The 2023 Running Baseball Thread

Sadly, it's almost inevitable. People like their televised PG-rated violence.

 

My guess is they did this so Kevin Burkhardt could broadcast the main Fox NFL game. Which isn't much better. "Hey, you've been our main broadcast partner for almost 30 years, but by all means please make our jewel event a secondary priority to week eight of the NFL season."

 

You'd think a statistical wizard would understand that if you contract the playoffs, you make the regular season LESS interesting, because more teams are eliminated from contention earlier.

 

Well, yeah, this ain't tee ball. Torey Lovullo's number one concern should be, "what do I need to do to win this goddamn game," not worrying about which "dawg" is gonna get a WS at bat. If you're 5-for-5 you should stay in the game until they start getting you out.

 

Everything about Tommy Pham makes my skin crawl.

But y'all knew that.

 

Less interesting (to some people) . . . but more important.

There is something to be said for "why the hell are we going through the motions playing 162 games?"

 

Good ole Tommy Pham.

LOL

 

Let's assume baseball was still in the two divisions in each league, four team playoff version it had from 1969-1993. This season both NL division races would've been over by mid-August and we'd have spent six weeks previewing a Braves-Dodgers series. In the American League, the East race between the Orioles and Rays would've been what it was, and the Rangers, Mariners and Astros would have had one hell of a pennant race down past the last day of the season, with a one-game playoff to decide it. Being old enough to remember when all there was was the World Series, I think that's about average. Half of all races are blowouts, one-fourth are reasonably close, and a fourth (probably less) are barnburners. I think that's true no matter how many regular season races MLB creates to inflate the postseason.
I get all the reasons why MLB expanded the playoffs. It does make September more exciting in more cities. But the whole point of the long season is that the sport's differences between winning and losing are so small that any one game is a random event, and a short series only marginally less random. By valuing a month of short series over the regular season, baseball is in a sense at war with its own basic nature.

 

Do you think anyone would be complaining about the playoff format if the Series was a Dodger-Yankee match-up after both teams snuck in as Wild Cards? Nope. National media follows "the uniforms" as Seinfeld said - they don't know these teams so they think the Series is bogus. That people aren't familiar with these teams isn't on the teams - its on the national media.

 

to make money

 

Can’t blame MLB for the NFL’s fuckup.

 

Untrue. The Astros would still be in the National League (and the Brewers in the American League), where they belong.

And now, we gonna post-pad …