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Last week, in a live interview on New York’s WFAN, Rob Manfred said he was considering a number of ideas to change the MLB schedule, from a shorter season to split seasons to aggressive realignment. Manfred, who has overseen many changes to gameplay in his time as commissioner, seems to want to put some final stamps on the league before he leaves office in 2029. Manfred has a long history of floating trial balloons in the media, some of which, like the shift ban, eventually came into being, and others, like the Golden At-Bat, that got laughed out of the room. Take anything he says along these lines with a salt lick.
Within the interview, Manfred mentioned an in-season tournament, akin to the NBA Cup, which has livened up the early days of the last few NBA seasons. Before Manfred ever took over as commissioner, before the NBA abused the eyes of fans with its tournament courts, I proposed such a tournament for our game.
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The Joe Sheehan Newsletter
Vol. V, No. 24
March 21, 2013
If you're reading this, there's a good chance you've filled out a bracket this week. In a nation splintered by choices and long tails and personal everything, the NCAA men's basketball tournament is one of the few shared experiences, one that crosses over from college basketball and sports to mainstream culture and even a bit beyond it. The satisfaction of ticking off teams in a bracket -- online, it feels like a video game -- and ending up with just one from 64 crosses all our lines: gender, race, age, social status. It unites ballers and nerds, statheads and scouts, your mom and your dad.
(If you care: Duke, Michigan, Gonzaga, Indiana; Duke 79-72 in the final.)
Brackets, not basketball, drive much of the popularity of the NCAA tournament. Baseball got its own taste of this in the just-completed World Baseball Classic, which used short round-robins to narrow the field to four teams, who played single-game semi-final and final rounds in San Francisco. Baseball's Final Four. In the tradition of the Final Four, we had a Cinderella (The Netherlands) for flavor but in the end, it was a high seed -- the Dominican Republic -- that restored order and took home the title. The WBC's bracket rounds were too short and too March to garner much interest, but the interest shown in them, as well as the games leading up to them, show that the combination of March Madness formatting with the national pastime has potential. Brackets get people who don't care about sports to care about college basketball. Why not use that appeal to get those same people to care about MLB?
I've mentioned that I'm learning more about soccer, particularly the Premier League in England and European soccer more generally. It can be a bit confusing because teams can be playing in four competitions at once -- a home league, a Europe-wide league, and knockout competitions in their home country. It's the last of those that we need to steal. In England, they play a tournament, the FA Cup, that includes more than 700 soccer teams and plays down to one, with teams at the local semi-pro level eventually earning chances to play the likes of Chelsea and Manchester United. Sometimes, they even get to host those teams. Picture the Yankees going to Brooklyn to take on the Cyclones for a spot in the national quarterfinals, and you'll have maybe 10% of the idea. A smaller event places the top four levels of soccer into a national tournament, the League Cup.
Let's steal the idea. Let's set up the MLB Cup, a 30-team, single-game playoff that runs parallel to the MLB season and awards a crown to the team that survives. (Will Carroll of Bleacher Report first proposed the idea earlier this month.) It gives MLB a bracket event that would appeal to casual fans. It would give teams writing off a season an opportunity to compete in a playoff-type atmosphere and those teams' fans something to look forward to other than 100 losses and Dollar Dog Night. It can serve as a stronger midseason attention grab than the All-Star Game, which has been diminished to nothing by changes in both MLB and how fans experience baseball.
MLB has 30 teams, so you take two of them, give them byes to the second round and have 28 teams play 14 games in the first. The bye teams would be, in future MLB Cup tournaments, the finalists from the previous one. The bye teams for the initial one would likely be the previous year's World Series teams, although I'm open to assigning them by random draw. There should be as little connection between the championship season and the MLB Cup as possible. One is not a subset of the other, but a completely independent event.
The 14 matchups would be set by random draw, home team is the first one called. Forget market size, team quality, history…you can have the Nationals heading to Target Field to take on the Twins in this round. First-round games would be played on or around May 1. You would have to build this into the MLB schedule, of course. Teams would have roster flexibility for the game up to a point; you don't want this to be the Hall of Fame Game, contested mostly by minor leaguers, but some ability to swap in pitchers should be allowed. This parallels the soccer model, in which teams often use different rosters for Cup games versus league games. You might see teams like the Twins or the Astros or the Marlins actually focus on the Cup, altering their rotations and making sure they have a full squad rested and ready for the game, knowing it's their best chance at a championship in a rebuilding year.
The 14 winners and the two bye teams would play out the rest of the event during what used to be the All-Star break -- the All-Star Game would be retired. Now, while FA Cup events use random draws on through the structure, the MLB Cup would deviate from this, to allow for…wait for it…brackets! The initial draw would become a bracket and the rest of the tournament played out accordingly, allowing people to pore over the Braves/Angels game and try to figure out whether either team could beat the Blue Jays in the second round.
On the Monday of the break -- during the second week of July -- eight games are played at the fields of the designated home teams. All home teams in the first two rounds are decided by random draw. Ideally, these games would be staggered throughout the day, like the NCAAs or the Division Series. It's July -- MLB will have the stage to itself! A full day of elimination games, broadcast live across MLB's various TV platforms? Perhaps it wouldn't rise to the level of, well, today, but it would be a sight to see.
Tuesday is a travel day, ideally used for whatever All-Star break events survive this process -- preferably the Futures Game and only the Futures Game. On Wednesday, the eight remaining teams advance to a single location for the quarterfinals. Two are played Wednesday, two Thursday. The semis are on Friday and the final on Saturday, preferably during the day, a nod to the game's history.
The event carves out three additional days in summer, which is likely to be the greatest challenge. Teams won't want to give up the 45 July weekend home dates, especially for an event of unproven popularity. (Moving the WBC to the summer, a screamingly obvious move, is also hindered by this.) I recognize the challenge, but I check back to the point I made earlier this year: At some point, MLB and team owners need to assume some of the investment in these extra-seasonal events. Right now, it's falling on the players and the front offices. If players are expected to sacrifice training time and risk injury for the development of the game, teams should be expected to sacrifice money and risk slightly lowered profits for the same.
The MLB Cup would start slow. New things always do, this one especially given its distinctly European flavor. Then there would be some Bird/Magic moment, when big things happened and the world was watching, and it would jump a level. The event would develop a history and heroes and mythology, its own Jim Valvano, its own Keith Smart, its own Danny and the Miracles. Over time, the MLB Cup would grow to combine the national pastime of baseball and the national passion for brackets in a way that makes it a signature event of the American summer.
