Mike's Mets - Who Needs a Day Off?

 

By Mike Steffanos October 16, 2020

I haven't enjoyed all of the changes the 2020 season brought to baseball. I hated the extra inning rule. No matter what the sport, I'm never a fan of deciding a result in any other way than continuing to play the game until a team breaks a tie. Shootouts in hockey and soccer, putting a runner on second in baseball and all other gimmicks of that nature should never be seen at any level above youth sports, at least in my opinion. Seven inning games in double headers seemed like a necessary evil for this season, but I hope not to see this in future "normal" seasons. I'm more agnostic on the DH in the NL. I'll miss some of the strategy involved with pitchers hitting, but I won't miss watching those pathetic at bats that most of them had. I believe the rules needs to be the same in both leagues, and it seems quite unlikely that the AL would ever abandon the DH, so if I had a vote that mattered it would be to keep the DH in the National League, too.

One change that they made this season that I'm all in on is the playoff schedule with no off days in a series. For one, it makes the playoffs a lot more like the regular season, where teams have to have depth in their pitching to compete. If you've been a fan long enough to remember the 1986 World Series, I don't think that would have ever gone 7 games without off days. The Red Sox had 2 great pitchers, Roger Clemens and Bruce Hurst. Oil Can Boyd was a mediocre third starter at best. They had virtually nobody else in their rotation or their bullpen. Their closer, Calvin Schiraldi, had only been called up from the minors in August. (He had been the prospect the Mets traded to get Bobby Ojeda from the Sox) They benefitted greatly from scheduled off days between Games 2 and 3, Games 5 and 6, and then got an extra bonus when a rainout delayed Game 7 and allowed them to start Hurst again.

Playing every day forces teams to make decisions differently, whether it's starters or even how often they use their best bullpen guys. It wouldn't absolutely guarantee that a deeper team would win, but it would certainly give them a better chance of it, and that seems like a big improvement to me. There is always an inherent unfairness in a tournament deciding a championship in a sport that plays by far the longest regular season. No off days in a series gives a leg up to teams with deep rosters like the Tampa Bay Rays, and that's really how it should be.

Another positive from this year's schedule is that it really keeps the momentum of a series going. When there are off days and then possibly rainouts in a normal playoffs, it feels as if these playoff series are always starting and stopping, starting and stopping, breaking up the natural rhythm of baseball. This year the rhythm feels so much more like normal baseball.

I know the TV networks prefer staggered off days, because it allows them to schedule more games in prime time that aren't competing for viewers against other playoff games. I understand that the only reason they scheduled like they did this year was to get the playoffs completed (and grab onto all of that playoff cash) before COVID-19 potentially explodes again. Also, playing at a single neutral site took away travel between cities during the series. Given that all of the games are night games, it's a lot less practical not to have days off after traveling. If we get to the playoffs next season and there no longer is any danger of COVID intruding and we're playing in competing teams' ballparks again, I'm sure we'll probably fall back to the old way of scheduling playoffs. I get it, but that would still be a shame. Playing playoffs every day is one 2020 innovation that I really enjoyed.

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