Even though we're in the midst of March Madness and baseball season is still a couple of weeks away, there's still plenty of news being made around the Majors. The players are in Florida and Arizona, we've already got a couple pitchers headed to Tommy John (Yu Darvish and Zack Wheeler) and people are making their judgments on which teams are going to be good based on meaningless Spring Training games being played by guys who aren't going to make the team.
For his part, new Commissioner Rob Manfred has made some news with decisions he's made during his first two months on the job. Nothing controversial, mind you, but noteworthy nonetheless.
First, Manfred handed out a couple of All-Star Games. This year's is in Cincinnati, but they hadn't announced 2016 or any future years yet. Well, he took care of that by giving the 2016 All-Star Game to San Diego and 2017 to Miami. He was really just following through on promises Bud Selig made to cities that built new stadiums, but the problem was that all of these new stadiums are in the National League and the All-Star Game traditionally alternates between leagues.
There's no rule that says the All-Star Game alternates. It's strictly just honoring tradition. And we have seen the same league host consecutive All-Star Games before (the NL had back-to-back in 2006-07 to set up 2008 at Old Yankee Stadium in its final year). But this is the first time one league will host three in a row.
That would be more significant if they hadn't changed the rules a couple years ago to use the DH in the All-Star Game no matter what, but the "home" team designation is the real argument you could've used for preserving the tradition. Which team is "home" is more important in baseball than any other sport, and batting in the bottom of the ninth is a big deal. Especially since the league that wins the All-Star Game gets the extra home game in the World Series, it wouldn't have been fair to have the National League bat last three straight times. Manfred recognized that, so he declared that even though the game will be played in San Diego, the American League will be the "home" team in 2016. It'll be kinda weird, but I think we'll all get over it pretty quickly. And it was definitely the fair thing to do.
Another one of Manfred's changes regarding the All-Star Game will take a little more getting used to. Starting this year, the only place to vote will be online. MLB cited research that a majority of All-Star votes were being made online anyway, and they had thousands of paper ballots at ballparks that were never filled out last season. This way, they're eliminating all those wasted paper ballots (and it's probably a lot easier to count online votes, too).
This is not a novel approach. The NBA, NHL and NFL did away with the paper ballots a long time ago. But the All-Star voting numbers in those three sports are nowhere near what they are in baseball (Zemgus Girgensons was the leading vote getter in the NHL this year, and I don't even think he broke a million). I've got to think fans having the ability to vote both at the ballpark and online had a lot to do with that.
I go to a lot of games, and I would always grab a couple All-Star ballots and drop them in the little box, then go online late in the game and max out my online votes. And what are they going to do about that maximum number of votes? Will it go up? Will it be eliminated completely, letting you vote as many times as you want for whoever you want like the All-Star Final Vote? Because if they don't change the rule about the vote max, the number of All-Star votes cast will drop significantly. I'm not saying it was a completely terrible idea to do away with in-stadium paper voting. I'm definitely curious how much not having it will affect vote totals, though.
With the US and Cuba renewing diplomatic relations after all these years, that obviously helps Major League Baseball tremendously. Manfred's not an idiot. He sees the value of playing games in Cuba. The Orioles played a couple exhibition games against the Cuban National Team like 15 years ago and they were a tremendous success. Regular season games in Cuba might not be too far off. It's probably not going to happen in 2016, but the Orioles and Red Sox have both expressed interest in playing Spring Training games there. I can definitely see that happening, perhaps as a precursor to regular season games (or, at the very least, World Baseball Classic games) in 2017.
But the best announcement Manfred made is also the one that came as the biggest surprise. That doesn't make it any less great. This year, all 15 games on the final day of the regular season will start at the same time, 3 p.m. ET. No staggered start times to give any team an advantage over another that it might be fighting for a division title/playoff spot. Likewise, no sitting around waiting for the West Coast games to end to figure out whether you're in or out or where you're going.
Let's not kid ourselves. This is by no means a novel concept. They've been doing it in the World Cup and all the major European soccer leagues for years. The NFL does it somewhat, too. They adjust the start times in Week 17 so that games impacting each other kick off at the same time. It's refreshing to see Major League Baseball adopt that same mindset. Sure, it might negatively impact a team that's already in the postseason and won't have the luxury of setting up its pitching, but it's definitely something worth trying. And the 3:00 start time is genius.
When they announced it was 3, I thought it was kind of weird. "Why not 4:00?", I thought. Then I remembered that the final Sunday of the baseball season is Week 4 of the NFL season. And starting baseball games at 3 means the 1:00 football games aren't over yet and the 4:00 football games haven't started yet. You have to make a choice. You can't put the baseball game on once the football game is over. Or, you could just go to a bar and watch them both at the same time.
No comments:
Post a Comment