It's no secret that baseball has fallen out of favor as America's favorite sport, being surpassed by the football. Now the baseball moniker 'America's Favorite Pastime' is a part of history. The world is just too fast-paced for baseball. Sure, it's true that there's not much difference in game length between baseball and other three major sports, but it's what happens during the game that makes baseball seems so much slower than the rest. In football, hockey, and basketball, there isn't a lot of idle time, meaning there's not a lot of time in which players are just standing around. In baseball, the entire sports is built around idle time. There are at least 11 players on a baseball field at any given time, nine of them are fielders, one of them is the pitcher, and the other the batter. Never are all 11 players in action at once, and so there is a lot of standing around. The focus is on the battle between the pitcher and the hitter. While some people love this, like myself, others find it boring, and the others is the majority of America. This is a problem for the sport of baseball, but it can be fixed.
Baseball is most interesting when it really means something. Then every pitch, every at bat, every coaching decision, etc. becomes analyzed to its smallest point. This is why people say the baseball season is too long and there are not enough meaningful games to follow along to. A baseball team lose 40 percent of it's games, which is 65 games, and still have an excellent chance of making the playoffs. 65 games is the equivalent of about two months of baseball, meaning that a team can go 0-30 not once, but twice and still be considered a great team (provided that they win a lot during the other three months). This is an easy fix though, and MLB commissioner Bud Selig hit a homer by implementing it. The fix is simply to add more playoff teams.
Prior to this season, the MLB had the least amount of playoff teams, trailing the NFL by four. The NBA and NHL each has the most as over half of each league (16 to be exact) makes the playoffs. The NFL has a much more modest number of 12 teams making the playoffs of 32. The MLB has an even more modest number of 8 teams out of 30. This season the MLB still trails the NFL, but only by two as the league changed the playoffs by adding two more wild card teams. The result was just what the MLB was looking for--a stretch run in September that's had so many storylines that baseball writers can't even pay attention to all of them. With almost three weeks to go, there are 13 teams within six games of the four wild card spots. Of these 13 teams, seven of them are within four games of the lead in their division.
This spike in the number of the teams in the playoff race has made the entire month of September much-watch baseball. The reason behind is this that the more teams in the playoff race, the more meaningful games there are. This year's race has all different kinds of stories to go by as well. You have the team that lost their big lead and is now fighting for a playoff spot (Yankees). You have the teams that are surprising everyone by how close they are to winning the division (A's and Orioles). You have the teams that tried to buy/trade their way into the playoffs (Angels and Dodgers). And you have teams that are making late runs that could just squeak into the playoffs (Brewers and Phillies). There is a story for everyone to root for or against, and it's made baseball exciting to watch, or at least pay attention to.
Bud Selig being able to make this change and add more excitement to the end of the season is a testament to the fact that the MLB isn't just going to die out. It can adapt to change just like every other sport has done over the years. Maybe next the sport will consider chopping down the schedule as its next change. I personally think that if the playoffs were in August, and the MLB only had to compete with NFL training camp and preseason, then more people would pay attention. This would also greatly chop down the regular season and increase the number of meaningful games played, which would again make more people pay attention. A potential problem, though, would that the All Star game could no longer be held in July. It would have to be pushed back into June, which could interfere with both the NBA and NHL Finals and nobody is watching an exhibition game over a championship game. The draft also would probably have to be moved back, but that would be less of a problem since the draft does not have a strong TV presence anyways. If it could be done, I'd trust Selig would somehow find a way as he seems committed to fighting for MLB relevancy.
References
http://espn.go.com/mlb/standings/_/type/wild-card
http://espn.go.com/mlb/standings
http://scores.espn.go.com/nba/scoreboard?date=20120621
http://scores.espn.go.com/nhl/scoreboard?date=20120611
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