The commissioner of baseball sat in front of the ESPN microphones in Williamsport, Pa., last weekend, and all sorts of hot-button words started flowing. By now, you probably know which ones we mean.
Expansion.
Realignment — and not just any old realignment …
Geographic realignment — which could totally reinvent the …
Playoff format.
Rob Manfred dropped all of those breadcrumbs last weekend, in response to a David Cone question asking if he could open “a window into the future.” There was lots to chew on, even if you’ve given up bread and carbs. But there was one more breadcrumb, firmly connected with expansion, that the commissioner never got around to dropping:
The demise of the 162-game schedule.
One club official we spoke with this week casually referred to baseball’s current 162-game slog as “an endangered species.” Another longtime club executive, also granted anonymity so he could speak freely, was even more emphatic.
“Expansion,” he said, “means the end of 162.”
Hmmm, bet you never thought that expansion had anything to do with how many games get crammed into a baseball schedule, right? Oh, yeah, it does. Of course it does.
A baseball season is the world’s largest jigsaw puzzle. Every piece is connected to every other piece. That means that if this sport does someday expand from 30 to 32 teams, everything is in play — much of it visible, some of it not so visible.
So if there are 32 teams, it seems more likely that the season will last 156 games — or possibly 154 — than 162. Math is a factor. History is a factor. Health is a factor. Money is a factor.
How? Why? Let’s explain it all as best we can, based on our conversations with officials across the baseball spectrum, from the commissioner’s office to front offices to the MLB Players Association.
You said there would be no math
Nope. Never said that. Math is a big part of any schedule in any sport — but especially this sport.
Before we lay out the math that applies to shrinking the 162-game schedule, we should probably remind you of something important:
None of this is certain.
First of all, expansion itself isn’t certain. The commissioner often talks about it in a way that makes it sound practically inevitable. But it all would need to be negotiated with the players’ union, so there’s no assurance that that would go smoothly.
It is also far from unanimous, among officials of the 30 current clubs, that expansion is a good idea.
Where? Probably Nashville and Salt Lake, but that’s not a lock. When? Sometime after the Rays and A’s get settled into their next homes, which could be anywhere from 2029 to 2089. How much is it worth? Billions, but maybe not enough billions to convince the skeptics.
So all of that has to get sorted out first. It won’t be this week. It won’t be this year. It won’t be anytime soon. It’s wise to remember that as we move along, despite all the fun talk this week.
“If we expand, it provides us with an opportunity to geographically realign,” commissioner Rob Manfred said this week during an ESPN broadcast. (Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images)
But where were we? Oh, that’s right. Schedule math.
Let’s say baseball in the future is a sport with 32 teams, split into eight divisions of four teams each. You know where the math majors would suggest the schedule needs to go if that’s the setup? To 156 games. Here’s our rough sketch of how simple it is to get to that number:
12 games apiece versus the other three teams inside the division. That’s 36 games.
Six games apiece versus the other 12 teams in your league. That’s 72 games.
Are you adding along at home? No need. That gets us to 108 games. Where do the last 48 games come from?
Three games apiece versus the 16 teams in the other league. Now we’re at 156. Bingo.
There is one other reason that 156 games would work. There’s a basic scheduling principle to keep in mind.
The ideal schedule is arguably two series a week for 26 weeks, so 52 total. And if there are 32 teams, that creates perfect 156-game schedule math, of 52 times three. (In other words, that’s two three-game series a week.)
So the math works. But what about the …
History lessons
A view of the Mets’ Citi Field on Opening Day. If MLB shrank the 162-game schedule, a 156-game or 154-game season could make sense. (Al Bello / Getty Images)
There’s incredible irony here. Expansion could be the creature that kills the 162-game schedule, but once upon a time, it was the reason 162 happened at all.
It came with the first wave of modern expansion, more than 60 years ago. For six decades, there had been only 16 teams in the American and National Leagues. And they played a 154-game schedule, a number the league settled on in 1908 and stuck with for more than half a century.
Then, in 1961, the California Angels and Washington Senators 2.0 arrived in the AL. In ’62, it was the NL’s turn. So Houston got a team, and the Mets brought NL baseball back to New York.
So out went the 154-game schedule, and in came the 162-game schedule. Why? Math happened. Every team played each of the other nine teams in its league 18 times. That added up to 162. Simple arithmetic, friends.
It has taken many creative schedule gyrations to make future expansions fit into the 162-game puzzle. But maybe not for long. For a decade, the schedule makers have been talking behind the scenes about using the next expansion as the impetus to trim a schedule that has become a monster in more ways than one. Now here we are.
But history in baseball always matters. So it’s possible that if the schedule does shrink, it wouldn’t shrink to the most mathematically perfect number (156). It could instead land on the most historically perfect number (154) — the previous standard for so many memorable seasons.
That could also be a number that appeals to the record keepers, because numbers and records that revolve around season totals would be impacted by shaving games off the schedule. So the power of 154 is that virtually all of modern history can be divided into two sections — the era of 154-game seasons and the era of 162-game seasons.
Because there is so much history attached to the 154-game season, you could see a path back to 154 when the shrink wrap settles. It isn’t quite as neat and clean mathematically. But it’s possible. To get to 154, a team would play a pair of two-game home-and-home series against one of those non-division teams — presumably a “rival” — in place of two three-game series. Voila!
But there’s more going on here than just math and history …
Here’s to your health
Corbin Burnes, one of the highest paid pitchers in the sport, underwent Tommy John surgery in June and will miss the rest of the season. (Chris Coduto / Getty Images)
You know how much payroll money has already been allocated this year to players on the injured list? How about $953.57 million, according to Spotrac — with a month and a half left in the season.
The sport has already cleared the $1 billion plateau once, in 2023 … and barely fell short last year. Now it’s well on its way to another billion dollar payout this year — all to guys who are not playing.
So why would this sport want to shorten the schedule? Connect those dots! It’s not a myth that one of the biggest causes for injury is fatigue. And where does that fatigue come from? Jamming 162 baseball games, in four time zones, into 26 weeks is a good place to start. And it isn’t only the players who have noticed.
“I think they need to change it,” one club official said this week. “The schedule is crowded. The players could use time off. It would be beneficial, I think, to the players’ health. I think it would be beneficial to the players’ performance. And I think it would be beneficial to baseball as a sport and as a spectator sport — to see more rested, healthier players playing more often than they are.”
Lopping eight games off the schedule could add about 10 more off days in a season. And remember that schedule math we laid out earlier — of two series a week, of three games apiece? That leaves space for one guaranteed day off for every team in every week of the season.
Should this sport be thinking long and hard about making something like that happen? It makes sense, except for one thing …
Show them the money
Bryce Harper circles the bases after homering in the Phillies-Cardinals Wild Card Series in 2022, when MLB expanded the postseason field to 12 teams. (Stacy Revere / Getty Images)
Anyone else out there seeing dollar signs when we talk about all this? If you’re not, it’s only because you don’t make a living working in baseball.
So what do owners see when there’s talk of lopping three or four home games off the schedule? All the money they’d be losing — from ticket sales, concessions, TV and sponsors. What else?
And what do players see? Not all the benefits of those 10 more off days. They worry — at union headquarters anyway — how owners will use those lost dates as an excuse to pay the players less money, because of course.
So feel free to write this down: None of this schedule-shortening stuff can happen unless the league can figure out a way to replace that lost game-day revenue with some other source of revenue. But it could be done.
Here’s a good guess: Expanded playoffs, here they come. (Yep, again.)
Can this sport create additional October inventory? Sure. It could turn best-of-five series into best-of-sevens. It could go from 12 playoff teams to 16, which creates eight best-of-three first-round series, compared with four under the current format.
Would that get this done? Would Fox or Turner or Netflix or Peacock want to pay enough for those extra October games to make the rest of this doable? Who knows?
Would the players even agree to it? You might remember that before the last labor deal got done in 2022, the league proposed expanding the postseason to 14 teams (just like the NFL). The union said no thanks. Have we mentioned lately that none of this is certain?
But don’t let that uncertainty stop you from exploring your most deep-rooted feelings about that magic number, 162. If expansion happens, we’d bet you four bleacher tickets that a shorter schedule happens right along with it.
Manfred never got around to mentioning that the other day. But that’s what we’re here for. You’re welcome.
(Top photo of Shohei Ohtani at Chase Field in May: Christian Petersen / Getty Images)