Players want to ease the grind
But clubs are in the business of maximizing their revenue
On April 30, the Chicago Cubs were due to host the Atlanta Braves at Wrigley Field, but the temperature never rose above 50 degrees and rain poured down, so the game was postponed — an easy decision given the conditions. That baseball staple of yesteryear, the doubleheader, wasn’t a good fit for the next day, a Sunday, for two reasons: the Cubs wouldn’t want a two-games-for-one ticket because it would cost them a sellout at the gate, and a split day-night doubleheader wasn’t practical given that both teams had to travel that night, with games the next day.
The compromise: The Braves returned to Chicago for one game July 7. The fallout: That ate the Cubs’ only off day between June 16 and the All-Star break. The Braves, by comparison, had it easy; they played 20 consecutive days. The Cubs’ resulting streak: games on 24 straight days.
“It was a lot of fun,” first baseman Anthony Rizzo said, complete with a smirkand-eye-roll, you-gotta-be-kidding-me expression.
The Cubs’ schedule had already included what in the past would have been considered an odd road trip — three games in Milwaukee, then three in San Francisco, then back to the Midwest for three in St. Louis — but is now fairly typical, with time zones and time for travel seemingly an afterthought. And they’re just one team, one example, of why players consider the logistics of the schedule to be among the most important issues on the table in this session of negotiations for a new collective bargaining agreement.
“It’s an industry, but at the same time, our bodies are not made to play at that level — at this high level — that many days in a row,” Cubs second baseman Ben Zobrist said. “You’re not going to get the best of us when you put us out on the field that many days in a row.”
There is agreement that there are opposite forces at work here. Clubs are in the business of maximizing not just performance, but revenue. Home teams determine the times their games start within certain boundaries established in the CBA — no night games if either team is traveling and playing an afternoon game the next day, allowances for travel from one coast to the other, etc. If a club draws better crowds at night, they’re likely to schedule more night games, even if it involves late travel for their team afterward.
The schedule, then, can grow demanding. Last month, the Nationals had a 10-game trip that went from San Diego to Los Angeles to Milwaukee. The last game against the Dodgers was a 7:10 p.m. start local time. The team’s flight to Milwaukee didn’t land until roughly 7 a.m. local time. Though the team was off that day, Max Scherzer, the pitcher due to open the series against the Brewers, said he went to sleep at 8 a.m. and slept till 4 p.m., but still had to work out in preparation for his start the next night.
“I’m dragging butt,” he said. That, Scherzer and other players agree, impacts performance. Scherzer didn’t mention it, but that night in Milwaukee he allowed five runs in six innings, and the Nationals lost.
“You’re obviously not going to be able to play your best baseball if your scheduling is going on like that,” Scherzer said. “That’s a fact.”
Players also believe there is a relationship between things such as consecutive days played, game times, travel — and injuries.
“I think on getaway day, you should have a day game every time,” San Francisco Giants ace Madison Bumgarner said. “Too many guys get hurt. I mean, you got to have rest and recovery. … The everyday guys, we can’t wear them down like that. That’s why you see so many injuries.”
But the league doesn’t see it that way. Baseball moved from a 154-game schedule to 162 games in 1961 for the American League, the next year in the National League.
“If we had changed the schedule to 162 in 183 days, and we had more injuries, I could see where that theory would make some sense,” Commissioner Rob Manfred said. “The fact of the matter is, we’ve been playing this way for decades, and we still have had this increase of injuries. I have a hard time with the correlation between those two.”
Still, Manfred and MLB are cognizant of the toll on the product they put on the field each day. When he first took over as commissioner last year, Manfred floated the idea of going back to a 154-game schedule — essentially adding eight additional off days to the existing calendar. He has since allowed that such a rollback would have significant economic ramifications, including four fewer home dates per team and new negotiations for TV contracts, because networks wouldn’t willingly pay the same money for fewer games. Manfred said earlier this month that any decrease in revenue from an altered schedule would have to be shared by the players, a notion with which his counterpart at the union, former all-star first baseman Tony Clark, disagrees.
So it seems unlikely that the number of regular-season games will go down.
“We used to be in a world where we came into the season thinking about playing 162 and working backwards,” Clark said. “… In today’s climate what you’ve seen across the board is the goal of playing 140 games, 145 games, 150 games— strategically taking days off in an effort to stay as on top of your game as you possibly can over the long haul that is the 162-game season.”