Scott's Baseball (and other stuff) Blog

July 13, 2010 -- ARCHIVES -- Send me a comment!

"The Boss" is dead. No, not Bruce Springsteen. I'm pretty sure George Steinbrenner earned that nickname even before Bruce did. 

If you've been a fan of any other baseball team besides the Yankees since 1973, you probably found it easy to hate the man who unashamedly bought his team's way into the playoffs year after year, appearing in 11 World Series and winning 7 during his ownership. 

But it can't be denied that Steinbrenner was one of the most influential owners in all of pro sports. When he took over the Yankees, the once-great franchise of Ruth, Gerhig, and DiMaggio had declined so badly that many assumed Steinbrenner planned to move the team out of New York. Instead, he began fixing up both a crumbling Yankee Stadium and a faltering Yankee team. His aggressive pursuit and signing of Jim "Catfish" Hunter in 1974 is widely credited with ushering in the modern era of free agency, effectively changing the game forever.  

Steinbrenner's reign may have been controversial -- he was twice suspended, and famously hired and fired manager Billy Martin five different times -- but it was never dull.  Today, I imagine George and Billy are busy talking over old times. 

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July 12, 2010 -- ARCHIVES -- Send me a comment!

Believe it or not, regular-season interleague play has been around for 14 years now -- and it looks like it’s here to stay.  I resisted at first. I took the purist’s stance, claiming that any games pitting a National League team against an American League rival should be reserved for the World Series -- the only interleague series that really matters.

Well, it took a while, but I eventually changed my mind. I like interleague play. It’s kind of  fun to see the Cubs face the Red Sox, or the Yankees square off against the Dodgers, or, yes, even the Marlins vs. the A’s.  Here in Chicago we’re blessed with a team from each league, but for smaller markets, I think it’s a fine idea to let the fans in Pittsburgh watch their team play the Angels, or for Rays fans to be able to see the Giants come to town.  

But, it still isn’t quite right.  The sometimes wacky scheduling of interleague games throws off the balance of the season, helping some teams and hurting others in the process.  

I took a look at the interleague schedules for the six teams in the NL Central in 2010, and found a number of strange things:  

-         The Cubs played 18 interleague games; all the others played only 15.  Traditionally, the American League tends to be stronger than the National during interleague play. This would seem to put the Cubs at a disadvantage.

-         Four of the six teams have regional rivalries, with six games scheduled against a single team.  The Reds beat up on the hapless Indians 4 games to 2 this year. The Cubs got bashed by the surging White Sox by the same margin. The struggling Astros lost 5 of 6 to the first-place Rangers. And though they only met three times this year, the Cardinals usually enjoy six contests against the perennially weak Royals.

-         The Astros were the only team in the division to face teams from the strong AL East.  They got swept by the Yankees and dropped 2 of 3 to the Rays.

So what does all this mean? For one thing, it means that teams which should be fighting head-to-head for the division title are taking different paths to get there. If the Reds should happen to edge the Cardinals by a single game, they can partially thank those 6 Indians games. In the event the Astros stage a late-season comeback but fall just short of a playoff spot, that lost trip to Yankee Stadium will look awfully big.  

Of course there are never any guarantees, but a balanced schedule is inherently fairer. In a perfect world, every team in the division should play the same number of games against the same opponents. The problem is, with 16 teams in the NL and 14 in the AL , this becomes all but impossible to schedule.  

My solution? Balance the leagues. Slide Kansas City from the AL Central to the West, and let the Brewers rejoin the AL – where they had spent a quarter century before the 1994 realignment – and voila! You’ve got two leagues with three divisions of five teams each. Then, you can schedule each division to face the five teams of a division in the opposite league, on an annually rotating basis. For instance, the NL Central plays the AL West one year, the Central the next year, then the East.  

Obviously, this plan would require a couple of changes. With an odd number of teams in each league, interleague games would be required throughout the entire season, in order for every team to have an opponent at any given time. I don’t see a problem here. If fans can accept interleague play in May and June, why can’t they accept it in April and September as well?  

It would also mean the end of annual regional rivalries. Good riddance, if you ask me. Sure, the Cubs-Sox series still gets a lot of attention in Chicago – but much of that is overblown media hype. Six games a year is overkill, and it’s become tedious. But if they played three games every three years?  Now that’s something fans can look forward to!