Dear Bud Selig,
Today, or possibly tomorrow, but certainly by Wednesday, the Pittsburgh Pirates will set a record for baseball — and a record for the four major sports in North America. Pittsburgh will have its seventeenth consecutive losing season.
Seventeen years. Their last winning season was in 1992. There are probably people reading this who weren’t born in 1992. Seventeen years.
I’ve no doubt that some of the problem in Pittsburgh is management. It’s a small market team, and they don’t have a lot in the way of revenue.
But the big part? Thanks to the unbalanced schedule, they’re the whipping boys for the National League Central.
The same thing happens in the American League East. Toronto, Tampa Bay, and Baltimore are the whipping boys for New York and Boston. They can field good teams, competitive teams in any other division, but when they’re playing a quarter of their schedule against New York and Boston, the other three-quarters don’t matter a whole lot.
The competitive balance that was the hallmark of baseball isn’t there any longer. Interleague play helps to keep the schedules unequal. An Australian researcher has shown that the unbalanced schedule in Australian Rules Football has an effect on win-loss records; the same methodology would show that baseball is likewise affected.
There’s a solution.
Do away with the unbalanced schedule. Do away with interleague play. Give the Pittsburghs and the Baltimores a chance. Do it, Bud. Grow some cojones and do it.
Signed,
A Cubs :cubs: fan
Sorry. It’s my fault.
See, back in ’92, I was 15. It was the playoffs. I kind of liked the Pirates, for reasons I cannot recall, and bet $5 with a friend that they would win the NLCS and go on to the World Series.
Well, they didn’t (if I’m even recalling any of this correctly). And I cursed them for making me lose $5.
And look what’s happened.
Go ahead. Blame me. 😉