Tom Verducci has a great column up at SI.com listing the ten changes he would make if he were baseball commissioner for a day.
Some highlights:
1. Penalize the wild-card winner: Something’s wrong when you’ve got every player and manager saying, “I don’t care if we win the division. We just want to get in the playoffs.”
This is something I’ve been wishing would happen since the wild-card was introduced. It makes no sense that a team can lose the division, win the wild-card, and yet have exactly the same home field as advantage as the three division winners in the division series. Why not just call the wild-card a fourth division winner if you’re not going to penalize the team that fails to win a division ?
5. Start World Series games no later than 7:30 p.m. Eastern Time, with Saturday games starting at 6 p.m.: A whole generation of kids have grown up never having seen Mariano Rivera pitch in October; he usually does so around midnight.
Absolutely, and I would say the same for Championship Series games as well. In today’s era of games that can last three hours or more, starting a game at 8pm or later means that anyone who wants to be awake at work the next morning will end up missing what are usually the most exciting parts of the game.. And, it means that most kids won’t be able to watch the games at all.
Which leads us to:
8. Mandate that every club set aside 200 free tickets for every home date for youth groups: Owners, I’m sure you’re smart enough to build the lost revenue into the prices of the box seats and luxury suites. But baseball needs to make a real effort to reach out to kids. Making them welcome at the ballpark can make them fans for life.
Great idea. Its time to make baseball a game you take your kids to again.
“Start World Series games no later than 7:30 p.m. Eastern Time, with Saturday games starting at 6 p.m.”
When I was a kid, you had to skip school to watch a World Series game…And we had to walk all the way across the living room just to change the channel on the TV set. Yes, life was hard back then.
More afternoon playoff games would be a good thing, but I think its probably too much to ask for. MLB makes a ton of money off the ad revenue in October, and they make more money when games are run in prime time.