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Thursday, October 30, 2008
Why the f!@# is the World Series so boring these years?
I’m not up on my NFL history, but I seem to remember that there were plenty of Super Bowl duds. And, the NFC and AFC were not well-balanced in terms of talent. And the NBA was, and probably still is, in the same position. MLB is currently in that spot, and has been for the last several years: the AL is the major league, and the NL is substantially behind. When an AL team faces an NL team, on average, the expected win% is .550. So, what happens when an AL team wins? It will probably be boring and expected. What happens when an NL team wins? It probably means that the AL team was making mistakes, or the NL team got some really uncharacteristic plays. It may happen that you get a good series, but the more imbalanced the teams, the more ripe it is for blah.
And the solution is easy, and it is inspired from the Olympics and World Championships in hockey and other major sports: when you get down to the final four, make #1 of one conference, play the #2 of the other conference. In this case, you would have gotten the Phillies play the Redsox, while the Rays play the Dodgers. Or even better, you can make it #1 of one conference play the #4 of the other, and so on. This would be my preferred route. But, to force the better conference to always send one team and the worse conference to always send one team is more ripe for disaster.
Of course, since there is an incredible bias in MLB fans for any change of any kind, the natural reaction here is that the idea is stupid. And, the challenge to those fans is to come up with something better. This isn’t politics where the argument boils down to: “you suck”. Don’t tell me everything is perfect. How would you improve things? Don’t post unless you can advance an idea.