Have you hugged a "purist" lately?
Maybe it's time that you did.
The 2025 baseball season is already under way, with the defending World Series champion Dodgers having swept a two-game series with victories on March 18 and 19, both games having been played at Japan's Tokyo Dome.
Most of the rest of MLB will begin the season on Thursday, March 27.
But is this really necessary?
On April 12, 1960 — the last year of the 154-game regular-season schedule in both leagues (the American League would increase its schedule to 162 games when the then-Kansas City Athletics and Los Angeles Angels entered the AL as expansion teams; the NL would follow one year later with the addition of the New York Mets and the Houston Colt .45s — a moniker they would never get away with using now) — the Pittsburgh Pirates lost 4-3 to the Braves in Milwaukee; but their season ended six months and one day later when Bill Mazeroski hit a home run with no outs in the bottom of the ninth inning in Game 7 of the World Series, giving Pittsburgh a 10-9 victory over the Yankees and a 4-3 win in the Series.
While there are now four rounds in the postseason instead of just one (the World Series itself), the start of the baseball season can at least be pushed back into April by returning to the "traditional" 154 games.
And the various statistical titles can simply be awarded on a per-game basis, as has always been done in the NBA, so no "asterisk" scenarios would arise.
But how would a 154-game schedule work, you ask?
Interleague play would be totally unaffected, with each team continuing to play one three-game series against 14 of their 15 non-league opponents (who gets the home field therein alternating every year) and the Mets/Yankees, Cubs/White Sox, Dodgers/Angels etc. having four annual meetings — two at home and two away (maybe the owners were being farsighted when they implemented universal interleague play starting in 2023?).
Then, delete four games from each team's non-division schedule within the same league, reducing the total number of such matchups to 6 games each, instead of having these teams play four of the 10 teams 7 times and the other six 6 times.
Then drop four games from the intra-division schedule, reducing the number of those pairings from 13 per year to 12 per year.
The shortened regular season means that opening day gets pushed back approximately 10 days, to about April 6, depending upon the vagaries of the calendar.
Leave March to college basketball — and isn't it bad enough that the World Series can now extend into November?
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