Jeff Francoeur comments on playoffs' Extension
With a couple of days passing since the Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA) declared its intention to propose a post season extension, Jeff Francoeur of the Texas Rangers, issued his comment on the proposed plan and
explained his reason for opposing the deal:
“Obviously it’s going to get more people in the postseason. But baseball’s so unique because only eight teams go. In football you get 12, in basketball and hockey you get 16. I mean, you’ve got more than half the teams going to
the playoffs. I think that’s what’s so cool and so special about baseball is that you only have eight teams that go, four teams from each league, and that means a great deal. You start adding wild cards – How do you do it? Who gets the bye? I love the way
baseball’s set up right now. Sometimes you can do too much to make the sport worse, and I like where our sport’s at.”
Commissioner of Major League Baseball, Bud Selig, is looking forward to the plan and hopes the proposition gets a list of approvals along the way before the 2012 season goes underway. New head of the MLBPA, Michael Weiner, issued
a statement considering raising the stakes in the professional baseball competition yesterday, focusing more on the playoffs which seem to attract more viewership than regular season matches. Looking into the situation with an evaluative eye, the new leader
and representative of the players mentioned a 7 team progression in the post season from both National and American Leagues.
However, the proposition comes with a cost that will have to be incurred by both, the clubs and the players, altogether. The play time in the regular season will have to be dropped and as that would happen, the unqualified teams
for the season face the prospect of losing a source of revenue generation in the form of cuts in play time. That will eventually lead to big differentials in salary issues and can cause problems.
In addition many players are looking to discard the idea as the present system differentiates them from other sport games and makes the road to the post season, that much sweeter.
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