renard_ruse
Break up Amazon
- Joined
- Aug 30, 2007
- Posts
- 16,094
In order to save Major League Baseball, and stop its decades long slide in popularity, the following proposals MUST be adopted:
1. Number of regular season games must be reduced: though some radical proposals have been suggested to reduce the season by as much as twenty or even forty games per team, to start I would propose a return to a 154 game schedule (from the current 162). The season used to be 154 games until the 1960s. Under this proposal, each team would only lose four home games. The season could end a week early and the all star break increased from three days to five to give players a longer mid-season break. The fact is, everyone knows there are too many games compared to other major sports, so a reduction has to start somewhere.
2. Increase the playoffs. This idea has been floated by many commentators. I would suggest having six teams make the playoffs, with a best two out of three preliminary round for three wildcards and the lowest division winner with a bye for the top two division winners in each league. Then increase the second round to best of 7 (from the current best of 5). Keep the other rounds as is. Many casual fans only start to follow the major sports leagues during the post-season and MLB already has less playoff games compared to NHL and NBA.
3. Have more interleague games. No reason not to do this, its a win-win.
4. A pitch clock. Not my idea, I stole it from another article, but I think that would be a great idea. Many younger people, with their short post-modern attention spans, claim that baseball is "boring." And certainly many games are too long. Speeding up the time between pitches could help.
4. Limits on foreign raised players: this will be the most controversial proposal, and I'm sure the RoryN types will go beserk, but there needs to be limits on the number of foreign players allowed per roster. I firmly believe that many Americans have lost interest in baseball in part because there's so many foreign players. The NFL is almost all American raised players, and the NBA, despite having quite a few foreigners, still has a clear majority of American players. These sports have passed MLB or are challenging it for interest, could there possibly be a connection? I think so.
I would therefore propose a team be limited to no more than 20% of its roster as "import" players. This could be defined in terms of where the player was "trained" as in the Canadian Football League. That is, a player would have to have played a certain number of years in the US in high school and college or meet other specified criteria to qualify as a non-import. This would help to restore baseball as the great American game which was historically part of its appeal.
IF these proposals are NOT adopted, over the longterm I predict baseball will fall further and further behind the other major sports and eventually wither away completely as a major sport.
1. Number of regular season games must be reduced: though some radical proposals have been suggested to reduce the season by as much as twenty or even forty games per team, to start I would propose a return to a 154 game schedule (from the current 162). The season used to be 154 games until the 1960s. Under this proposal, each team would only lose four home games. The season could end a week early and the all star break increased from three days to five to give players a longer mid-season break. The fact is, everyone knows there are too many games compared to other major sports, so a reduction has to start somewhere.
2. Increase the playoffs. This idea has been floated by many commentators. I would suggest having six teams make the playoffs, with a best two out of three preliminary round for three wildcards and the lowest division winner with a bye for the top two division winners in each league. Then increase the second round to best of 7 (from the current best of 5). Keep the other rounds as is. Many casual fans only start to follow the major sports leagues during the post-season and MLB already has less playoff games compared to NHL and NBA.
3. Have more interleague games. No reason not to do this, its a win-win.
4. A pitch clock. Not my idea, I stole it from another article, but I think that would be a great idea. Many younger people, with their short post-modern attention spans, claim that baseball is "boring." And certainly many games are too long. Speeding up the time between pitches could help.
4. Limits on foreign raised players: this will be the most controversial proposal, and I'm sure the RoryN types will go beserk, but there needs to be limits on the number of foreign players allowed per roster. I firmly believe that many Americans have lost interest in baseball in part because there's so many foreign players. The NFL is almost all American raised players, and the NBA, despite having quite a few foreigners, still has a clear majority of American players. These sports have passed MLB or are challenging it for interest, could there possibly be a connection? I think so.
I would therefore propose a team be limited to no more than 20% of its roster as "import" players. This could be defined in terms of where the player was "trained" as in the Canadian Football League. That is, a player would have to have played a certain number of years in the US in high school and college or meet other specified criteria to qualify as a non-import. This would help to restore baseball as the great American game which was historically part of its appeal.
IF these proposals are NOT adopted, over the longterm I predict baseball will fall further and further behind the other major sports and eventually wither away completely as a major sport.
Sunday afternoons. 
