Major League Baseball publicly revealed part of a proposal to the MLB Players Association on Thursday ahead of the expiration of the current collective bargaining agreement (CBA) this coming offseason. The league has done this multiple times during the season and this is just the latest. It includes some playoff proposals -- including extending the Division Series from a best-of-five to a best-of-seven -- while the current postseason is ongoing and on the minds of fans. MLB also proposed cutting down the regular season from 162 games to 154.
As for me, I'm going to run through some of the pros and cons of the latest maneuver from ownership and the league office. Here's a forewarning: if you get angry about opinions or "bias," you can probably stop reading. This isn't reporting. This is a discussion full of opinions.
MLB proposes 154-game regular season, bulked-up playoff schedule with a twist in latest labor talks Mike Axisa
Pro (sort of): A 154-game season
There's certainly a history-loving, Hall-of-Fame voting part of me that would prefer to stick with 162 games. We've had so many seasons with 162 and have gotten used to certain benchmarks with that specific number of games. It seems weird to go backward. Of course, anyone who knows history realizes that the American League had a 154-game schedule from 1920-61, and the National League had a 154-game schedule from 1920-62. There's plenty of precedent and we've historically adjusted with our numbers just fine. We can transition back.
Further, 162 games are more than enough. We can drop the "more than." Baseball is a game that needs to be played in large samples, so I'd protest pretty strenuously if there was a proposal to knock this thing down to something like 80 or even 100 games. All the way up to 154, though? Yeah, that's plenty. And guess what, we'll even get a few more teams hanging around in contention later on the calendar, and that's a good thing.
Pro: Longer divisional series
Again, Major League Baseball is a marathon of a sport where small samples can provide fluky outcomes. The one-game wild card was never the best decider on which team should advance to the divisional round, but at least we could say, "hey, if you don't like it, win your division." Now that there are three wild-card teams per league, we could end up with all kinds of weirdness in the Wild Card Series and I think three games is far too short for those series. And, really, seven games is still too small a sample to definitively determine the better team.
Still, moving the divisional round from five to seven games is a good thing. The longer the series, the more likely the better team prevails, even if it won't be a hard-and-fast rule (and we don't want the winner to be obvious anyway, otherwise what would be the fun in that?).
Further, a component of this that I do think matters is that a seven-game series makes it much more difficult to skirt by with a limited number of actual starting pitchers. There's been a vocal movement in recent years to make the starting pitcher much more of an old-school main character. And while you can bob-and-weave through the earlier rounds with one starter and a bunch of creativity with relievers, a seven-game series in the divisional round, LCS and World Series surely requires at least two starters and probably a minimum of three.
Con: The deal is only contingent on one thing
Again, the owners' offer only comes into play when there is a salary cap. Via MLBPA:
Unfortunately, the league once again made clear that all of its proposals are contingent on players' agreement to a salary cap, a system that guts player rights and compensation, as well as its other anti-player proposals.
If you read through what Major League Baseball released to the public Thursday afternoon, there was no mention of this.
Why not? It isn't too tough to figure out.
Remember, the players are still occupied right now with the playoffs -- which make a veritable ton of money for owners, by the way. The owners know this isn't an actual negotiation until the World Series is over and the MLBPA can start meeting as a whole, focused on the matters at hand, rather than having a handful of teams still fighting for their professional lives in the postseason.
Plus, the owners know a salary cap is a non-starter for the players as things currently stand. So they can keep their offer on the table and float a bunch of new ideas that the general public and baseball fandom might like. And then it looks like, "hey, the owners are playing ball, but those damn greedy players aren't!"
Con: Continuing to do this in public
And, again, this is all unfolding from the owners' side in public. Why? Because they are painting the players as the bad guys who won't listen and won't negotiate.
"Ah shucks! We're the ones who keep floating all these good ideas that the fans like and you guys just keep saying no!"
As a reminder, the players need the money more than the owners because a player's career has a set end date, whenever Father Time inevitably takes over. Some of them don't even last a season. The lucky ones get to play multiple decades but still hit an end that would seem like an absurdly early retirement in any other business (Justin Verlander at age 43).
The players are the talent and the top-end talent isn't replaceable. Owners are replaceable. People pay to watch the world's most talented players play baseball. They don't pay money to attend a ballpark and stare at the owner's box. Ownership groups are absolutely filthy rich and aren't going to run out of money. This is where people might tell me that the owners are taking all the "risk."
If you think they are, ask yourself why more teams aren't put up for sale. Arte Moreno just sold the Angels for $4 billion. He bought them for $180 million in 2003. You can put any sort of spin on that you want and you can't escape what a ludicrous return on investment that is.
Now, some small-market owners want to cry poor and that's why there must be a salary cap. They can't spend enough to put winning baseball teams on the field. There's an easy solution here and it's to make public the team's financials. The MLBPA line has long been that if teams are really losing money and smaller-market ballclubs can't spend more on player payroll and need a combination of more revenue-sharing from larger clubs (hey, that's totally fine with me!) and a salary cap, then show us your financials. If the Guardians truly can't afford more than a $75 million payroll while the Dodgers can afford to top $400 million, OK, let's get things a bit more even. But we don't know this to be true. Many owners have convinced a great many people that it is true, but we don't know the exact extent of the discrepancy. They won't show us.
The only team that does is the publicly traded Atlanta Braves, and their bottom line is robust.
The owners crying poor won't show people how much money they need from the large-market teams and/or how much the large-market teams' salaries need to be capped.
But they will continue these misleading negotiations in public.
Pro: A standard day off each week
If we put the negatives aside, there are some more positives in this deal. Making one day a week a standard day off would be great for the players. Monday works fine. There could be "weekday" series that run Tuesday to Thursday, with the Thursday games all being day games before travel and then the "weekend" slates would be Friday-Sunday. The diehard fans who truly can't handle one day a week in the summer to do other things than watch baseball (by the way, I refuse to believe you can't read a book, hang out with family or friends or watch a movie or TV one night a week) can just deal with the extra time.
Having a guaranteed six days of games a week is a good thing, as is having that one day off. Would we see six-man rotations with pitchers going just once a week? They might all have more gas in the tank by the end of the year, and, as a bonus, maybe we'd get them working deeper into games on a regular basis? That would be preferred.
Everyday position players would be fresher by the end of the season as well.
It's not ideal, but the off-day could also be used for makeup games later in the season. As we know all too well, when there's a rainout nowadays, people are furiously searching for a "common off-day" later in the season. Everyone would have every Monday off in this proposal.
Pro: Letting teams pick playoff opponents
The league proposed allowing higher-seeded clubs in the Wild Card Series and Division Series to select their opponents. Overall, it probably wouldn't alter the seeds too much. The main problem in the AL this year was that the Astros won their division at 81-81 while the three best records were all in the AL East. The Astros were the No. 3 seed and would've just chosen to play the sixth-seeded White Sox. Maybe in the second round, the Rays would've chosen to play the White Sox instead of the Yankees, but the Rays swept the Yankees anyway.
Over on the NL side, I think the Wild Card Series would've remained the same. Maybe the Brewers would've picked the Braves to play instead of the red-hot Padres in the NLDS, but they beat the Padres in four games.
Where this really moves the needle for me is the potential for major pettiness, both in clubhouses and among fan bases.
The entertainment factor goes up exponentially when there's one team screaming, "You wanted us, you got us!" There would be extra attention leading up to the playoffs on which teams each of the better seeds should pick if given the choice. And more discussion means more attention. And it's a fun discussion. We already do the whole "who would the Rays rather play" thing, but now they'd actually have a choice when they earn that position.
That's fun.
Let's do more fun stuff instead of arguing about money now, please.
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