Tuesday, May 15, 2007

The New World Series Schedule

Most people probably missed MLB's announcement that they were pushing back the start of the World Series four days from Saturday October 20th to Wednesday October 24th.

It seems like a pretty harmless move, but there is some significance behind it.

MLB says the big reason they're doing it is because it will help ratings. That's kind of a load of crap. Sure, they won't have to play a game on a Friday night when ratings are at their worst, but if baseball really wanted to improve the television ratings of the World Series, they wouldn't play the games in the middle of the night.

The new schedule change also means that Game 7 wouldn't be played until November 1st, the first time a Major League baseball game would ever be played in the month of November. (UPDATE: Turns out that there have in fact been games played in November before thanks to 9/11. Thanks to the readers for pointing this out to me. Over. And over. And over again. I shall now go cut myself.) It's nice to see that baseball has learned its lesson about scheduling.

But the real reason they're moving back the World Series?

Baseball is going to make the first round Divisional Series a best-of-7 instead of the current best-of-5 format. Owners have been asking for this for the last few years for a few reasons. One being that the better team tends to win more in a seven game series than a five, but the most important reason is extra games mean more income.

I wonder if the idea to shorten the regular season from 162 games to 144 ever crossed their minds?
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12 comments:

  1. This comment has been removed by the author.
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  2. there were a few yankees-dbacks games in november in 2001, but your argument is interesting. Also, I hope you're wrong about making the divisional series 7 games - there has been enough talk about how there are already too many regular season games, PLUS we can all see how absurd the nba playoffs are now that te first round is seven games.
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  3. What is your source on this???

    The 2007 postseason schedule on MLB.com shows that the ALDS and NLDS are best of 5.

    http://mlb.mlb.com/news/press_releases/press_release.jsp?ymd=20070514&content_id=1964536&vkey=pr_mlb&fext=.jsp&c_id=mlb
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  4. The real solution to the problem is picking two wild cards and putting them into a play-in game for the LDS. That way, both teams are penalized with a 163rd game and are most likely forced to use their best pitchers before the playoffs begin.
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  5. The Yanks/D-Backs games were in November because of 9/11
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  6. You know there were 3 games played in November in the 2001 World Series right?
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  7. Dave-I wasn't talking about this season. I'm saying that for the 2008 season the Divisional round will be extended.

    And YES I'm now aware that there were in fact three games played in November of 2001. Thank you.
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  8. This doesn't make any sense. You are claiming that MLB is pushing back the 2007 World Series dates because they are changing the playoff format in 2008??? Oh, and you still never said who your source for this was.

    Not buying it.
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  9. Dave,

    Let me make this clear for you. What I'm saying is that baseball is pushing back the World Series this season to set up extending the first round next season. They can't do it for this season because I'm sure they'll need approval from the player's union and other places to do so.

    As for my source, why do I need a source to form an opinion? This is just what I feel is going to happen. I never said it has happened, I just said this is what I believe is going to happen.

    This seems to be something that everybody else who has commented here has been able to pick up on.

    Whether you buy it or not doesn't matter.
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  10. This is making less and less sense. True, you never said it "has happened," but you do say "baseball is going to..."

    And what does it matter to the 2008 schedule what days of the week the 2007 games are played on???
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  11. The "no games on Fridays" thing doesn't make sense, either. The World Series is never played on Fridays anymore - until this change, it had been game 1 on Saturday, 2 on Sunday, Monday off, 3/4/5 on Tues/Wed/Thur, Friday off, and games 6/7 on Sat/Sun. So MLB can't be changing it for that reason.
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  12. "Selig said baseball was not considering an expansion of the first round from best-of-five to best-of-seven."

    http://sports.espn.go.com/mlb/news/story?id=2873846
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Try to play nice with each other, or else I will remove your comment.

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