2013 Schedule: Constant Interleague, Still Unbalanced
Welcome to the future. In the all-new, sleek and streamlined 2013 schedule that MLB just released, every division will have the same number of teams, every team will play the same number of intradivision and interleague games, and there will be “at least one Interleague game every day.”
The Astros’ move to the AL West makes all of this standardization possible. Every team will play exactly 19 games against each of the other four teams in its division (76 total), 6-7 intraleague games against each of the 10 teams in the other two divisions (66 total), and 20 interleague games. The season will begin right after the World Baseball Classic, on March 31, and will end on September 29. (No word on whether the playoffs will end before November.)
But this schedule is going to take some getting used to. Just as an example, here’s what it looks like for the lone non-US team, the Toronto Blue Jays:
The Jays will begin the year with two exhibition games in Philadelphia. They don’t have any interleague games in April; they begin the year in Canada, and then have road trips to Detroit, Kansas City, Baltimore, and the Bronx. Then, in May, they’ll travel to Boston and Tampa Bay, then play two games at home against the Giants, and a week later they play the Braves for two games in Toronto and then fly to Atlanta for two more games. (And yes, I know, the last time they played two in Toronto and flew to Atlanta, they only needed one game to end the series.) Immediately after that, in June, they’ll fly to San Diego and San Francisco, back home to play the Rangers, then to Southside Chicago, then to Arlington Texas, then home to play the Rockies.
Like I say, it’s going to be weird: the baseball map just enlarged, permanently. Your favorite team will still play seven times more intraleague games than interleague games, but they could go to a city in the other league at any time. That might be good for fans who live in a different city than their favorite team, like me, a Braves fan living in Boston, even though the Braves aren’t coming to town this year.
But perhaps the most significant significant thing about perpetual interleague play is something Steven Goldman noted at SB Nation: this makes it harder for a team to carry a professional DH like David Ortiz, a player who really shouldn’t be allowed onto the field for any reason. As a result, the market will likely begin to favor DH fielding ability a bit more strongly than normal, as teams begin to prefer a DH-type who can play 20 games a year with a below-average glove, compared to a a bad body who simply can’t.
Goldman believes that this disadvantages teams that have already invested in players like Ortiz: “AL teams are in the position of having to win with rosters designed for a schedule that is slowly being taken away from them.” I tend to disagree. There aren’t THAT many David Ortiz/Travis Hafner/Billy Butler/Jack Cust types who really should be barred from the field at all costs. Usually, designated hitters are players who’ve aged out of an everyday field position, rather than players who never had a glove to begin with, and so you can usually hide them in left field or at first base for one game if need be.
But it could mean that minor leaguers who truly can’t field might have an even tougher time making it to the majors, and it means that the line between “awful fielder” and “cannot field” — the line between Manny Ramirez and David Ortiz — just got a little bit brighter.
Unfortunately, the schedule is still unbalanced; even though the number is now evenly fixed at 19 per team, teams now play even more games in their divisions than before. And that is why people like Rays owner Stu Sternberg are decrying the new schedule. “Look at the schedule the Tigers are playing,” Sternberg told CBS Sports. “I’d like to take my chances playing that schedule.” As I wrote a year ago:
It’s unfair for the Blue Jays to have to play nearly 55-60 games against the Red Sox, Rays, and Yankees, while the Rangers get to play 55-60 games against the Angels, Athletics, and Mariners.
It’s going to get even more unfair, now that those teams have 76 intradivision games to play. It’s hard to blame Sternberg for wanting to play 76 games against the Astros Twins, Royals, Indians, and White Sox, rather than the Yankees, Red Sox, Blue Jays, and Orioles (!). There’s a fundamental tension between the unbalanced schedule and the notion of competitive fairness. It’s unfair for the Orioles to face a vastly tougher schedule than the Tigers. This is to some degree mitigated by the second Wild Card, and over the next few weeks, we’ll find out what effect the new Wild Card play-in game will have on the contours of the playoffs and the stretch run.
In one way, the new Wild Card diminishes the relevance of a team’s regular-season record, since it provides a back door into the playoffs for the 10th-best team in a 30-team league, and to that degree, it mitigates the problem of unfairness caused by the unbalanced schedule. However, in another way, the second wild card increases the relevance of the regular season for the two wild card teams, because the four wild cards have a tougher road than the six division winners. The new schedule, therefore, places even more of a burden on the second wild card and wild card play-in game, as a sort of backstop of last resort for fairness.
That said, the schedule changes either a little or a lot every year. For a sport that’s famed for its adherence to hazy ritual, Bud Selig’s MLB has constantly tinkered with its format in a relentless search for profit, and has been mostly successful, at least when it comes to that aim. The only two things we know for certain are that there will be a few more changes in 2014, and none of those changes will take money off the table: expanded replay is almost certain, but there’s no way that the schedule will decrease from 162 to 154 games.
Now, if we could just figure out a way for them to end that stupid Saturday blackout for MLB.tv…
Alex is a writer for The Hardball Times.
I doubt the new format has any impact on DH’s. Before the change, AL teams played 9 interleague road games. Now they will play 10, not exactly a big enough reason to change rosters. If anything, the new schedule makes carrying a DH only type slightly less problematic because the interleague road game will be more spread out.
Just what I was thinking. Didn’t understand why there would be an impact on no-glove DHs.
In the current format, your AL, DH-carrying team typically has a 2 or 3 city road trip through NL parks. That stretch allows your AL team to manipulate its’ roster to compensate for the DH. You can send down your 16th pitcher to gain an extra batter and thus shuffle your DH around. In the future state, teams will not be fixed to interleague during fixed, longer periods so you’ll be forced to use your DH (if they are that valuable, in the case of someone like Ortiz) daily.
Are there examples of teams actually doing that? Did the Red Sox do it this year, or last?
On the other hand though, this format will allow teams to spread those series out. If you have David Ortiz or Jim Thome on your team, its easier to carry them for a three game series here or there where they may not do more than pinch hit, than for a 9 game road trip, where all those games in a row essentially shorten your roster for over a week.
Oh my Christ, the Saturday blackout is fiendishly annoying. Three consecutive Saturdays, the Braves game has been blacked out, and three consecutive Saturdays, Fox has been showing some random, uninteresting non-Braves game in my market. We know they have the technology to black out by region; is it so much to ask that if the game is not available on TV in my market, it’s not blacked out in my market either? Just, like… whose conceivable interest is being served here? If you really think I’m going to default to Twins/Rangers because you blacked out the Braves, you are completely insane.
What I find incredibly annoying is, as a Tigers fan living in Omaha, NE, I can’t watch the MLB.tv games when they play the Royals, for any of the 18 games. Normally, this would be fine, because I could turn it on Fox Sports KC, and just turn off the sound because I can’t stand the broadcast team. However, FSKC doesn’t even broadcast every game like I’m used to FSD doing. This results in my not being able to watch the game at all, because I’m in the KC market and the KC market isn’t showing it! And not only on Saturdays!
It may only be one extra game, but the timing DOES matter… The Red Sox will be without David Ortiz for their second to last series of the year, because they’ll be playing in Colorado. That’ll be a tough pill to swallow if they need to make up ground late in the year
is obvious.
“As I wrote a year ago:
It’s unfair for the Blue Jays to have to play nearly 55-60 games against the Red Sox, Rays, and Yankees, while the Rangers get to play 55-60 games against the Angels, Athletics, and Mariners.”
I wouldn’t be bragging about that insight. The Angels, Athletics and Mariners have seven more wins than the Sox, Rays and Yankees.
i think its fairly obvious he meant the astros.
Remember, the subtitle of Moneyball is “The Art of Winning an Unfair.” Just because you won doesn’t mean it wasn’t unfair.
Wait, what?
Isn’t it “The Art of Winning an Unfair GAME”?
And since the Mariners, Angels and Athletics are better than the Red Sox, Rays, and Yankees, I don’t see how this is particularly unfair to the Blue Jays. Or how the Blue Jays “won”. Your comment makes sense on exactly zero levels.
Yes, there is unfairness inherent in the division setup, because the AL Central sucks and the AL West is ridiculous (have fun playing against the stacked Angels and Rangers and resurgent Athletics and Mariners next year, Astros). How do you propose to get rid of it?
The easiest possibility: eliminate the unbalanced schedule. Let every team in the league play the same number of games as every other team in the league.
Or, you could get rid of divisions altogether, which I wrote about here: http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/index.php/passan-vindicated-with-division-deletion-proposal/
The basic idea: let them play.
It may usually be a competitive disadvantge to play Yankees, Red Sox, Rays most years, BUT those games will also draw more fans, meanging the team has more revenue/profit to make the Blue Jays better, so it’s likely not really THAT bad for them.
It’s certainly true that the attendance bump against a team like could be substantial. But the attendance bump for marginal wins is nothing to sneeze at. For a team on the bubble, a weak schedule could be the difference between making the playoffs and missing them, and the additional revenue to a team that comes from making the playoffs is real and lasting.
If you elminate the unbalanced schedule, you create a new unfairness: more travel across more timezones more frequently which affects teams in the west more than teams in the east, since there are more teams in the Eastern (14) and Central (8) than the Mountain (1) or West (7, including AZ)
And you also take revenue away from the teams, since more games in different time zones means more viewers missing the start or end of games, which eventually shows up in TV contract money.
Besides, won’t schedules always be unbalanced because teams don’t have to play themselves? The best team in baseball will have an easy schedule, because they never have to play the best team in baseball. The worst team will have an unfairly hard schedule, because they never get to play the worst team.
I’m a huge fan of getting to One True Schedule(tm) and keeping it year over year, to get some predictability and fairness in the competitive balance and especially the travel.
But I have to say there’s too many places in this article that presume that the schedule should try to contort itself around to match the state of teams as they are right now. Imagine trying to set up rules for scheduling even a year or two ago under the assumption that the O’s, A’s, Pirates, Nationals, etc. would never ever ever reach the playoffs, and that e.g. the Red Sox would be perennial contenders for the foreseeable future. Players, rosters, teams, divisional balances of power… all these change over time.
Heck, go back just 5 years and tell me the Rangers would eventually be one strike away from a WS ring, twice…
I’m saying that it shouldn’t contort itself. Let every team in the league play the same number of games against every other team in the league.
So sick of this nonsense about a balanced schedule being fair. As long as you have divisions it’s not.
Suppose everyone in the AL plays the same schedule. White Sox win 85 games and have the 6th best record in the league, yet they make the playoffs because they play in MLB’s weakest division–a gift of geography. The A’s win 88 but finish second in the division and 3rd in Wild Card race, so they go home. What’s fair about that?
And why do we need a balanced schedule to be fair to wild card contenders, who are battling for a chance to win a short post season series against first place teams who already proved their superiority over 162 games?
A fair playoff system would involve no wild cards whatsoever. Only first place teams who played distinctly different regular season schedules, so that the issue of who is better hadn’t been decided at season’s end. We’ll never have that kind of system, so what MLB is proposing now — unbalanced schedule, teams within division playing almost identical schedules, and wild cards disadvantaged in playoffs — is the closest to fair we are going to get.
They could do something similar to football where they have the best teams play each other more often and the worst teams play each other more often with the best and the worst rarely matching up against each other.
“It’s hard to blame Sternberg for wanting to play 76 games against the Astros, Royals, Indians, and White Sox”
I guess the Twins and Stros are both equally forgettable.
Ah, right. I got my “Central” divisions mixed up. Fixed.
You’ll never have a completely fair schedule. If Team A plays Team B in April and Team B is strong, then Team C plays Team B in August when Team B has a rash of injuries. That’s not fair either. You can’t just say “well it balances out” because it probably doesn’t.
I do think they need more balance. It’s complete bullshit that Atlanta’s interleague schedule was ridiculously hard and they play the best team in baseball while the Cardinals play the Royals twice and two of the worst teams in the game (Cubs and Astros) frequently. Not only that, but even other teams in the NL East like the Phillies had weaker interleague schedules.
You are looking at the schedule after the games have been played and saying that the schedule wasn’t fair because Team C played Team B at a favourable time whereas Team A faced Team B at an unfavourable time. I don’t think that’s the proper time to evaluate whether the schedule is fair or not.. The best that can be done – and what the league should aim for – is to create a schedule that is fair at the time that the schedule is created. A balanced schedule comes as close to fair as can be done.
I agree with you, my point is that the schedule will never be totally fair. A balanced schedule, and I think a schedule in which you play the same teams at roughly the same time as the rest of your division is the best way to go. For example, the NL East all sees a home series vs the Dodgers in May and and an away series in August or whatever.
Seems to me that with division mates playing nearly identical schedules, the race for each division crown is fair within the division. The wild card spots are less fair as teams from different divisions don’t have similar schedules, so one team may have a weaker schedule than another they are battling for a wild card spot. The fact that the value of a wild card spot has been diminished lessens the impact to the point of being no big deal IMO.
As for the issue of a team like the Rays having a tougher road to a division crown than say the Royals, I have two thoughts. One, its a pretty short term view to say that. Things change over the years as teams rise and fall based on good ownership, good management, etc. I think its short sighted to make decisions like that based on say the last 5 years. Two, if its unfair for the Rays or O’s because the Red Sox and Yanks consistently have better teams than the Tigers or White Sox, the issue isn’t the schedule, its the CBA and what teams are allowed to do with their money. I see the schedule only as a proxy at best for the real cause of competitive inbalance. To be quite honest though, I think its short sighted to say that the Yanks and Red Sox are definitively tougher opponents than the Tigers or White Sox. All four reside in major markets and could easily have sustained runs of excellence.
As a side note, I’d have liked to have seen two 15 team leagues, no divisions, top 4 teams make the playoffs with either 5,7,7 or 7,7,7 for each of the 3 rounds. I think the wild card set up with 5 teams making the playoffs in each league and the top 3 getting a mini bye is just goofy. Kinda like the overtime loss in hockey being worth a point.
To call Detroit and New York both “major markets” is pretty misleading. New York is a vastly richer market than Detroit. Just the way money is distributed geographically in the USA, the coastal divisions are likely to be tougher than the Central divisions. There’s more money on the East and West coasts. Having said that the only teams that are at a big disadvantage are the smaller market teams in the East, i.e. Baltimore and Tampa Bay.
People will always find a way to complain that the schedule is unfair. It will just eventually lead to people complaining that “The Yankees have an easier schedule because they don’t have to play the Yankees.”
So what?
A few problems I notice with this.
1. MLB has basically all but postponed the opening series of Detroit of Minnesota. Is it really that hard to not play any home games in Detroit, Mpls, Chicago, Clev, Pitt, Philly, Denver, NY or Boston before April 10? Do they remember the famous snow out in 2007 in Cleveland or the flakes I have seen in Coors Field on TV in early April?
2. The Tigers really will appreciate playing the last weekend of the season at Miami. I’m sure they love knowing a critical series will be played without the luxury of DHing Cabrera, Fielder or Martinez.
3. 76 divisional games per team is ridiculous at best, idiotic at worst. It makes the schedule more boring. It also takes away an opportunity to weight the schedule according to previous year’s finish. In the interest of trying to promote more parity, shouldn’t the playoff teams from 2012 play a harder schedule than the teams who finished in last? I realize prior year finish is not the end all, but it’s a real attempt to try and promote some modest improvement and more hope to last place teams.
4. I love me some MLB, more than any other sport, but the schedule makers missed some golden opportunities here to improve several things. The decrease in interleague rivalry games from six to four is also a miss. There are thousands of extra tickets to be sold in NY, Chicago, Tampa/Miami, Mpls/MKE, STL/KC, LA, and the Bay Area with those extra two games now gone by the wayside.
The inter league rivalry games are the main source of unfairness in the schedule. Cutting the number from 6 to 4 is a step in the right direction. Now, for the first time, all the other inter league matchups will be the same for every team in a given division. MLB did an excellent job with that.
You can’t weight the schedule based on the prior year’s standings because for logistical reasons MLB has to publish the next year’s schedule before the current season is finished.
MLB blew a golden opportunity to fix the scheduling mess, but blew it. Divisional games = 19 & other league games 6 or 7???? Give me a break!!!
This is what they should have done: Divisional games = 20 x 4 = 80; Same league games = 6 x 10 = 60; Interleague non-rival games = 4 x5 (same division) = 20; Interleague rivalry games = 1 x 2 (home/home on consecutive days) = 2 for a total of 162. Regarding the latter, there a 3 sets of teams that have no natural rivalries (East/Central = DET, BOS, TOR, ATL, PHI, PIT; West = SEA, HOU, TEX, ARI, SD, COL). They would alternate interleague opponents in a 3-year cycle.
In addition, they would also play a BALANCED wild card schedule in each league by having the last 6 division games (24 in all) + the 60 games against same league teams not in same division = 84 games in all be the only ones that count for wild card purposes. Thus each team in each league would play a balanced wild card schedule of 6 x 14 = 84 games. The remaining 78 games would count only toward division titles.
This proposal beats the hell out of what Bud Selig, et al came up with.
And this is a perfect time to have both leagues adopt the DH. Or, at the very least, during the World Series, All-Star games and all interleague games. There is no reason to handicap the AL by forcing their pitchers to bat during these games!
Actually it’s a perfect time to to have both leagues flush the DH into the earth’s core via giant smelly sewer lines and have it never rear its ugly head again.
“This is what they should have done: Divisional games = 20 x 4 = 80; Same league games = 6 x 10 = 60; Interleague non-rival games = 4 x5 (same division) = 20; Interleague rivalry games = 1 x 2 (home/home on consecutive days) = 2 for a total of 162.”
Your suggestion is wildly similar to the new schedule…
“Bud Selig’s MLB has constantly tinkered with its format in a relentless search for profit, and has been mostly successful.”
Well, yeah that is true. The reason why MLB got rid of its completely-balanced schedule in favor of a division-focused schedule was to boost TV ratings and hence more money.
Simply put, why have divisions if the schedule doesn’t place any emphasis on it?
Spreading out the interleague games will make it easier for the Sox to carry Papi, since he can be rested a couple games here and there, but not 9 in a row like the schedule has been set up.
Papi also is not as bad at 1B as many think he is.
When is everybody going to get it? Money doesn’t win games. Money doesn’t mean a team is good.
Right now the Rays are loving playing the Red Sox. You know why? The Red Sox suck. Despite the money (and the roster gouging)
I dislike the idea of divisional play but lets not sit here and complain that the Rays are at an instant disadvantage because they have to play the Yankees. If the Rays are good, and the Yankees are bad, then the YANKEES are at a disadvantage having to the Rays.
Money doesn’t buy wins. Money doesn’t make a team tougher.
Oakland, Baltimore, Tampa Bay, and Pittsburgh if they would get their act together are proof of this.
Boston, Los Angeles, Los Angeles again, New York Mets, and Miami are proof the other way.
Well, yeah, Tom. Money doesn’t cause wins. But it certainly helps facilitate them. Do you really think the Red Sox would be a better team if they had less money to spend? Are you asserting that money has a negative causal effect on winning? Or are you just saying that there’s no relationship between money and wins? Because I would disagree with both. Remember, a Win Above Replacement has a free agent market value, and that value is positive and above zero.
The Rays are one of the great success stories in the league because their success has come despite the disadvantage of being able to spend as much money as other teams. You could say that penury encourages discipline while affluence encourages profligacy, but if you gave Andrew Friedman more money, I doubt he would win fewer games.
I’d just like to point out that David Ortiz is by no means the worst-fielding first baseman the Red Sox have used over the years (I’d nominate Brian Daubach over Dick Stuart).