Would Baseball Be Better If There Was Less Of It?
Image credit: (Photo by Christian Petersen/Getty Images)
The poetic value of a Major League Baseball season is at least somewhat tied up in its near-omnipresence. Baseball is beautiful in a nostalgic sort of way because it intersects with our lives as a daily ritual, a soothingly consistent soundtrack to countless spring and summer evenings. In this respect, it is a feature, not a bug, that baseball is a marathon, a gauntlet, some might even say a slog. For fans and practitioners alike, it’s not a sport that rewards fickle interests with instant gratification.
The strategic, and also literal, value of so much constant quantity is, however, susceptible to the principle of diminishing returns. The importance of “depth” has outstripped almost everything else, illegal roster manipulation is broadly accepted as a necessary evil to get from Opening Day to the end of the regular season, and the playoffs far too often feel more like a war of attrition than a showcase of true talent. One hundred and sixty-two games played over 187 days is simply too much regular season baseball—especially if we concede that financial forces are such that the postseason is only ever going to grow.
In May 2021, it was announced that ESPN’s new MLB rights deal would be for less overall money and much fewer regular season games, prioritizing instead exclusivity—they dropped their midweek slate of games that had also been broadcast locally—and presumed expansion of the postseason. In exchange for more on a per-game basis, ESPN got the right to broadcast an expanded Wild Card round—one that did not yet exist.
Before the deal would go into effect in 2022, the league would have to negotiate a new collective bargaining agreement with the Players’ Association. Expanding the postseason was a clear priority for MLB—because more playoff games means more money from national broadcast partners—as had been openly telegraphed for years.
In 2020, when MLB had sought to offset the competitive and financial hit of a 60-game regular season, the 16-team playoff field reportedly netted the league close to $1 billion compared to the $780 million in television revenue it would have gotten from a normal 10-team field. A year later, as part of further pandemic-perpetuated negotiations, the league proposed a 14-team postseason in exchange for pushing back—and shortening by four games—the regular season, ostensibly to allow for more people to be vaccinated.
“The real money for owners comes in the form of October television rights, so they crave this structure,” Sports Illustrated explained at the time. That year, no agreement was reached and 2021 was 162 games with a 10-team postseason.
The CBA negotiations the following offseason forced the issue. The league offered financial incentives to the players in an effort to get them to sign off on a 14-team field — which would have reportedly been worth roughly $15 million a year more in broadcast revenue — before ultimately settling on the 12-team format we’ve had since.
All of this is simply to emphasize how MLB, the central office anyway, is highly incentivized by money to move relentlessly toward an ever-bigger postseason. The distant, but widely recognized as inevitable, league expansion to 32 teams only makes that more of a guarantee. That is an inescapable force, an immovable factor. Whatever holistic ideal of baseball you hold dear, the reality features no fewer than 12 teams playing at least four playoff rounds at a minimum of three games apiece. Already the biggest stage, if those games are going to become increasingly important; so perhaps we can stand to make the six months preceding the postseason slightly less grueling.
Especially because the concern surrounding the toll of that schedule is not new. Baseball’s history is long and weird enough to span all sorts of structural eras. But for a long time, a 154-game schedule with regularly scheduled doubleheaders and a single-round postseason allowed for mid-April starts, early October World Series, and more off days. First in 1961 (American League) and fully in 1962 (with the National League doing the same) the schedule grew to 162 games to accommodate expansion.
And it wasn’t just the sheer number of games. The postseason grew, doubleheaders disappeared, eventually the season took up more space on the calendar with less breathing room. By 2015, when Rob Manfred ascended to commissioner, one of the first things he was asked to consider was shortening the regular season. Complaints at the time were primarily about the unbaseball-like weather at the extreme ends of the season. Ultimately Manfred decided to focus his efforts on pace of play. Still, the concerns around season length, and the sport’s uniquely relentless schedule, have lingered, occasionally pushed to the forefront of baseball discourse.
There are a couple of reasons to favor a more relaxed regular season. The daily grind takes a self-explanatory physical toll on athletes who are most compelling at their peak performance. Stories of stars who played through pain only to succumb to surgery as soon as the season—or postseason—ends are inspiring but also serve as a reminder that during the highest stakes games, essentially no one on the field feels their best. An easier schedule would eliminate the need for any star player load management—like the kind that former New York Mets manager Buck Showalter referenced on a recent Foul Territory appearance, complaining that “guys get penalized now for playing too much” — and perhaps even phantom IL stints to stretch roster availability.
There’s also an aesthetic argument with respect to the role of pitchers. Modern baseball is characterized by a troubling dichotomy: the pitching has never been better, but the individual pitcher has seen his role diminished. Of course, these things are strategically linked — a quick hook and semi-regular full bullpen games are effective. The man on the mound is unhittable, and all too often anonymous. This is seen in the sheer number of pitchers teams need to get through a season. A decade ago, in 2013, more teams (three) used 20 or fewer pitchers than used 30 or more (two teams). Last year, not a single team used 20 or fewer pitchers and 21 teams used at least 30.
An easier schedule won’t fix the part of the problem where pitchers have the upperhand—that’s what all the other rule changes are for. But it would almost certainly slow the revolving door of pitchers on rosters and help restore the status of the star starter—if only because it would allow for more draconian limits on pitching staffs that have thus far proven ineffective. If the pitching is going to be lights out anyway, we might as well watch the best pitchers more rather than more pitchers in short stints.
Despite Manfred kicking off his tenure willing to consider a shorter season, it’s never really moved out of the realm of the nice hypothetical. If you’re even a little cynical about sports, you can probably guess why.
“You want to work less, usually you get paid less,” Manfred said in a 2016 Sports Illustrated article, referring to the players.
Two years later, he reiterated that sentiment: “They’re going to work less, they’re probably going to make less,” Manfred was quoted as telling Associated Press editors. That time, he was responding to comments from Anthony Rizzo, who had expressed being open to taking a paycut in exchange for a shorter season with fewer 20-degree games.
When the topic has come up in the past, this is usually where the exploration ends. Any change to the season structure would need to be collectively bargained because of the financial implications. Neither the league nor the union made an official proposal that included a shortened regular season in either of the last two rounds of CBA negotiations—even in conjunction with the 14-team playoff field. The offer from MLB in 2021 to play 154 games at full pay was a Covid-accommodation intended to allow more time for people associated with putting on games to get vaccinated. The players would never agree to a reduction in regular season games that was tied to prorating their salaries accordingly and there is some concern that fewer regular season games could more subtly erode how much teams are willing to pay over time.
But there’s a reason I led with the financial pressure to expand the postseason. All of those earlier discussions around reducing the number of regular season games took place during the two-Wild Card era. That a shorter regular season would necessarily mean less baseball inventory and thus less money overall in the industry was taken as a given and an impossible hurdle to overcome. Sure, someone may love the idea of relaxing the regular season, but no one thinks it could actually happen if it would mean anyone involved made less money.
Granted, even amid the painful unraveling of the once-lucrative regional sports network model, regular season games still have value—ticket sales, concessions, and yes even local broadcast revenue, where ratings are still strong despite cord cutting—that varies based on markets and situations. But recent years have made a couple of things clear: MLB aspires to a future in which all broadcast revenue is centralized and postseason games are more valuable than regular season games. After ESPN slashed their slate of regular season games in the latest rights deal, MLB reportedly struggled to re-sell them elsewhere, failing to find a new national home for nonexclusive midweek games.
And it’s not just more playoff teams MLB could be interested in as far as league-wide efforts to grow the game that might require pairing back the regular season. As recently as last summer, Manfred once again indicated an openness to a 154-game schedule, to better accommodate international games like the London Series. A recent proposal to allow MLB players to participate in the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles allowed for the possibility that the regular season might need to be shaved down to 158 games that year.
If these initiatives are priorities, and have been deemed financially worthwhile by the league, perhaps it wouldn’t be paying players to work less so much as paying them to work differently (or, OK, maybe a little less, but also more strategically) if they kept salaries the same and shortened the regular season.
In response to the reports about the Olympic proposal, Baseball Prospectus editor-in-chief Craig Goldstein commented—sarcastically I assume—that it is “gonna be great when they use the Olympics as a Trojan horse for a shortened season that ends up adding another round of expanded playoffs.”
But what if it’s not subterfuge or surreptitious at all? There are health reasons and aesthetic reasons to think the sport as a whole would be better with a shorter regular season—and the league does seemingly want to continue to expand the playoffs. So why not pay players their current salaries and make that trade openly?
