Opening Day is finally here! It’s a baseball fan’s Christmas. The waiting and anticipation is over. Games are underway, the strike is just a distance memory now and we can pretend that the game is as good as it ever has been. Opening Day should be a national holiday, but it isn’t. It isn’t even on one day this year. Let’s get into all the problems with Opening Day this year.
When you title something with the word “day” in it, you assume it will only be one day. Not so for opening day. It’s spread across two days. There’s not a good reason for this – the excuses they’ll give might be about when spring training started. Or it might be to help with the scheduling. But in a season where there are games every day and you can tun in and tune out at anytime you need to embrace the single moments where you can generate as many eyes as possible. There was a time where scheduling was good. Sure it was before the mass adoption of MLB.tv and was also back when ESPN cared about baseball. But there was a time when opening day was an all day affair – starting in the east with a noon start and finishing on the west coast late in the evening. That needs to come back. All 30 teams need to play on the first day of the season. Spread it out so every hour another game starts. Block off the time so marquee games won’t have anything else to compete with. But make sure that there is a solid 12 hours of uninterrupted baseball action.
If anyone is arguing against this joyous baseball filled day using some weak argument about scheduling, they’re wrong. Day 2 and Day 3 of the season is where you space out the games – have half take off the second day and half take off the third day. You get that makeup day filled in for the home opener to make sure you get it in for the fans. Then you’re off into the flow of the season.
Apart from the opening day nonsense we still have to pretend it’s baseball as usual. But it’s not. For whatever reason the powers that be in baseball have a grudge against the sport. They don’t want to embrace quirks. They don’t want to embrace tradition. This is a sport that could improve the technology of their bats, but choose to keep them as wood. But for some reason those in charge *cough* Rob Manfred *cough* like to ignore that tradition. Obviously I’m talking about the DH in the National League. It’s wrong, it’s sacrilege. It basically has rendered the Manager’s job obsolete – now being replaced by egg head front office guys using an algorithm.
One of the only arguments I heard that was halfway decent about adding the DH in the NL was that you don’t have one set of rules for half your teams and another set of rules for the other half. It’s a pretty bad argument still, and maybe more of an argument to get rid of interleague play. Basically it was a football fan’s argument to specialize the game. Specialize every position to the extent that you now have the Fielding Team and the Hitting Team. That’s where this move is going if you let that kind of argument grab hold. Pitchers should hit.
The biggest changes in baseball though are happening out of sight. They’re happening in the minor leagues. It started last year when they decided to cut the number of minor league teams. For how much money flows through baseball there’s no excuse for these owners to cut these minor league teams. Sure they don’t bring in much for money, but that’s because they don’t really focus on making money with that league. What they should really look at doing is something similar to the English Championship League and create a draw on tv for the AAA teams and still have the other minor leagues get some television or streaming coverage.
That’s a solution to the start of the problem though. What’s happened in this CBA is even worse. They’ve decided to make the minor leagues their mad science lab. Testing out larger bases, robot umpires, and any other terrible idea they try to come up with to change the game. It’s fine if Major League Baseball wants to do that with the Atlantic League that isn’t affiliated with any of the Major League clubs. But keep that league separate and independent. The Minor Leagues are a place for players to develop their skills and work to make it to the show. It’s not for the League to test out their pet projects.
When you look past all these things you can almost feel like the great American game is back. In some ways it is, but in some ways it’s just a haphazard attempt at making us believe in James Earl Jones’s speech in Field of Dreams “the one constant throughout the years, Ray, has been baseball”. It’s becoming less and less true each year. But for now we can enjoy that it’s back, and we’ll pretend that it will remain.