Major League Baseball is killing its best rivalries with its balanced schedule
It’s getting harder and harder to work up a good, old-fashioned friendly hate in Major League Baseball.
You know, the kind of hate that Bears fans have for the Packers or that Ohio State fans have for Michigan.
It used to be that Cubs fans couldn’t stand the Cardinals and the Mets. They were NL East Division rivals, and even in the pre-social media days, fans knew those teams well.
Darryl Strawberry and Dwight Gooden. Al Hrabowsky and Albert Pujols. Cubs fans loved to see the North Siders take it to those guys. Or at least try to.
Then the Brewers moved to the National League, and a good rivalry began between those two teams where it used to exist between the Brewers and White Sox.
The rivalries stemmed from familiarity, both geographic and because the teams saw each other frequently during the season. Now division rivals see each other just 13 times a season; two home series, two away series. The Cubs already made their one trip to New York this year.
You might think that absence makes the heart grow fonder, but in this case these games are losing their spark.
Interleague play has watered down the schedule and with it diluted the game’s best rivalries. This year MLB introduced its “balanced” schedule, meaning each of the 30 teams play each other at least once.
Did the Cubs really open the season in Texas? There’s no history there, and the teams won’t see each other enough to develop even a mild dislike.
The Cubs are in St. Louis this weekend, and for all the excitement about the series they might as well be in Seattle or Tampa. Baseball is the most traditional of American sports, but it seems intent on changing that. That’s a shame.
Imagine the NFL telling the Bears and Packers they’ll play each other only once a season. There would be an outcry from Ann Arbor to Columbus if the Big Ten told Michigan to go play Rutgers and Ohio State to visit Oregon the final week of the season.
In September, when the Cubs hope to be in the middle of a pennant race, they will host Oakland for three games. And when players say it’s just another series and nothing special?
We’ll believe them.
· Pitcher Kyle Hendricks is the last Cub from the 2016 World Series championship team, which is a long way of reminding us that it’s been eight years since that glorious season.
That’s almost half a 17-year cicada dormancy period.
Long gone are stars Anthony Rizzo, Javier Baez, Addison Russell, Kris Bryant, Jon Lester, Dexter Fowler, Jake Arrieta, etc. Some have retired, others are still playing, but none of them make their baseball home in the Friendly Confines any longer. And none of them have repeated the glory of 2016 elsewhere.
Catcher David Ross retired, became a broadcaster, signed on as Cubs manager and was fired.
Just Hendricks is left with the Cubs, and now he’s been sent to the bullpen. It feels like a way of easing him off the roster, a courtesy that wouldn’t be granted to a player with a lesser history with the team. Sentimentalists are pulling for him, even though we all know Father Time always wins eventually.
Eight years have flown by.
· Just your periodic reminder that the only reason for the Bears or White Sox to ask for public funding to build themselves a new stadium is that they want it.
They don’t need public funding. They’d just rather use your money than their own.
And despite their claims, there’s little public benefit to spending all that tax money to build a pro sports stadium, even if it might also be used for an occasional concert or tractor pull or political convention and be big enough to be seen from the moon.
You almost have to admire their chutzpah. Almost.
· Any typos in this column can be attributed to cicadas landing on my keyboard.
Daily Herald Sports Editor Orrin Schwarz can be reached at oschwarz@dailyherald.com.