Baseball Season to Start Earlier in 2011
In recent years, World Series games have been pushed into November and the MLB is now planning to make a simple change to ensure that a champion is crowned in October.
Next season, Major League Baseball plans to open the regular season four days earlier than it has normally begun in recent years, a league official stated.
As a result of that, playing games that count on Thursday and Friday will have a two-fold effect in moving up the World Series by a whole week. The league will also cut the final weekend of spring training, where games are normally played at neutral sites.
Most recently, the league has opened the season with a Sunday night game on ESPN and a full schedule starts the following day.
"It's a way of getting meaningful games played that weekend," Commissioner Bud Selig said. "You've been around training camps so you know that these guys are ready to go at that point."
The tentative schedule would have the season ending on September 28th, which is a Wednesday next year. By that token, the playoffs would start on that weekend. The World Series would then be scheduled to begin on October 19th, ensuring the postseason would end in October, as a seventh deciding game would be played on October 27th.
Selig said that this idea has been talked about for the past few years among the league and owners. This year it has continued to be a hot topic of conversation during meetings.
Another idea was to take out an off-day during the middle three games of the League Championship Series, which goes for managers, general managers, and officials throughout baseball. This was recommended by the committee and taken out this year.
“A lot of people deserve a lot of credit for the schedule change," Selig said. "It takes care of our November problem, as I call it, and starts the season on a weekend. [Phillies president] Dave Montgomery and Katy Feeney [MLB senior vice president of scheduling] and I have been talking about it for the last few years, actually."
A problem last year was the World Baseball Classic pushing back spring training a whole week, which resulted in the World Series being decided on November 4th. The New York Yankees won their 27th Championship over the Philadelphia Phillies to end the seemingly dragged-on season.
A league official also stated that the players’ association was behind the idea and supports the new schedule. The new schedule is currently under review and should be formally be announced in September.
Selig sounded extremely pleased with the new schedule: "Anything we could do to finish in October is what I wanted to do," Selig previously said. "It shows how serious we are in doing this. I feel very good about it, and am pleased at everybody's reaction."
There has only been one other game in World Series history that ended in November. The 2001 Fall Classic between the Arizona Diamondbacks and the New York Yankees ended on November 4th in Phoenix, concluding a seven game series where Arizona won their first World Series. The reason for the late finish was due to the league halting the schedule following the September 11th terrorist attacks that pushed the postseason back a week.
For five years, from 2004-08, the only reason the World Series ended in October was because those series ended in five games or less.
Now the league doesn’t have to worry about the Fall Classic ending in the cold and dreary month of November. So, the main question is, aren’t there more important issues to worry about right now?
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