In the previous article (“Euro 2008”), soccer was discussed. Many were bored. Little did they know that it would lead naturally into an exhilarating discussion of scheduling minutiae. Buckle up, and keep your arms and legs inside the car at all times.
No sport is perfect (except for hockeysoccerbroomball, whose rules have long since been lost to legend and the corners of my grandmother’s basement), and most could improve simply by adopting some of the more rational aspects of their brethren. Soccer has problems of its own,* but they generally schedule the crap out of their leagues, and manage to run three tournaments and a regular league comprised of the same pool of players simultaneously. Baseball can barely manage a regular season without sending some hapless team on a 13 day road trip comprised of no less than 3 cross-country flights.
Most of the top tier soccer leagues in Europe play perfectly balanced schedules: home and away series between every team. No bitching about other teams “beating up on the weaker teams” or your team “having a much harder path” than your opponents. Of course, these are one-division leagues, and the winner of the “division” is considered the league’s champion, without any resort to a playoff system. No need to worry about inter-divisional rivalries, or geographical limits, as the largest European nation with a top tier soccer league, France, is less than 80% the size of Texas.**
Still, these are excuses and not real impediments. If Major League Baseball either (a) expands to 8 divisions of 4 teams each, or (b) simply evens up the leagues to 6 divisions of 5 teams, the following schedules are balanced to some degree and would provide an interesting experiment:
32 teams (two choices):
1.) Each team plays the 28 teams not in their division 4 times (2 home games and 2 away). Each team plays 16 games against the 3 teams in their division (8 home and 8 away). Total of 160 games. Balanced across ALL teams, weighted towards division.
2.) Each team plays 6 games against all other teams (3 home and 3 away games). 186 games. Perfect balance.
30 teams (at least 3 choices):
1.) Each team plays 4 games against each of the 25 teams not in their division (2 home and 2 away), and either 14 or 16 games against the other teams in its division. Total of 156 or 164 games.
2.) Each team plays 4 games against the 15 teams not in its league, and 8 games against the 14 other teams in its league. Total of 172 games. Balanced as to league, for reasons discussed below.
3.) Each team plays the other 29 teams 6 times. Total of 174 games. Perfect Balance.
None of these will be adopted, though I believe that ANY of them is preferable to the current situation. My personal favorites are option 1 given 32 teams and option 2 given only 30, for almost completely antithetical reasons.
In a league with 8 divisions of 4 teams, there is no need for a Wild Card, and there is no real cross-divisional competition. Thus, it does not matter that teams in different divisions technically play different schedules, save for determining home-field advantage. Teams play identical schedules to those teams with whom they are directly competing for playoff spots.
In a league with 6 divisions of 5 teams, there is naturally some form of cross-divisional competition. Option 2 balances this out, once again providing identical schedules for every team competing for a (fourth) playoff spot.
Problems with doing schedules like this are obvious. Perhaps the enemy of any plan, inertia is no different here. We have had 162 games for quite a while now. None of these plans come easily to that number. Records will be broken, and thus, legends will be different, and traditionalists will complain. Except, of course, if the home run records are broken. On that day, there will be much celebrating in the streets.
Travel would be different as well, but it would take three monkeys approximately half a day (with hourly banana breaks) to figure that 2 day series on say, Monday and Tuesday, with a day off Wednesday, and then a 4 day series against a divisional foe (or two two-game series) would settle this problem.*** Smarter use of the day off and even a slight increase in the number of day games/get-away days would make the travel relatively easy. Not to mention the fact that, because each team plays ALL other teams, there would be more options for long road trips with shorter travel. No more traveling from Seattle straight to Oakland, or worse, Arlington. There would be stops in San Francisco, San Diego, Denver, etc., to shorten/lengthen the trip to make it worth the team’s while.
Either of these plans retains (and in fact, expands) interleague play, pretty much a given at this point. However, it mostly does away with the newfangled “rivalry series.” As a baseball man who has been repeatedly exposed to the “Battle of the Beltways” between the Orioles and the Nationals, I am unmoved by this problem. Still, I am sure Mets, Yankees, Cubs and White Sox fans will be very sad about this. To which I say: Tough Noogies. Now you get to see Hanley Ramirez, Joe Mauer and Brandon Phillips in person at least twice, and you can still watch the cross-town foe on whatever cable network they currently own.
Other completely unverifiable benefits of these plans would be: happier players with reduced travel times, “greener” baseball with reduced fuel use or smarter travel (BRING BACK TEAM TRAINS!!!), a broadening of the baseball gene pool as players travel to cities and groupies before untapped, and a final answer to which is truly the worst team in the league.
*While in Europe, I managed to catch a weeklong special on CNN international about racism in sports…4.9 of the 5 days were spent on soccer. At one point they actually called America a “racially cohesive paradise” in comparison. That’s….not….great.
** France is approximately 210,026 square miles, Texas is 268,601.
*** Many thanks to the three monkeys who aided in the research and writing of this article. You have earned your bananas, as ever.