On the 162 Game Workload

Commissioner Manfred’s ballpark tour took him to Texas yesterday, where he got to witness one potential solution to baseball’s run scoring problem: clone Samuel Deduno. I’m guessing that probably won’t be on the table when the next CBA negotiations come around, but it would bring offense roaring back to life, probably.

My mediocre attempt at humor aside, Manfred did talk about another issue that might become a discussion point in the next CBA, however; the length of the Major League season.

Manfred said reducing the number of games in a season would have economic and competitive ramifications, but the idea of giving players more off days is receiving more attention than ever.

“One hundred and sixty-two games in 183 days, and a lot of those 21 days consumed by travel, is a pretty demanding schedule,” he said. “By reputation I work pretty hard, and I don’t think I work 162 days out of 183. It’s a tough schedule.”

These comments aren’t particularly new for Manfred, who has previously talked about potentially considering returning to the 154 game schedule of years past.

“I don’t think length of season is a topic that can’t ever be discussed,” Manfred told ESPN.com. “I don’t think it would be impossible to go back to 154 [games].”

I do think it’s worth thinking about going back to a 154 game schedule, but I also wonder who is going to lead the charge on a move that would mean less money for everyone involved. If you drop five percent of the regular season, the television contracts that have been negotiated based on an expected number of hours of programming have to be reworked, as the networks aren’t going to just settle for fewer games at the same number of dollars. Fewer events at the ballpark means stadiums sit empty more often, and it’s not like building them is going to become cheaper as a result of reducing the number of games played. Reduced revenues for the teams mean less money for the players. Everybody takes a haircut if you go from 162 to 154.

While it’s perhaps interesting to think about a 154 game schedule, I just don’t see it happening. People generally don’t take paycuts on purpose, and it’s especially unlikely to see owners reducing their own revenues just to give their employees a few more days off. Owners may very well be incentivized to protect their players health and well being, but I’d imagine they’ll have a strong preference to do so in a way that costs them as little money as possible.

But as we see in other sports — especially in the NBA where the negative effects of playing on back-to-back nights has been well chronicled — there appears to be growing recognition that perhaps the ironman concept of playing every single game on the schedule is not actually a very good idea. With biometric analysis beginning to gain some real traction — the Dodgers, for instance, partnered with a company called Kitman Labs this year — we may be moving towards a time where days off for regular players are now viewed as a net positive to overall production.

While the Dodgers payroll allows them to construct rosters that other teams can’t even dream of, it is interesting to look at how they’re using their roster this year. Their Opening Day bench of Andre Ethier (17 starts), Justin Turner (10 starts), Scott Van Slyke (9 starts), and Alex Guerrero (8 starts) have all been used heavily in the team’s first 27 games, and while some of that is simply the result of injuries to Yasiel Puig and Carl Crawford, the team has leaned heavily on their position player depth even while we all wonder when they’re going to make a trade to clear up the logjam. And that probably isn’t a coincidence, given their investment into understanding the role of fatigue in player performance.

The future of baseball isn’t loading up on $30 million worth of reserves who play a few times per week, but reducing the number of games individual players are asked to work seems like a more likely solution than reducing the number of contests overall. If teams can get similar levels of overall production by asking their best players to play 145 games instead of 155 games, but still get the revenues associated with selling the tickets and television rights to 162 games, then this will be a much easier sell to the bean counters.

But given the competitive nature of the sport, simply suggesting more frequent off days for regular players doesn’t seem like a realistic solution, especially for lower revenue teams who can’t afford to have guys like Alex Guererro and Andre Ethier as their backups. If you’re in the Wild Card race and there’s a dramatic talent gap between your starting shortstop and his backup, it is going to be difficult to convince yourself to take that downgrade voluntarily, even if you buy into the idea that more rest is a net benefit to everyone. If the games are played and they count in the standings, managers are going to want to win those games.

In order to avoid creating a competitive balance associated with riding your starting line-up more heavily than your opponents, everyone would have to buy-in on a plan to move games played from the starters to the reserves. And you’re probably not getting that without a rule that makes participation mandatory. There would probably have to be a collectively-bargained rule that took this decision out of the managers hands, creating the opportunity to rest players without putting them in a position where they felt they were giving away an opportunity to maximize their team’s chances of winning.

Thinking out loud — and this is more thought experiment than fully-formed concept that I’m pushing for — the league could potentially implement a slightly different type of roster that included active and inactive players. Perhaps instead of a group of 25 who are eligible to play everyday, perhaps a team is allowed to travel with 30 players, but only 25 may be active for any given game, and no player is allowed to be active for more than six games in a seven day span. Currently, when a team wants to give a regular a day off, they have to do so with a shortened roster, which often results in that player pinch-hitting or coming in as a late game replacement, so even non-starts aren’t truly days off. Deactivating a player could allow them to know, in advance, that they didn’t have to mentally and physically prepare to take the field that day.

With the player’s association likely looking to capture a larger share of revenues, roster expansion is potentially one way to get more jobs covered by the union, even if it’s not a dramatic difference. But with the league rightfully concerned with the slowing pace of an MLB game, simply creating larger rosters with more specialists is not something to rush into. Instead, perhaps a scenario where teams had more options to choose from on a daily basis, but not more options to choose from in-game, could lead to a desired result of more rest for the league’s star players without allowing managers to slow the game down even further.

Under this kind of scenario, we’d never again see a Cal Ripken, but maybe we shouldn’t be asking players to follow in his footsteps to begin with. Maybe the game is better off with its stars getting more than 3.5 off days per month. Maybe it’s better for the game if guys like Andrew McCutchen aren’t asked to play when they aren’t 100%, and perhaps the only way to force him to take a necessary day off is to write it into the rules.

This is a highly speculative post, of course, because teams are never going to release biometric data concerning a player’s fatigue levels to the public. We don’t have data to conclude that a reduced schedule is going to provide enough of a necessary return to outweigh the loss of production that comes from playing inferior talents more often, and perhaps there will be other issues that arise that this can will be kicked down the road until there is more evidence that 162 games in 183 days is an inefficient use of the human body.

But to me, giving teams the mechanism and the requirement to lean more heavily on their reserves seems like a more likely solution than reducing the number of games played in a season. Instead of fewer games per team, perhaps the better solution is just fewer games per player.