Baseball is too healthy. You can see the problem with that, what with all the money rolling in and the steady attendance. It’s like a fault line, continually building pressure, just waiting for that one little slip. Where’s the drama? Where’s the tension? Are we going to be engulfed in an 8.4 dramaquake after this unprecedented stability?
Probably not anytime soon, but the Collective Bargaining Agreement is up after this season, and there will be tremors. At the All-Star Game last week, commissioner Rob Manfred talked about one of the first. According to David Lennon of Newsday, there’s a renewed push for a 154-game season.
The idea of returning to a 154-game regular season has gained momentum recently. Exhausted players have complained about the rigors of the modern travel schedule, which can force teams to jump as many as three time zones on consecutive days.
Eight fewer games per season, with MLB going back to the way the schedule was set up until 1961. That seems like a big deal, and you might have questions. We’ll pretend we have answers. Here’s the guide to a 154-game baseball season:
Why would the players want eight fewer games? That can’t make that much of a difference, right?
I’m just a guy who recaps 140 games or so from his couch, so take this with a grain of salt. The salt is in the kitchen, where all my foodstuffs and libations are, surrounded by every other comfort of home. My family is there, even if it’s impossible to explain to a 3-year-old why daddy’s work involves him watching the TV and yelling at it. I’m not traveling. I’m not even getting in the car and going to the ballpark every day like a real writer.
The thought of eight fewer games makes me weep like a newborn baby held to his mother’s bosom for the first time. So beautiful.
Now extend that to the people who do actual work. Who get up at an ungodly hour to workout after traveling all night, who arrive at the ballpark hours and hours before a three-hour game, and who are expected to hang around for a while after the game to answer questions. On the plane, off the plane, in a hotel, out of a hotel, into the gym, out of the gym, stretching out that hamstring with the trainer, taking some extra BP during a slump, exerting mental and physical energy for three hours, unless there are extra innings, repeat repeat repeat, for 162 games a year out of 183 days.
If your response is, “Pfffft, so what, they’re paid millions of dollars, the big babies,” that’s true! They are fairly compensated. At the same time, you can’t pay the fatigue goblins to go away. You can’t buy energy credits at the energy store. You can’t buy spousal goodwill from a vending machine. Money doesn’t make the strain feel any less miserable.
All of the above would still be true with 154 games. But an extra two games off (roughly) per month would help. It would help substantially. It would, in theory, keep players healthier, too, which would help the on-field product. Everyone would win.
Except for the people who have no idea what to do when their teams aren’t playing every night. So, you. Sorry about that.
What would the owners expect in return?
Let’s do some back-of-the-envelope math. The Tigers reportedly had $268 million in revenues in 2015. Lopping off an extra eight games would be roughly 5 percent of the season, and if you assume that would directly correlate with lost revenue, we’re talking $14 million.
That written, even though we have Forbes estimates, I’m pretty sure it’s impossible for us peons to know exactly how much revenue a team collects, and between tickets, television, MLB Advanced Media, concessions, and merchandise, that $268 million figure seems a little low for gross revenue. Either way, the point is that the pie is a large one with a diamond crust, and the owners wouldn’t just want to give up 5 percent of their product to make their employees happier in an intangible and unquantifiable way.
They’d want to make just as much money as always. It seems a little too simplistic to suggest their revenue would decline in direct proportion to the shorter schedule, though. The supply of the games might go down, but it’s possible the demand would stay the same, which could provide an opportunity to recoup some of those losses.
It’s complicated. Even with the books wide open, two reasonable economists could yell at each other for hours about how much revenue is being collected and how much would be lost.
It says something that the response from the owners isn’t “lol just try to take 5 percent of our product, you hyenas” and more “the season really is absurdly long, so let’s talk.”
Why is this coming up now?
Lennon posits a popular theory that the renewed interest in a shorter season is directly linked to baseball’s crackdown on performance-enhancing drugs and stimulants. If there’s a better explanation, I haven’t read it. For decades, players would put their fatigue on a credit card made out of amphetamines, with the interest being paid by their bodies years later. As long as we didn’t have to see it, whatever! Dance, circus bears, dance.
Later, PEDs became popular, and the biggest misconception was that they existed solely to make Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds get stronger and look like Starting Lineup figurines. But they also helped players recuperate quicker, both from injuries and the typical, never-ending day-to-day nonsense. This is the first period in baseball history where stimulants and PEDs are heavily regulated. Can’t just grab a Coca-Cola Now With Extra Cocaine and hop on the train like you could in 1901.
Players are tired. And I don’t blame them. Chanting “Let them juice!”, Bad News Bears-style just doesn’t have the same appeal as lopping off a small portion of the season.
Also, note that there’s an extra month of postseason baseball, with a third of baseball affected. That’s not the way it was drawn up when the leagues merged last century.
Could there be any complications?
Oh, goodness, the whole thing is a giant complication. every financial arrangement MLB has is based on the 162-game season, from television deals to ballpark vendors. You don’t just hold a press conference and announce that baseball has been reduced by 5 percent, so everyone is going to have to adjust.
Put it this way: The reason you can’t watch your local team on the electronic box you keep in your pocket is because baseball has deals with companies that want you to watch your local team on the electronic box you keep in your living room. Even now, with baseball forced to allow in-market broadcasts on MLB.tv, it’s still taking a year to hash out the details. That doesn’t seem like it would be that complicated, but it is.
This is asking far, far more from a business partner and existing agreements.
That’s just one partner! Baseball has dozens of considerations like that, and they would all be an absolute mess.
What would happen to the baseball records?
We’d adjust. If there’s anything baseball fans love more than cold, hard numbers, it’s arguing about those numbers. So if Mark Trout hits 71 homers in 2043, making his pops proud, we’d get to argue if that’s the second-most homers in a single season, or if Barry Bonds’ record deserves an aster… well, that’s a bad example, but you get the point.
It would make it harder to compare seasons and records directly. It would make it easier to argue. And arguing is kind of the point of sports.
If baseball were invented tomorrow, how many games would there be in a season?
Probably 82, just like basketball and hockey. There’s no practical reason for a season to be twice as long as any other professional sport. When baseball was commercialized, television didn’t exist. People would get home from the factories and stare at piles of sawdust until it was time to go back to the factories. There was a void, and there weren’t a lot of competing sports. That’s the context you need to think, “I KNOW. 154 GAMES. THAT SEEMS REASONABLE.” Everyone was just tired of staring at sawdust and writing letters.
The current baseball schedule is dictated by a bunch of weirdos who had only three channels of TV to watch, and that was based on a schedule devised by weirdos without TV. Times are different, and there’s more competition for entertainment dollars. A shorter season would probably help the youngsters pay more attention, too. It couldn’t hurt, at least.
What will probably happen?
Rob Manfred and Tony Clark will text back and forth about different things they can take from amateur players and minor leaguers until there’s a compromise.
It will take years, though! It will take years, even if there’s a Manhattan Project to make the season shorter. So don’t worry about having baseball ripped from you in 2017. If the players make enough concessions and if baseball figures out a way to satisfy the financial side of their commitments, it will still take forever.
My guess? It will happen. Not next year or the year after, but it’s coming. The baseball season really is ridiculously long, a total anachronism, and while there’s no way to cut the season in half to mirror two of the other major sports, this is just about the least they can do.
It’s just a matter of the players giving up enough money to make the owners happy. Considering that the players are actually getting something in return for the lost salary, all that’s left is to bare-knuckle fight over exactly how much money we’re talking. It shouldn’t be that bloody of a fight. Just a moderately bloody one.
Besides, baseball’s been too successful and quiet lately. Looking forward to this CBA, everyone.
