Leave baseball be
Don’t change the game, just simplify fans’ access
Five years into his tenure as the commissioner of Major League Baseball, Rob Manfred is in the hot seat — and with good reason.
As other sports enjoy soaring national television revenue, baseball has fallen behind. Mr. Manfred’s solution? Rule changes meant to improve “pace of play,” with the hopes that a quicker game would equal more TV interest and advertising revenue. These little tweaks — some innocuous, some controversial — have done little to change the game.
But Mr. Manfred’s latest scheme — a wholesale overhaul of MLB’s playoff structure that could be implemented as early as 2022 — is a step too far.
The league is reportedly considering an expansion of the playoffs from 10 teams to 14. The revised system would also include a reality TV-style event in which the best teams would choose their opponents for the first round. The better team would then host every game in the first-round series.
In other words, if the 2024 Pittsburgh Pirates somehow squeak into the playoffs as the seventh-best team in the National League, the team would play zero playoff games at PNC Park unless it survived the first round.
The entire plan reeks of desperation. Mr. Manfred wants to raise baseball’s national profile, but he mistakenly believes that zany plans that upend the tradition of the game can achieve this. In the process, he ignores that baseball actually has a large and devoted fan base that could more easily grow if the league simplified the delivery of its product.
More and more people are ditching traditional cable TV packages. Many of the remaining holdouts, however, are sports fans. This is because leagues like MLB have made it purposefully difficult, and sometimes impossible, to legally stream games.
Online streaming services like MLB.TV have convoluted blackout policies that prohibit fans in certain ZIP codes from viewing the games of nearby teams. In Pittsburgh, that would mean customers couldn’t watch Pirates games. In certain parts of Iowa, more than 200 miles from the closest MLB teams, access is blocked to six teams — the Chicago Cubs, Chicago White Sox, Kansas City Royals, Milwaukee Brewers, Minnesota Twins and St. Louis Cardinals.
If Major League Baseball wants more eyeballs on its games, it should get with the times and modernize people’s access to the games. Dramatic rule changes are not going to attract more fans — it may actually turn them away. MLB should not dilute its product. It should just make it easier for fans to watch the game they already love.