2016 Major League Baseball thread

Hoping the Redsox can beat Baltimore today, thereby eliminating the last undefeated team. I'm confident they'll get it done during this series, but the sooner the better.

I was just doing some research on attendance figures, and remembered how @Ancalagon was so boastful about soccer attendance, and how a few others have claimed that baseball is not the top game in the US. Anyway, they are all wrong, and it's not even close if we judge by the number of tickets sold. Here is total attendance for the most recently completed season in the major sports (and also soccer).

NHL......21,584,712
NBA......21,442,595
NFL......17,342,667
MLS.......7,325,696
MLB......73,760,032

So baseball is in a completely different category from the others. More people attend baseball games than all the other sports combined. As for MLS, well, the Dodgers and Cardinals on their own come within a single Sounders game of beating the entire league.

Damn ... Old Man Winter just WON'T leave the Atlantic Northeast alone!

@gul
Did Fenway get any ice &/or snowfall on it this past weekend?

No. We did have some snow last week, but it was all gone before Friday.

Those numbers are misleading.

MLB has more games by far than either NHL or NBA (162 to 82 for each, so twice as many) and the stadiums hold far more people than a typical basketball or hockey arena (in some cases twice as many if not more).

NFL plays in huge stadiums, but their season is literally 1/10th as long as the MLB season.

So the raw numbers definitely favor MLB, but only because there are more opportunities to see the games.

There's a fair point there with respect to the NHL and NBA, but much less so with respect to the NFL and MLS.

NBA and NHL arenas are multipurpose facilities that often serve both leagues and routinely hold other athletic events, concerts, and conventions. One of the reasons that tax breaks for football stadiums are such a disaster for the localities that offer them is that football stadiums are essentially vast wastelands of emptiness about 357 days a year. Those 81 versus 8 home games, and all those extra fans over the course of a season, make a substantial difference when you're talking about whether a stadium is capable of meaningfully impacting the local economy.Those raw numbers matter.

Yes, but I submit that none of those sports could sustain that number of games. Hockey and basketball could not fill 45,000 seat venues on a regular basis, especially not if they doubled the schedule. Would football be able to sell 80,000 seats per game if there were, say, 32 games? You might argue that football viewership is constricted by supply, but you can't make that argument for the other sports.

There's no doubt that most NFL stadiums are a huge bust to their communities, but I was only addressing game attendance numbers, which don't include extracurricular activities like concerts and conventions.

Definitely not. The players' bodies wouldn't hold up.

Agreed. I'm not a hockey fan at all, but the NBA season should probably be shortened by 20 games. 82 games is too long to get to the playoffs.

Plus, due to the size of the playing area in both basketball and hockey, once you go over 22,000 seats or so, the fans get pushed so far back that you may as well stay home and watch it on teevee (one of the reasons the Spurs hated playing in the Alamodome for nine seasons).

Football is the only sport that could lengthen its season and probably maintain ticket sales, but it would be a mistake to do so. With only 16 games, each one is pretty important and adding games to the season would lessen that. Plus, due to the physicality, teams have a hard enough time maintaining a healthy roster through 16 games. Playing more would only exacerbate the problem.

When they play half as many games in buildings half as big, sure I can.

It's math.

But they don't even fill those venues, so they certainly couldn't fill a venue twice that size. Anyway, nobody would seriously argue that hockey or basketball is as popular as baseball. And only one person ever has argued that soccer was more popular. Football is probably not something that can be compared as easily by ticket sales. Probably TV revenue would be a more reasonable comparison there, and I don't have those numbers. I'll try to find them at some point, though, as it's an interesting question.

Definitely. Some teams are so bad they have trouble filling their current arenas. I suppose the same is true of any bad team, though, no matter the sport.

Certainly not in the case of the former, that's for sure. The NBA has done an incredible job of improving its marketing during my lifetime (I remember when playoff games, including the Finals, were shown on tape delay) but it doesn't have the history of MLB and hasn't ingrained itself in the culture like baseball has.

The first major league games I saw were at Veterans' Stadium in Philly and it had those God awful things. Even not knowing anything else, I didn't like the way it failed to match my little league field. I hadn't realized Rogers Center was the last of those infields.

It's the 7th oldest. Fenway (1912), Wrigley (1914), Dodger Stadum (1962), Angel Stadium (1966), Oakland Coliseum (1966), Kaufman (1973), all are older. The most interesting thing to me is that Camden Yards is the 8th oldest. It's the model for most that have followed, and I still think of it as new, but 22 fields are newer.

Here's the complete list:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Major_League_Baseball_stadiums

In Cincinnati, They tore down the multipurpose Riverfront Stadium (Home to both the Reds and Bengals) and built separate stadiums for each. GABP fot the Reds and Paul Brown Stadium for the Bengals. Riverfront was where I went as a kid to see both teams, and the Bengals got the worse of that deal, because they shared the stadium they had no logos on the field and the endzones were just green. Honestly I am not a fan of GABP, the place is just weird. Only been to Paul Brown once and it was OK..

I don't think there was ever a multi-purpose stadium that worked well for either sport. Angel Stadium, which was originally baseball only and is so again, was converted for a time to multi-purpose when the Rams decided to leave the Coliseum. They closed off the outfield to add more seating, and tweaked the shape of the field to fit the 120 yards plus required for football. The additional stands made for swirling wind patterns. Since it is natural turf, they could not simply put something down for football games, so the base paths, which crossed in to the football field were left as dirt. Just terrible in every way. Fortunately, they made significant modifications once the Rams bailed to St. Louis, and now it's a fairly pleasant baseball environment again.

Believe it or not, football has been played at Fenway Park. The Patriots played there for a season or two, and the Redskins (before they moved to DC) played there, too. Last fall, there was a game played between Notre Dame and Boston College, and they left the field set up so that four traditional high school rivalries could use it for their Thanksgiving games. Here are some pictures from the Boston Latin-English High game, which is one of the oldest high school football rivalries in the country.

I remember this game, I was there, I was 16 and it was a warm July night in 1986.

I disavow this prediction. Even if it winds up coming true. The D-backs look awful to start the year.

I don't think I saw this, but I do remember Ray Knight as a real hot head. He charged the mound when Tom Neidenfuer accidentally hit him in '88, and basically took a beating as a result. It was a stupid move, because it did not appear to be an intentional bean ball, so no honor at stake, and he took on a guy about 4 inches taller and 50 pounds heavier. Idiot.

The Bisons just drew my for a game (albeit their home opener) than the Rays did on the same night

Just some What if(s)? type thoughts here:

Would MLB ever consider going back to a 154 game schedule?

Granted, it's been decades since that was last done.

Would MLB consider reducing either the 1st Round of the Post-Season, or perhaps the 1st 2 Rounds, of the Post-Season, (back also, really) to Best-of-5 Playoffs?

Over a century ago, in the 1st few years of the 20th Century, the World Series was a Best-of-9 Championship!

Might the Fat Cat$ who own & run MLB (ever) consider returning the World Series back to that?

If the World Series became winning 5 out of 9 (again) to be MLB Champion Standing, then perhaps (all?) the earlier rounds of the Post-Season could be shortened to winning 3 out of 5 contests, though perhaps the League Championship Series should remain a winning 4 out of 7 contest?

Perhaps a tad shorter regular season, with truncated Playoff Rounds would keep The Fall Classic back within reasonable "normal" limits, in regard to the Seasons.

Plus, the World Series returning back to the Best-of-9 Championship would give both the MLB & all those advertisers, & Entc Ent al, more Profit $pace!

Despite how cynical a reality that i$ re: Pro-Sports

I hope not, mostly because they'll only do that if they add another round to the playoffs, and I really don't want to see another round added to the playoffs.

Me neither!

IF they ever DID go back to 154 games, I'm hoping that they WOULDN'T add another Post-Season Round.

But you're correct, given certain unavoidable realitie$ of the world, they probably, & almost certainly WOULD, add another round to the Playoffs

I like the current post-season format pretty well. I wouldn't tamper with that or the season length unless they expand to 32 teams.

Proposal for 32 teams:

Each league collapses to two divisions (8 teams each). Inter-league play disappears, and the schedule becomes 16 games against each division opponent, 6 games against each team in the other divsion, no inter-league play = 160 games. Post season would be two rounds for league pennant: best of five division round pitting division leader against runner-up from the other division; league championship series (best of 7) between winners. World Series should remain best of 7, and be played between two teams that have not met in the regular season. I think 9 games was only tried once or twice, it was never a standard thing.

By the way, fuck inter-league.

I'm not a fan of inter-league, but there's nothing less interesting in the world of sports than watching an MLB pitcher bat. Give me a few months of dedicated practice and I'd bat as well as the typical MLB pitcher, and I haven't played baseball in 30 years. Pitchers are specialized, these days more than ever, and asking them to bat is like asking an offensive lineman to ice dance.