Lightly Wounding Two Birds with One Stone or "How To Fix This Crap So I Can Watch Every Cubs Game"

1. An interleague series in September may make a team ineligible for the playoffs where an in-league (or in-division) series would not. It may make an eventual World Series winner be seen as invalid due to playing a weak club in the last week of the season. Imagine the howls if the Yankees got home field advantage throughout the AL playoffs due to a season-ending series versus the Astros.
2. It removes intrigue. As the inter-league stuff is still fairly new, it’s still fairly novel. There’s no way to drum up interest in the Cubs visiting Fenway if it happens every year. Expand, and it’s a once-every-8-years thing. That allows the league to keep selling inter-league play as something interesting to the casual fan.

Houston to the NL west, Arizona to the AL west. Done, 3 divisions of 5 for each league. There are plenty of logistical experts to sort this out in regards to travel, etc.

The majority of one’s schedule should be within the division, which already happens. I’d like to see a change in the total number of games in a season, essentially making the ratios equal. Why 162? We’ve added teams since this number was set years ago.

Oh yeah while I’m at it, (get rid of the DH or) reduce the interleague play. I’ve always hoped this would have been a fad that had run its course by now.

10% of NFL games last year were blacked out in their home markets. Anyone outside of those markets who wished to see their games were able to do so. I could have walked into any sports bar in my town (Fargo, ND) and watched any “Raiders, Bengals, Lions, Bills, Buccaneers, Chargers” game I wanted. The blackout rule exists in the NFL to help owners sell tickets. The blackout rule in MLB exists to protect local broadcasters’ interests. To put this in terms which are germane to the audience, if I am a Cubs fan in Iowa City, I am not guaranteed a way to watch a Cubs game on any given day, no matter what. It’s worse if I’m in Vegas which claims 5 different teams. Any one of those teams can be blacked out due to conditions occurring more than 100 miles away.

I’m sorry, but anyone who argues that the NFL model is the way to stop blackouts has lost all credibility in my book. No sports league controls their product more and limits access more than the NFL.

And yet, I can legally watch every NFL game I want. Occasionally, it requires that I find a sports bar, but it’s possible. Today, I had no way of watching the Cubs game without driving at least 200 miles to do so (well, 150 if I wanted to cross an international border). And this is less restrictive than a league that blacks out broadcasts within 50 miles? Please.

It’s ridiculous to think a team like the Yankees would ever voluntarily hand their broadcast rights over to MLB. They own the YES network. Do you think they want to pay MLB for the rights to broadcast their own games? Or worse, have MLB sell them to the MSG network?

The YES network (and NESN) are responses to a market which does not allow consumers a choice (and, notably, in markets which don’t have problems with selling their parks out). If Yankee fans were always allowed to see their team play, do you think the YES network would have ever arisen?

Where? Las Vegas? Portland? San Antonio?

As I said – lively debate.

There’s nothing to see here. Move along.

As someone whose articles routinely draw less than 30 comments each, I’d be wary of such statements.

Sorry, that comment was bitchy, but in fairness – so was yours.

Revenue sharing is already occurring (albeit in a limited way) via the “luxury tax”. It’s enough of an issue that superagent Scott Boras has come out publicly against teams that don’t spend their share of it on payroll (Royals, Pirates).

If you haven’t guessed, I am not opposed to the way the NFL does business. Granted, they have problems of their own, but I believe that they have provided a blueprint which would allow national sports leagues to thrive in this [country|continent].

How can a team drawing a thousand for a September game against a fellow last place team even afford to cook the hot dogs?

1. Vagaries of scheduling. It happens that you sometimes don’t get an ideal matchup at the end of the season, but there’s no way to predict that ahead of time.
2. Then give me 8 four-team leagues. The chances of a September matchup being meaningless for both decreases immensely.
   

   And even if, say, a Raleigh-Durham or a Las Vegas gets a team and sells out against the Braves or Dodgers, what size stadium are they selling out without public help, and there’s going to be massive resistance to that in this economy.

   
   Note that I made no demands that MLB institute this Right F*cking Now. Wait for the economy to recover or local tax rates to get high enough to make building a stadium on the public teat palatable – it really doesn’t matter to me. What matters (as the sub-head says) is that I can watch whichever game I want anywhere I want whenever it happens to be on. This is one possible path to making that happen.
   

   Also, if Raleigh-Durham or Las Vegas got a team, you’d hear the Braves, Nationals, Dodgers, Angels and D-backs scream loud and long that their fanbase was being eroded. Phoenix used to be big time Dodger country with Vinny on the radio and TV there before the D-backs came to town.

   
   As I said – lively debate. Neither the Braves, Nats, or O’s could scream too loud about the Research Triangle – that’s a split market with no clear favorite. Same with Vegas. OTOH, if you were to expand MLB’s reach to other locations with no rooting preference, but still within a couple hours’ flight time (like Puerto Rico), you start grazing even more birds with this single chunk of igneous material.
   

   The Yankees, Cubs, Red Sox, Dodgers, etc. would have to pony up and share their TV revenue, something I imagine the Pirates and Royals have been asking for for awhile.

   
   This is exactly what my proposal avoids. MLB simply has right of first refusal over any new contract. This nets no money for MLB or the member club, but ensures that restrictive broadcast policies which harm the average baseball fan do not and will not exist.
   

   Of course, if there’s revenue sharing, you’re also going to hear owners screaming for a salary cap. Will the players ever let that happen even if it would be good for the game?

   
   We’ve just seen the smallest market in the NFL win a championship in an uncapped year. Combine that with MLB’s disdain for same, and I would assume that proposal would be offered as a feint only for at least the next 20 years.

The difficulty for out-of-market fans isn’t that we may not be near a TV, it’s that no TV near us will be playing the game.

As they are both cheap and (generally) local. They can be rebroadcast by the league (as the league has done, in fact), but the main audience for them is not necessarily subject to big national media buys. I wouldn’t oppose anyone suggesting they be excluded from any future CBA which includes my proposal.

About the only place that could support a team would be putting a third team in the NYC market (probably in New Jersey). But the Yankees and Mets would want huge dollars for invading their territory.

There’s one other city that is big enough market-wise to support a team — that’d be Portland, Oregon. But they have no stadium and couldn’t even build one to keep their Triple-A team. Portland is the No. 22 TV market — it’s bigger than San Diego, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, among others who already have a MLB team. But again… no dollars for a stadium.

There are five other top-30 TV markets that do not have major league baseball: Sacramento, Salt Lake City, Indianapolis, Raleigh-Durham and Charlotte.

Sacramento: too close to the Bay Area, which already has two teams.
Indianapolis: too close to Chicago and Cincinnati
Raleigh-Durham: possible, but again, no stadium, and that’s really football country
Salt Lake City: too isolated
Charlotte: has been mentioned before, but has the same issues as Raleigh-Durham

There’s one other very large city with a metro population of about 2.5 million — about the size of St. Louis or Tampa/St. Petersburg. That’s Vancouver, which has been dying to have a baseball team for more than 20 years. I can’t imagine MLB granting another franchise to a Canadian city, though.

We could have a 8 team league and the fans would still be able to find their Theriot.

dominates coverage in nearly all markets.

Eastern Missouri apparently had Cubs Giants. Those of us in the rest of the state were stuck with the Yankees. SW Missouri is NL Central territory. It made no sense.

were rained out?

Where you don’t have any specific place to live during the summer? Six months on the road? No thanks.

It would work if they could use existing facilities (ie, play home games in Fenway when the Sawx are out -of-town), but what happens when there’s a rain-out for either team at that facility? I can see the “roving teams” concept working for the NHL or NBA, as their games are played indoors and non-consecutively, but not MLB.

the former Cincinnati Royals split time between KC and Omaha. It worked so well they moved the franchise to Sacramento after a couple of years.

Kansas City/Omaha Kings? Didn’t work out well. Games in 2 cities? Uh, no.

There are teams which perhaps deserved contraction over the last 30 years, but any time someone looks like they’re going to get serious about it, the owners circle the wagons. After all, who’s to say that their team wouldn’t be the next one on the chopping block?

MLB is slightly hand-cuffed on the blackout issues due to the fact that teams each negotiate their own media contracts. There is minimal collective bargaining at the league level for regular-season games. At one time, this made sense; the teams knew their markets best and were the ones who were best able to decide which media outlets should carry their product. As mass media has become so pervasive (starting with cable and satellite technology and continuing with the Internet), MLB finds itself stuck in a backward model and so long as it continues to allow the clubs to negotiate the majority of their own media buys, we will never be rid of these blackout issues. MLB has never had a Pete Rozelle to metaphorically grab the owners by the scruff of their necks and point them at a different model and say, “This. Do this, or get out.” That cannot happen in today’s MLB, anyway, as the owners hold too much sway with the commissioner’s office to ever capitulate to it.

Thus the multiple birds/one stone thang – MLB can find new fans in new markets, straighten out scheduling issues, and kick the tires on a media model that makes sense for the 21st century.

Every year, the Cubs play the white sox 6 times this year and cards play the royals 6 times. And some years, the cards won’t play the white sox and the cubs won’t play the royals. This year, the cubs will play the royals 3 times. But the cards won’t play the white sox at all.

Hey at least the reds have to play the indians twice!!

Now, last year that might have been an easy road for the Reds. This year — not so much.

The Cubs play 80 division games this year. A drop to 57 would be a big change. You divisions would be won outside of the division play, not inside it.

When the NL had 2 divisions of 6 teams (1992), the Cubs played their 5 division opponents 90 times – 18 each. Much closer to the 80 division games they play today.

64 Div, 50 Intra, 48 Inter.

KC to ALW, Milw to ALC.

3 extra Inter games would be “specials”….Cubs/Sox, NYY/NYM etc.