Without steroids Selig's failures would be even more obvious. Selig might as well have taken the steroids himself. Steroids pumped up attendance.
The need to increase the number of playoff teams was obvious and overdue. To credit Selig, especially given the inept manner in which that change and the reorganization occurred, is absurd. Selig still doesn't even realize that he presided over the merger of two organizations, which is why that merger has been so mismanaged. Take a trip down Radical Baseball memory lane for some of my observations on the disaster for which Bud Selig is responsible.
Monday, May 18, 2009
MLB: switch to aluminum bats before someone gets killed.
It is obvious that MLB commissioner Bud Selig has neither the imagination nor the inclination to actually do something about the alarming tendency for wood bats to splinter into javelins and fly at people, both players and fans.
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Wednesday, October 7, 2009
MLB commissioner Bud Selig is a moron!
This morning I happened to see Selig interviewed on TV. No, not NBC's Today show. Not even ESPN. On a simulcast of ESPN radio.
Way to go Bud, getting your sport covered!
Then this moron has the nerve to praise himself for what a great idea he had in creating the stupid MLB wild card playoff system...
So now Minnesota flops into the playoffs with 87 wins to play the Yanks who won 103. Hey, Texas won 87, why isn't Texas in the playoffs? Oops, Texas finished second in AL West. Nice system, Buddy... why should the Yanks with 16 more regular season wins than Minnesota risk its season in a five game series with only one more home game as reward for the far better regular season record?
What is that last World Series game played in the daytime? Maybe around 1981? Football, both college and NFL, scared MLB off Saturday and Sunday afternoons decades ago. Now, MLB has retreated to a twilight play-in game on TBS.
Not even counting the whole steroids mess, Bud Selig, you are a moron!
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Thursday, October 8, 2009
Selig cannot imagine changes to playoff system.
During yesterday's ill fated interview on ESPN radio MLB commissioner Bud Selig was asked about adding another wild card team. He's stuck in old thinking. Buddy said
- no team wanted to shorten the regular season
- players did not want a single play-in game
- adding another round of playoff games would push the World Series well into November.
November baseball: hey, more rain and cold. MLB does not seem to care about the comfort of fans attending games now so why not?
MLB could:
- give top team a bye
and/or
- have teams four and five play a one game play-in game; everybody is in love with Tuesday's Detroit-Minnesota play-in game; they could have two of those each season...
Teams should be aligned geographically to avoid needless travel... The system is not fair and glorifying the stupid wild card is really stupid. See my original radical baseball post from what I wrote on June 9, 2006:
3. Four leagues, no divisions.
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Wednesday, July 14, 2010
MLB finals home field advantage
That feeble minded commissioner Bud Selig must change MLB finals to give home field advantage to the team with the better regular season record, like a modern professional league would do it.
Having the result of the all star game determine MLB finals home field advantage is a stupid travesty.
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Wednesday, June 22, 2011
MLB schedule gets curiouser and curiouser.
NL Central teams play different numbers of games against division rivals and I've been told that this uneven number rotates from year to year. It turns out this is kind of correct. Read on.
2010 is different from1998 when NL added Milwaukee Brewers and Arizona Diamondbacks, causing NL Central to expand to six teams...
Bud Selig must be dumber than even I thought...
Obviously Selig had no idea what he was doing when MLB expanded NL to 16 teams in 1998. MLB was experimenting year to year. No wonder MLB is so confused now trying to fix the mess. Do you think this undermines the integrity of the game, you know, like steroids? ...
Change is nice, isn't it? Each season from 1998 through 2004 is different. What next? ...
Fewer games in division but almost equal. Oh, Buddy (Selig), this scheduling thing is complicated! Somebody should help you. No wonder you didn't know about those silly old steroids...
Buddy is zooming around, fine tuning that NL schedule. Most of us had no idea it was changing so much each season...
That Buddy. He keeps us guessing, doesn't he? No wonder he has all that power.
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Thursday, June 23, 2011
MLB schedule and organization: back to the future that never was?
Who knew NL Central had 11 different intra-division schedules in 13 years?
My previous post dealt with the curious situation of the NL Central teams playing different numbers of games against division rivals. Using Cincinnati as the example, the division schedule became more convoluted each season from 1998 through 2010 because of its strange inexplicable variety, which I doubt was known to many fans or media. Plus, I have no idea what it is for 2011. I'd like it to remain a mystery...
Considering that there are only five opponents, it seems as if MLB was actually trying to make it convoluted, non-intuitive, illogical, unfair, un-American, ... What the heck was Bud Selig and his MLB staff thinking? ...
In 5 of 13 years Reds played at least one division team at least 3 more games than at least one other division team. In 8 of 13 years Reds played at least one division team at least 2 more games than at least one other division team.
Part of what makes this truly bizarre is that the team that Selig had owned, the Milwaukee Brewers, were switched from the AL in 1997 to the NL in 1998. Why? To accommodate the addition of an NL team in Arizona in 1998. MLB wanted the NL to have an even number of teams (16) ... for scheduling reasons. How is that for ironic? Obviously, MLB continued its practice of not thinking it through. The result was six teams in the NL Central and the scheduling mess documented in this and the two previous posts.
More irony: MLB is supposedly considering, now get this, moving Houston, not Milwaukee, to the AL to have 15 teams in each "league" ... for scheduling reasons. You can't make this up.
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
Merger: AL and NL merged years ago. How come no one noticed?
the National League and the American League … merged in 2000 into a single MLB organization led by the Commissioner of Baseball after 100 years as separate legal entities...
The two leagues were once totally separate rival corporate entities, but that distinction has all but disappeared … This difference in rules (DH) between leagues is unique to MLB; the other sports leagues of the US including the NFL, NBA, NHL each have all teams playing under the same rules...
More of a mess is that MLB did not even attempt to reconcile the different rule, the 1972 designated hitter (DH), which applied to the AL but not to the NL. That schism persists to this day, the first of the MLB finals, and MLB is not even embarrassed by that as it should be. FORTY years and MLB has not resolved a simple rule aberration.
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Wednesday, March 7, 2012
MLB tournament: inadvertently less random with one more team?
Ancient commissioner Bud Selig and his brain trust may have stumbled into a less random tournament format, which will hopefully get the two top seeds through this nonsense and into the finals, which is what anyone with any sense wants, not the Russian roulette of St. Louis coming from nowhere to win as happened in 2011 when the Yankees - Phillies matchup was derailed in game five losses in the first round...
Ah, finally something positive, even if it most likely happened accidentally and out of greed. Selig's home town Milwaukee team is less likely to succeed. Serves him right.
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Monday, June 11, 2012
Major Baseball League: a new phrase is coined.
Major League Baseball (MLB) should change its name to Major Baseball League (MBL). Maybe I'll do it for them. Ladies and Gentlemen, now introducing the already existing Major Baseball League with its American and National conferences! Get used to it.
Much better. Now when some jerk like Cole Hamels of the Philadelphia Phillies takes it upon himself to hit a rookie like Bryce Harper of the Washington Nationals with a pitch he can accompany his cowardly act with a paraphrase of the line used for decades by players in the National Football League (NFL): "Welcome to the Major Baseball League".
In case it is not obvious enough the intent of this name change is to drive home the point yet again that the old American and National Leagues merged into one league known as Major.
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June 13th, 2012
My friend Cliff first referred to them as the American and National conferences a couple of years ago. I’ve picked up on that. It’s refreshing to make that change in thinking. It helps put things into perspective.
The only thing that suggests that they are still separate leagues is that they continue to have a different rule: the designated hitter (DH) is used in the American conference but not in the National conference.
1. There is one commissioner, not two.
2. There is one group of umpires, not two.
3. Teams in an independent league do not play regular season games against teams in another independent league. Did the NBA play regular season games against the ABA before the merger in 1976? No. Did the NFL play regular season games against the AFL before the merger in 1970? No, just the four Super Bowls, which were an extra game played between the NFL and AFL champions; this was like the old World Series; in both cases the old name persists even though it has been replaced by a post season tournament.
4. Do independent leagues move teams from one league to another? No. MLB moved Milwaukee from the American conference to the National conference. It is about to move Houston from the National conference to the American conference in 2013.
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Sunday, August 19, 2012
Melky Cabrera: should his stats be purged and his team's wins vacated?
Melky Cabrera was suspended 50 games by the Major Baseball League (MBL) ...
What about the record of Melky's team? Without Melky the Giants would porbably have won fewer games. Shouldn't the Giants wins with Melky playing be vacated the way the NCAA does with rules violations in football? And shouldn't the Giants be banned from the MBL tournament for a couple of seasons? ...
Last but not least: Melky was MVP in the 2012 All Star game, which though an exhibition, carries the weight of designating which conference champion receives home field advantage in game seven of the finals of the MBL tournament. Shouldn't that result also be vacated and home field advantage awarded to the American Conference?
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Thursday, August 23, 2012
Great White Father
The Major Baseball League (MBL) suspended yet another player born in the Dominican Republic for 50 games: Bartolo Colon, a pitcher with Oakland...
Colon tested positive for testosterone, same as fellow Bay area Dominican San Francisco Giant Melky Cabrera who was suspended for 50 games August 15, 2012. So what's the box score on 50 game suspensions? Something like 12 of 21 are Dominicans? ...
The MBL treats the Dominican Republic like a colony. Why isn't there more concern about this arrangement, which culminates with Dominican players being discarded disproportionately? Star players, especially those born in the USA, are pretty much immune from detection and even more so from punishment...
There's plenty of hypocrisy to go around but let's start with MBL commissioner Bud Selig, the Great White Father in this scenario. Allan Huber Selig was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, not in Altamira, Puerto Plata like Bartolo Colon. Colon and Cabrera wandered off the reservation and Selig's organization punished them according to the peace treaty. It's all according to the rules but there's something disturbing in all this, including the juvenile attitude about baseball, which is very different from our attitude toward football and basketball. Maybe it confirms that baseball is in our culture much more deeply than we realize, even if the national pastime is past its time.
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Sunday, October 21, 2012
Home Rules Advantage: Melky's Revenge.
This morning I read that the American Conference (AC) tournament winners, the Detroit Tigers, plan to use Designated Hitter (DH) Delmon Young in left field in the opening game of the MBL finals in the National Conference (NC) home park, either in St. Louis or in San Francisco.
It hit me all over again. In the finals the team with the home field advantage (actually only in a game seven) also has the home RULES advantage. Geez, what a joke. The Major BUSH League will look even more ridiculous than usual this season if the league championship comes to that absurd ultimate conclusion.
Melky's team, the San Francisco Giants, the one that refuses to activate Melky even though his suspension has been served, will get an advantage that it clearly does not deserve.
I guess it's too late to ban the Giants but at least MBL commissioner Bud Selig should have the basic common sense and decency to deprive the Giants of home rules advantage in a seventh and deciding game in the MBL finals. If Melky was guilty then so was Melky's team, which should not be rewarded for Melky's transgression.
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Friday, November 23, 2012
Baseball will crash in 2020.
2. Teams are now cooperating with secondary channels that sell tickets at very low prices.
3. Money paid to players is still very high and cannot be sustained once attendance plummets.
4. Baseball is being outsourced. Only 75% of players are born in the USA.
5. Few young Americans are playing baseball. This will decrease interest in watching baseball even on TV. With TV viewing down, advertising dollars will decrease and the bloated TV deals will wither contributing to the downward spiral.
6. Baseball has long been unwatchable. It is slow and boring. It is dominated by pitching and debilitated by absurd rituals like changing pitchers that suck the life out of a once great game. The only way to watch baseball is to record it and watch by fast forwarding between all 300 pitches. There should be a service that condenses games so the viewer does not need to push the FF button so often.
The Bud Selig house of cards will come down and the establishment will not react well or quickly exacerbating the problems. Because Americans will stop playing or attending games, baseball will fade into history.
Will this happen in the year 2020? Maybe but it will happen.
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