PITTSBURGH (93.7 The Fan)- We know this MLB season will be shortened. Whether its 114, 82, 80, 76, 60, 50, 48 (insert number you've seen thrown about in negotiations along the way), it won't be 162 games as is customary.
Colin Dunlap and Chris Mack took some time on The Fan Morning Show today to ponder whether Major League Baseball should consider never even going back to the 162 game standard post-COVID.
"Could there be a way with quality over quantity if you could shrink these seasons and make those tickets something that are a higher priority as opposed to a lot of empty seats in a lot of places. Make that television advertising dollar mean more so in effect you can make as much money if not more. I don't know, what my gut tells me is volume is what sells but I just wonder if there's a way," said Dunlap.
Chris Mack added, "Especially in a gate-driven and regional television-driven league as baseball is, you're probably right, they're always going to want volume. But I think there's a way to figure this out. Just think about the simple laws of supply and demand. If there are fewer games, then every game becomes that much more important. If every game is more important and every game is played thusly and every game is managed as such, maybe there's fewer of those games early and late in the season, esspecially when the weather is terrible, that you're not necessarily as interested in going to. Now maybe it's a little more appointment viewing on television.
It doesn't have to be something drastic like cutting the season in half. If you took one week off at the beginning of the regular season so you were starting in the first full week of April. And you took one week off at the end of the regular season so you weren't always wrapping up in October. And you took a full week for the All-Star break in the middle of July somewhere and you played five games a week. In other words, everybody gets two days off a week so players are staying healthy, there's fewer need for guys number 23, 24, 25 on the roster to play as important a role. Fewer needs for 12,13, 14-man bullpens.
You can still play 120 games over the course of that schedule. Yeah, you're chopping off 40 total games and that means 20 home dates, that's a quarter of the home schedule and owners would lose their minds over that. But think about how much more heightened the importance of every game would be in a 120 or 125 game season as opposed to 162."
Do you think 162 games for Major League Baseball still makes the most sense?
You can hear the entire conversation on this from The Fan Morning Show today, below.
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