut off the 6th seed, would anyone care?
And that’s with an 82 game schedule.
MLB is proposing seven teams from each league reaching the post-season. Seven! Keep in mind they play 162 games, which is enough games to determine who the best teams in the game are.
You can understand the NFL putting 14 of their 32 teams in the playoffs. They only play 17 games. Look at the AFC North. This year, there were no bad teams in the division, so no division team had the advantage of picking up two easy wins against an inferior opponent.
Add in the nature of baseball. Is it called an “upset” if the Orioles beat the Yankees in a three game series? Of course not. It’s the way baseball is. The best teams in a given season lose 60 games. No one goes 140-22.
Heck, Cleveland has two cases of this in their history. In 1954, the Indians won 111 games, then an American League record, and lost in the World Series in four games to the New York Giants.
In 1995, the Tribe went 100-44 in a shortened season, and perhaps could have broken the ’54 squads’ record. But they lost the World Series to Atlanta as well.
What the sport is engendering is having average teams winning its championship. Why try to win your division? Baseball fans may have to get used to the term “load management”.
Baseball fans have accepted the wild card and even a second wild card. Having 10 out of 30 teams in the post-season isn’t a big problem but playing 162 games to eliminate just slightly over half the teams is going too far.
Unfortunately, all the owners see is dollar signs, and that goes for all professional sports. The integrity of the competition, finding a true champion, not just a playoff champ doesn’t matter anymore.
We are critical of the NBA at times, but at least in basketball, the commissioner works on behalf of the owners and the players. Baseball needs the same thing, but the owners will never let it happen.
Cleveland Sports Perspective 