By Martie Hevia | Blue Beach Song™

“It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.”

~A. Bartlett Giamatti, “The Green Fields of the Mind,” Yale Alumni Magazine, November 1977

Suggestion #6: Shorten the Season

Call me crazy, but does 2,479 games sound like a lot? (Specifically, 2,430 regular season games + 49 possible post-season games.)

Crazy, right?

There are 30 teams in Major League Baseball and each team plays 162 games, 81 home and 81 away – no wonder there are so many injuries by the time they get to the post-season!

If the season weren’t already long enough, then the addition of the league championship series and the division series, which have further extended the season from April to late October into November, surely has made it more than long enough.

What will happen with the expansion of the playoffs from 8 to 10 teams in 2012?!?!

Does each team really need to play each of the other division teams 15 to 19 times (depending on the league and division)?

How about the 250+ inter-league games, do we need all of those?

The teams might actually fill their stadiums if there were fewer games and, as a result, each game meant a little more.

Then again… the longest season of all is between the end of the Word Series and the beginning of Spring Training.

I take it back. Play Ball!

NOTE: This was the sixth of a 30-part series of posts offering suggestions (sometimes tongue-in-cheek) on how I would improve the game of baseball. This series is based on my original (very long) post: Baseball: How I (A Girl) Would Improve America’s Pastime, it provides the context for this series of posts. I hope you enjoy the series and offer your own suggestions! All the best, -Martie

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