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Tuesday, April 10, 2007
MLB.com: MLB unlikely to alter scheduling
Although there was a hue and cry on Monday for a schedule adjustment to open in warm weather sites, beginning next year, it’s probably not going to happen.
“If somebody can predict weather for me 18 months in advance we’d be happy to do it another way,” added Katy Feeney, Major League Baseball’s senior vice president of scheduling and club relations, when reached in New York on Monday. “But nobody has been able to do that.”
...
About a decade ago, when MLB tried playing the first two weeks in predominately warm weather cities, the weather was worse the third week of April when the eastern teams finally went home, said Feeney, whose late father Chub, was a former president of the Giants, the Padres and the NL.“The warm weather teams don’t want to be heavily home in April and May, either,” she said. “They want their June, July and August dates (after school lets out), too. Plus, if you go by that logic, would you have any of the Florida teams or the eastern teams at home during hurricane season? And that’s June through September.”
More on the Great Scheduling Debate…
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Something I've learned on the internet is that whenever you read the phrase "if you go by that logic," you should ignore the second half of that sentence.
If you go by that logic, I have no idea what you've learned.
Don't trust someone in the corporate ladder who is someone's kid.
Using the younger, diminutive name probably makes her less likely to be at the wrong end of a MR(S). FEEEEEEEEEEEEEENEY!!! joke.
Has congress taught them nothing?
Don't trust someone in the corporate ladder who is someone's kid
These are excellent points, but I have to say I agree with Katy. You could schedule all April games next year for Florida, Texas, Arizona, and California, and then it could be the warmest, most heartbreakingly beautiful April that the upper Midwest has ever seen, just aching for baseball to be played. You just can't win by betting on the weather.
In the old days, before huge TV contracts and a reluctance to play any kind of doubleheaders, the games would have been postponed. There were also two other reasons: the season started later (mid-April), and all teams visited multiple times a season. With three-division and interleague play, that's not an automatic now.
One thing I think MLB will learn from this is to make sure that all interdivision games played in potential cold-weather sites over the first two weeks of the season be multiple-visit situations, although I believe this is almost exclusively an AL practice since it only has 14 teams. (But as I've stated before, if MLB expanded to 32 teams, with four 4-team divisions in each league, scheduling would become both infinitely easier and more equitable.)
Great idea! Spread them throughout the country so that every fan is within driving distance, and we will never have another cancelled game.
If you go by that logic, your mother is a whore, PreservedFish.
Let's see. In early April 2009, I'm predicting it's going to be pretty cold in Cleveland, Chicago (north and south side), New York (both Bronx and Queens), Boston, Washington DC, Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Detroit.
I'm guessing it will be warm in Phoenix, Miami, Los Angeles, Anaheim, San Diego, Houston, Arlington.
It will probably be room temperature in Milwaukee, Toronto, Seattle and Minneapolis.
At least schedule weekend day games in the cold places. Playing a Saturday night game with 30 degree wind chill, like they did in Washington is just plain stupid. What's going to get better attendance in that kind of weather, a day game or a night game?
Also, modern fields drain much faster. In the old days, they used to cancel games even if the rain had stopped, because the field was an unplayable mess. Now, the fields just don't stay wet that long.
Looking at old game logs on retrosheet can be instructive. It was not uncommon for teams in cold-weather cites to have multiple days between games.
Give the players union a little something back to make it worth their while.
This is a problem every year. There are always games played in way too cold weather in April in the Northeast. This year was worse than normal, but this isn't a new phenomenon. That's why they used to start the season April 8ish, before Bud had to have his extra round of playoffs.
Now if a game gets called because of snow because it's a night game, I'm sure it's awful for the TV nets. I wonder what the ratings for night game "rain delay theater" are like as opposed to the ratings for a live day game?
Give the players union a little something back to make it worth their while
Again, I think that the owners would love to schedule more day/night doubleheaders, but those are ghastly on the players, and rightly resisted. Owners have zero incentive to schedule traditional two-for-the-price-of-one doubleheaders, and I don't think we'll see very many of those in future, whatever the union thinks.
I don't know whether that model holds up for YES and MASN with game coverage.
So the owners have to give up one game a month at the gate, and in return for getting that less gate (and potential parking) revenue, they have to in turn give the players a little something, extra? What am i missing here? Why don't we shorten the schedule back to 154 games, and give the players a raise so they can deal with the extra money they spend on their extra days off?
The loss in revenue from having doubleheaders seems like a poor answer for what is not that big of problem.
Divisional rivals the first week, coupled with perhaps trying to keep games in warm weather climates the first week seems to be the only answer that makes sense.
Well, for owners who have attendance troubles, Sunday doubleheaders would be an attractive option. They were traditionally better-attended than normal games were. In the old days, when getting a million fans through the gates in a season was a big deal, the owners liked them because they put butts in seats. It was better to have one gate where you drew 25,000 than two where you drew 8,000 each.
Nowadays, however, in an era where the worst-drawing teams do better than some of the best-drawing teams of the 50s, teams don't have as much work to do to get fans to come.
Exactly. And another factor is that in the olden days, expensive seats weren't that much more expensive than cheap ones. Now, in the newer parks, each home date is a chance to sell unGodly-priced box seats. The incentive is to maximize the product of expensive seats (often bought by corporations and brokers, and hence usually sold out) times home dates. There's no objection to filling the cheaper seats too, but two dates at 15K with all the expensive seats filled probably does generate more money than one doubleheader with 40K and all the cheap seats filled. This parallels the trend towards less capacious ballparks.
That, AFAIK, is forbidden by the CBA. Day-nights are now only allowed for makeup games, and limited to two per season. It would take some serious negotiating for the union to permit three of those puppies in the original schedule.
Which is why I said, in post 17:
As if avoiding them playing a few games in sub-freezing wind-chills, and starting Spring Training a week later isn't enough of an incentive.
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