Interleague mayhem
Tonight, the Cardinals return to their interleague schedule with the beginning of a three-game set against the American League Royals. It's another chance for an exciting (yawn)..um... where did I put those pills?Can't we put an end to this hideous interleague experiment once and for all? The Royals and Cardinals are supposed to be regional rivals, but nobody cares. The two teams haven't played a meaningful contest against one another in almost 23 years. The 1985 World Series was tightly-fought, the Royals dubiously crowned, but now who gives a flying fig? The Cards won the 2006 World Series and we have nine others to boast. I concern myself with the Royals about as much as I concern myself with how Kevin Federline spent his Father's Day.
And this is considered one of the premiere matchups in the majors' heavily-promoted interleague schedule. It must be-- we play them every year, usually on a home-and-home basis. There is nothing interesting left to these interleague competitions. The novelty has worn, and baseball is best when it's played between teams that know each other well and the teams that win the most can then be trusted to be the best. In baseball, where constant adjustments are necessary, familiarity breeds quality. That's how it was set up in a sporting universe that allowed for a minimum of 18 head-to-head games between league or division rivals for more than a century.
Any Triple-A-caliber pitcher can be "lights out" for one ballgame if he's never been seen before, but this type of baseball truism is supposed to be balanced out by a long and grueling schedule in which you see the same opponents multiple times. When the Tampa Bay Rays came to St. Louis last month for only the second time ever, I recognized many of the players' names, but I wouldn't have been able to match names to faces. I didn't even know they were no longer called the Devil Rays. These were like exhibition games in the middle of the season-- all scouting reports and no rivalry. Can you imagine an on-the-field brawl breaking out between the Cardinals and the Rays? It's a laughable idea. The games require trainers on the field just to measure a given player's pulse.
Everyone seems to enjoy a Cubs/White Sox interleague matchup or a Mets/Yankees, but no one seems to notice that these contests are robbing us of extra Cubs/Cardinals and Yankees/Red Sox games. It's almost half-way through the season and the Cubs and Cards have only met thus far for a single three-game set. The Cardinals go to Wrigley Field this year all of twice, for a total of 6 games, and none until August 8th when the kids are practically back in school. Is this the type of schedule you remember growing up? Worse yet is the loss of the old-school rivalries within each league, but outside the divisions-- Reds/Dodgers, Cardinals/Giants, Cubs/Mets, or other combinations of the above. These had the potential to flare up and dominate entire decades.
It's all short-sided thinking, financially and otherwise, compromising these types of league rivalries that need to be better supported before they play out each autumn in the playoffs, and it takes the shine off the World Series as well, which was designed to be unique. When a National League club sees an American League team in the World Series, they haven't seen each other enough to be familiar anyway, and now there's little magic in the rarity also. We get the best of neither. The Mets/Yankees Series matchup in 2000 should have been epic, but the well had been poisoned and television ratings set record lows. There's been a lot of buzz around Chicago this summer about a possible Cubs/White Sox matchup come October, but why speculate-- and why wait? The two clubs will meet for three this weekend, and three more the following. Of course, the Cubs against anyone in the World Series would get the hemisphere's attention, but why are we always compromising?
The latest league trend is to mix and match the schedule to such a point that two teams competing in the same division can have completely different schedules. The Cubs meet the White Sox for 6, and the Orioles for 3 this year. The Cardinals play neither, but get the Royals for 6, and the Tigers and the Red Sox each for 3. For some bizarre reason, the Cards face the Tigers now almost every year, but they haven't played a game at Baltimore's Camden Yards in any of the 12 interleague seasons. The Cubs and Cardinals are supposed to have virtually identical schedules-- as they did for their first 121 years. They're turning baseball into college football, which everyone should recognize as the most corrupt sporting institution in America not controlled by Don King. There's no consistency or science to the scheduling, no level playing field, and the lack of fairness almost seems to be perpetuated, to create buzz on talk radio or something.
Major League Baseball is well aware these interleague games are nothing but exhibition fodder. That's why they don't schedule any of them in August and September.
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Baby Steinbrenner, George's son Hank, got teed off after Yankees ace Chien-Ming Wang sprained his right foot running the bases in an interleague game (played minus the AL's usual designated hitter) and sidelining him for an estimated six weeks--
“My only message is simple. The National League needs to join the 21st century. They need to grow up and join the 21st century... Am I [mad] about it? Yes. I’ve got my pitchers running the bases, and one of them gets hurt. He’s going to be out. I don’t like that, and it’s about time they address it. That was a rule from the 1800s.”
Please give this guy his league back. I don't want him soiling mine anymore than he wants to see crisply-played ballgames involving well-rounded athletes.
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Any Eero Saarinen fans out there? Sample this slide show presentation of the architect's finest work.
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Christopher Hitchens closes the book on the Hillary Clinton campaign. He seems downright gleeful about her electoral demise.
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You've been waiting for this and you never even realized it. Pollsters have put together a national county-by-county map revealing how and where Americans differentiate between "pop" and "soda."
posted by CM @ 8:23 PM
3 Comments:
Your argument against interleague play is also an argument against the World Series. I would like to see every MLB team play every other MLB team every year. I don’t like the idea that some teams will never play meaningful games against other teams in the same sports league. Think of all the great matchups we miss.
I say go back to four divisions with two leagues, no wildcard, each NL team plays each AL team a three game series, then you play 6 games against each team in the other division in your league, and the remainder would be 9-10 games against each team in your division. Keep a 162 game schedule. Or you could do half of one division from the other league one year and the other the next and add more games within your own division.
TA
I meant to imply that the World Series was designed to be the anamoly. The integrity of the competition in baseball should be maintained as it was back to the 1880s, when the winner of the National League met the winner of the rival American Association.
Your intra-league opponents are your brothers whom you fight with every day, and you know them inside and out. The World Series is the end of the year spectacle where anything can happen, and that's what delivers the dramatic payoff. This is where you find out whether juggernauts like the '61 Yankees, the '76 Reds, the '54 Indians, or the '88 Athletics are everything they've been purported to be.
Interleague play, the Wild Card, and the expanded playoffs have all muddied that, which baseball people don't seem to mind because of the trade-offs, but then they wonder why the World Series ratings are in the toilet.
A six-month regular season and three solid weeks of playoff games in advance of the final series has worn the fans out, even me, and then more often than not, it seems, we wind up with a matchup in the Fall Classic that they just witnessed in June.
Chris, I agree with your critique of Interleague play. The uneven schedules it creates between the Cubs and Cards irks me, even when the Cubs get the better of it. If the Cubs are going to win the division, I want it to be because the Cubs beat the Cardinals and other NL teams. Also, I think the Cubs/Sox "rivalry" is meaningless to most people outside Chicago, and distracts from the real rivalry.
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