This year’s World Baseball Classic has produced some tremendous upsets and compelling baseball.
That’s true even if no game should ever end this way:
Come on now, plate umpire Cory Blaser. That’s not even close to being a strike! At least we know that egregious bad calls like that during the regular season can be overturned. Instead of being strike three, that pitch should have been ball four and the inning would have continued. Maybe the Dominican Republic comes back and wins, who knows.
In any case,
Jayson Stark of The Athletic had an interesting idea recently about how to schedule the WBC to make it even more compelling:
Pool play: Let’s handle the first round of the WBC exactly how it’s done now. In the first half of March, send 20 teams to four sites around the world and play until just eight teams survive and advance. So nothing has changed — yet.
Final three rounds: Here’s where this gets fun. We’re about to create the most amazing week on the baseball calendar — by moving the WBC’s Elite Eight, Final Four and Finals to July. In fact, let’s move them to the site of the All-Star Game. Then “Baseball Week in America” would look like this, with all of it on the same field:
Saturday: MLB Draft
Sunday: Futures Game
Monday: Home Run Derby
Tuesday: All-Star Game
Wednesday: Elite Eight doubleheader
Thursday: Elite Eight doubleheader
Friday: Semifinal doubleheader
Saturday or Sunday: WBC championship game
I love Stark’s idea of putting the final three rounds in July. In March, besides the obvious issue of players not being totally ramped up for baseball yet, many people are into March Madness and not paying full attention to baseball. But in mid-July, baseball would basically have the sports landscape to itself. NFL training camps haven’t begun yet and the only other major sporting event in July, Wimbledon, would be over by the time this usual mid-July week happens.
Of course, doing the later WBC rounds this way presents another problem. That’s a full weekend off the regular season schedule, which team owners certainly wouldn’t want in July. So you’d be extending the season by several more days doing it this way. And you know that the league would try to stuff more games into March if that happened, because reasons.
The thing is, if you’re going to play the last three rounds of the WBC in July, why bother with a Home Run Derby or All-Star Game? Most if not all of the participants in those two events would likely be on the final eight WBC teams. So you’re going to ask them to play a couple of meaningless exhibitions, THEN play these meaningful games?
I’d rather see them do it this way:
Saturday: MLB Draft and Futures Game
Sunday: Elite Eight doubleheader
Monday: Elite Eight doubleheader
Tuesday: Semifinal doubleheader
Wednesday: WBC championship game
So let’s say every third or fourth year, when the WBC would take place, you’d simply replace the All-Star Game and Home Run Derby with these games. It would open up many more cities to be able to bid on this event. Wouldn’t you love to see WBC baseball at Wrigley Field? I sure would. This would also give the Futures Game more prominence. And, doing it this way might even get more money from TV channels.
This way, the regular season could resume on the Friday after the championship game, as it does now. No extra dates needed! Everyone except MLB players in the championship game would have multiple off days. You’d also have to get international leagues like NPB and KBO on board with having a week off at this time, but I don’t see that as a major impediment.
I love the World Baseball Classic and would love it even more if the most meaningful games could be played in a different variety of cities, with players fully in mid-season form, and potentially with a bigger TV audience.
What do you think?
