The Baseball Offseason

If your team never makes the baseball postseason, as my laughable Pirates never do, then your baseball offseason is typically six months long.  Now, explain to me how a sport that has 162 games in its regular season can still manage to have one of the longest offseasons of all the major sports?  The NFL has only 16 regular season games and even its offseason is about the same length as that of the MLB.  The NBA’s offseason is only 4 months long and, shoot, even the NHL (the fastest dying sport that is soon to be replaced by MMA or Cricket) has a shorter offseason.  Its no wonder that the MLB is slowly dying in popularity among young viewers (Message to Bud Selig:  young people are all about instant access, asking us to wait for 6 months is not going to work out very well for your sport).  I say they space the games out a bit more and have baseball go for more than six months a year.  I mean, kit would certainly help revenues if there were more weekend games for people to attend.  Why not make baseball a Fri-Sunday thing with a short 2 game series on Tues-Wednesday?  Give the players every Monday and Thursday off and keep baseball going for another few months each season (the purists are sure to send me hate mail).

I think that Major League Baseball is starting to get the hint in its decision to launch a 24 hour television network on January 1 of this year.  Now, even though we have to wait 6 months between meaningful games, at least we can watch some pasty schmoo talk about where Manny is going to play in 2009 or how many zeros are on the latest Yankee contrtact.