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| Thursday, June 15 | |||||||||||
| Please Bud, just fix the schedule ESPN.com | |||||||||||
There isn't much in baseball -- or in life -- that everyone can agree upon.
But we've finally found something:
Come on now. What is it that everybody in baseball hates these days?
The schedule. Of course.
Running through these schedule complaints right now is kind of like
singing along with the radio. We all know the tunes. But we never seem to get
tired of them. So here we go with just a selection of everyone's favorites:
It would seem to most of us that there would be certain priorities when the schedule is made up. And one of them would be to make sure that a team like the Red Sox would play a rival and fellow contender like the Yankees home-and-home in September. It's more than just good drama. It's more fair that way. The problem is, the schedule makers say they're assigned other priorities. Before they can get to that rivalry stuff, they have to make sure other things happen. For one thing, everybody has to play 81 home games and 81 road games, and that can get trickier than it looks. Then those schedule mavens have to avoid what Montgomery described as "travel violations." Can't play a night game here followed by a day game there. Can't play too many days in a row. Etc., etc., etc. Then there are those out-of-division opponents that clubs play nine times a year. If they played six in City A and three in City B last year, they have to even that up the next year. And that's no fun. Then the next priority is to take each team's schedule by month and make sure it isn't too far out of whack. "If somebody only played five home games in a month and 22 on the road," he said, "they might not be too happy. So you've got to address that." All that sounds fairly basic. But those are considered the "nuts and bolts" in the schedule. And the stuff we care about -- like why the Red Sox get to avoid the Bronx for three months -- is considered just "fine-tuning." "The fine-tuning should have a high priority," Montgomery said. "But that assumes you can get through the nuts-and-bolts stage to get to the fine tuning. And once you get through the nuts-and-bolts stage and once you get the interleague games in there, the ability to make something else a priority just isn't there. You can't do that without taking everything else out of there." But wait. The schedule has been complicated for 100 years. Why now, all of a sudden, are the Yankees and Red Sox playing only once in September when they used to play more? And the answer there is that this is only the second season of this particular schedule format. Before 1998, there were only 28 teams, with the same number in each league, so there was more flexibility. Got us so far? Then, in '98, when Arizona and Tampa Bay entered the mix, realignment made for unequal league sizes. That created a whole new mess. And most teams were still playing 16 interleague games apiece in '98, instead of the current 18. So that created lots of strange trips and two-game series. And the complaints were even louder about that. So last year, the schedule was adjusted to create more three-game series, with most teams playing 18 interleague games apiece. But with every adjustment, the schedule architects got more and more restricted in what they could design. "The explanation for all of this," Montgomery said, "is just that this schedule is so rigid that just to get the pieces to work is an accomplishment -- let alone getting them to work the way you'd like them to work." Why are teams playing each other so often so early? It wouldn't seem to make sense to us casual observers that, say, the Tigers and Indians should be playing each other 13 times in the first 12 weeks of the season. Or that the Braves would play all their games against the Phillies before they play any games against the Mets. Or that the Red Sox would be heading for New York on back-to-back road trips. But rest assured, Montgomery said, that there are logical explanations. The start of the summer, he said, is a complicated period. Interleague games enter the mix. The weekly network games begin. And "key matchups" within leagues are always scheduled to fix the public's attention on baseball. So the way to "control" the schedule during all that, he said, is with a concept known as "repeating." Not to be confused with what the Yankees do every October. "Right now," Montgomery said, "you've got other pieces in place. So if you reverse what you have, it all fits together. If, say, you put one of these Red Sox-Yankees series in the last week of July, then the Red Sox -- instead of going from another city in the east to New York -- might have to come in from the West Coast. If you do that, you've got to build in a travel day. Then that makes other pieces not fit. So the way to keep control over it is to have what happened over the last 10 days happen again in the next 10 days." The way to imagine this schedule-making thing is to envision one of those plastic puzzles you buy on the boardwalk where you maneuver the pieces until they turn into the picture of a sunset. But every time you move one piece into the right spot, some other piece moves into the wrong spot. "A schedule with all rigid pieces creates rigid solutions," Montgomery said. "You know how some puzzles, you can solve six different ways? This is a puzzle you can only solve one way." Why would an unbalanced schedule be better? This one's easy. The more two teams play each other, the more chances you have to schedule those meetings at more desirable times. So if you load them up on games within their division, the more flexibility you have. And the less those clubs play teams from other divisions and, in particular, other time zones, the easier it gets to maneuver them around. "There's no question," Selig said, "that that format would solve these problems." But even with that unbalanced format, there are other principles that would make the schedule work better. And the first is: Even numbers are good. If you have an even number of teams in a division, cities can be grouped together. So AL teams would almost always travel to, say, New York and Baltimore on the same trip, then Boston and Toronto on another trip, then Detroit and Cleveland on another trip. NL teams could do Los Angeles-San Diego, Philadelphia-Pittsburgh, Chicago-Milwaukee. That's way better than Arizona-Montreal. But we don't have that now. And that's a problem. And that lack of even numbers is also a major reason owners appear to oppose the players union's recent proposal for two 15-team leagues, with six five-team divisions. Everything about that alignment produces an odd number. So every day of the season, two teams would have to play an interleague game. And four other teams would have to play games outside their division -- even coming down the stretch in September. So there would be plenty of complaints about that, too. Trust us. That even-number fixation is also a big reason for Selig's much-ballyhooed realignment plan. Having six four-team divisions and one six-team division is a bad thing in some ways. But if better scheduling is the goal, it creates the most even-numbered divisions. So it should produce the most workable schedule. Finally, there's one other principle that makes the schedule work better: Divide by three. If teams from the same division play each other 18 times each, play teams from other divisions six or nine times each and play 18 interleague games apiece, all of those numbers divide by three. So that makes almost all series three games long. And that's good. The alternatives result in two-game series (which everyone hates) and four-game series (which create uneven weeks and too many weeks without off days). So that's another reason Selig's realignment aficionados proposed the plan they did: Lots of three-game series. At the moment, though, we have a schedule that combines a mish-mosh of all those principles -- or, in some cases, none of them. So suffice it to say that if the schedule wasn't messed up now or messed up in September, it would be messed up some other time of the year. And somebody would hate that, too. "I don't know all the specifics of it," Selig said. "But why do you think I've been saying for so long that the schedule is a nightmare and it needs to be dealt with? This is why." So don't go telling King Bud this is a nightmare of his making. Just hold him to his promise that by next year, this will be a nightmare of his solving. The one thing we know is that there has to be a better plan than this. And at this point, do we even care what it is? Jayson Stark is a senior writer at ESPN.com. | ALSO SEE Jayson Stark archive | ||||||||||
