Imrem: It's time to add teams to baseball party
Oh, yeah, almost forgot, the World Series is going on.
Hard to tell around here with the Cubs and White Sox burying baseball six feet under the Bears, Bulls and Blackhawks.
The sport will rise from the dead in Chicago, however, and when it does the postseason should be vastly different with or without our teams involved.
Should be but most likely won't be unless MLB gets smart.
Even though playoff series haven't been stretched to the limit, the games have been compelling and the storylines intriguing.
So commissioner-elect Rob Manfred should put near the top of his to-do list a longer postseason with more teams and more games.
Whoa!
As recently as a month ago, this was the last proposal I expected to make.
The best system ever was when each major league qualified one team for the postseason and the two pennant winners went directly to the World Series.
Then came divisions and more divisions and wild cards and more wild cards … since that's the way it is, as a certain local broadcaster says, "Don't stop now, boys."
Baseball no longer determines the best team over seven months. It determines the best team over one month. Heck, the Giants and Royals are second-place teams playing for the championship.
Major League Baseball should go the way of the NBA and NHL and make the regular season more of a sprint and the postseason more of a marathon.
Whoa, again.
Basketball and hockey have been criticized for decades for permitting 16 teams to qualify for the playoffs. Quality was compromised. Teams with records below .500 made it.
Yeah, so what?
Those sports are growing in popularity and have younger audiences than baseball, so there's the model for baseball: 16 of 30 teams in the playoffs.
To accommodate a postseason lengthened to somewhere between six weeks and two months, the regular season has to shrink by 10 to 12 games.
Hallelujah!
A 162-game season is too long anyway. Approximately 150 would be about right.
Baseball owners always resist losing the revenue from fewer games, but wouldn't TV pay more for more playoff games?
So many sports networks compete for programming now - with postseason games the most valuable commodity - most of the lost regular-season revenues would be recouped.
Even if they wouldn't be, so be it. Just do something in the best interest of the game for a change even at the expense of economics.
Baseball has been trying and failing to win back at least part of September from college and pro football.
Extra wild-card teams haven't made much of a dent nationally because stretch runs aren't any more compelling than they had been.
But start the playoffs right after Labor Day or in mid-September and baseball would come alive during the month.
Meanwhile, the dog days would become hey days. Division races in August, without football taking over yet, would attract more fans to more TVs and more ballparks.
Hey, it's a theory anyway.
The idea is radical, but baseball has made radical changes since almost committing suicide by canceling the 1994 World Series.
Milwaukee and Houston changed leagues. More and more interleague games were scheduled. Playoff teams were added.
Advocates say those moves brought baseball into the 20th century. So why not try something to bring the game into the 21st century?
If nothing else, expanding the postseason would give the Sox and Cubs a better chance to extend relevance beyond July.
After lengthening the playoffs, the new commissioner could work on shortening the games.