Moods, baseball, and cribbing from Craig

For the ten days or so since I returned from California, I've been kind of low-grade depressed. Not what I'd term a full-fledged Black Hole Episode, but enough to keep me slightly dazed and more than slightly unfocused and foggy.

It's not surprising when I think about it. I mean, I'd just spent a month immersed in my dad's slip into dementia and that's pretty depressing (and exhausting). I expect even someone not afflicted with fucked-up brain chemistry would come out of those weeks feeling a bit bummed out. Unfortunately, with me even a depression with a solid outside cause takes effort to climb out of and I'm not there yet. I'm actually counting myself lucky to only be low-grade depressed given the circumstance. Still, it's annoying.

Anyway, this moodiness is poorly timed in that October should be a time to thoroughly enjoy the baseball postseason, but instead I've been only moderately enjoying it, skipping a few games and finding my attention wander when watching others. Which is too bad given how some of the series have gone so far. The Milwaukee/San Diego NLDS was especially good, four games that were super close and hinged on weirdness and odd pitching moves, and even though I've not seen most of it, the still-going ALDS between the White Sox and Guardians has been goofily engaging. Going forward I'm rooting for Milwaukee, as they've been the closest thing to a Whitey Herzog-style team as we've seen in a very long time, plus the Dodgers have had their glory already. I suppose in the American League I'm mildly in favor of whoever wins tomorrow between Cleveland and Chicago since one of my Spuds teammates is from Ohio and another from Chicago, so one of them will be happy. Plus, the Rays are, I don't know, not that fun? I mean, they're super good, they're definitely the best of the three remaining AL squads and on paper they should wipe the floor with whomever they get for the ALCS, but it's hard to care about them. Maybe because they're Florida Men.

Still on the baseball front, we're a couple months away from another clash between players and ownership. When the current collective bargaining agreement between the players' union and ownership expires after the World Series, almost everyone paying attention expects owners to instigate a work stoppage via a player lockout. Meanwhile, the Commissioner's Office as a mouthpiece for the owners is negotiating in public, presumably trying to get the baseball fan base on ownership's side before the arguing hits full force, or maybe just because Commissioner Rob Manfred is an idiot. Basically, the owners want to institute a salary cap, something they've been gunning for since Bud Selig's coup d'etat in 1992. They're not going to get it, they've never made a persuasive case for it, and with teams being sold for billions—the Angels, one of the most hapless franchises around, just sold for $4 billion, the Rays with their iffy market and shitty stadium for nearly $2B—it's laughable when teams cry poor. But they're throwing these other things into the conversation to try and get support for their side and/or distract from their desire to facilitate their greed with binding documentation.

The latest "proposal" to the union contained this:

MLB has proposed returning to a 154-game Regular Season, best-of-seven Division Series, and opponent selection in the Wild Card and Division Series.

Starting in 2029, shortening the season to a 154-game schedule would create a standard weekly off day benefiting player health, and it would allow the addition of up to 8 more Postseason games by moving to a best-of-seven Division Series format.

Beginning in 2027, higher-seeded clubs in the Wild Card and Division Series would select their opponents.

Doesn't matter if these are popular ideas or not as they're not suggested in isolation, they're in a larger proposal that includes the salary cap poison pill. So the whole thing is a non-starter. Nevertheless, I have thoughts on them:

• The season schedule has been at 162 games since the dawn of expansion in 1961/62, when it changed from 154 to 162. Why? Fairness. Pre-expansion, the leagues were comprised of eight teams each and every team played every other team in the league 22 times per year: 22 × 7 opponents = 154 games. Then the leagues expanded to ten teams each and 154 didn't work anymore because every team now had nine opponents; 154 ÷ 9 = 17.111. Just going to 17 (153 games total) was out because you wanted an even number for evenly divided home and away games. 18 games per opponent works, though: 18 × 9 = 162. (The alternative was to go the other way to 16, but that lopped the schedule down to 144 and nobody wanted less baseball then). The next round of expansion in 1969, when leagues went to 12 teams divided into two divisions of 6, mathematically fit the 162 game norm: teams played 18 games vs. each division opponent, 12 vs. the other six teams (18 × 5 = 90, 12 × 6 = 72, 90 + 72 = 162). The next expansions (to 14 teams divided into 2 divs of 7) muddied things a little bit, but 162 still fit even if the balance was less than ideal: (13 × 6 = 78, 12 × 7 = 84, 78 + 84 = 162). But then we got Interleague Play in 1997, which threw fairness out the window. Teams no longer played identical schedules. By then, 162 games was seen as somehow sacrosanct even though the whole reason it came to be was to maintain scheduling parity.

  The schedule is a mess right now; teams play an odd number against their intradivision opponents and an extra game against some teams but not others. I'm all for cleaning it up and restoring parity, that's more important than the total number of games, but I have no faith in the powers-that-be to do it.

  Now we have two leagues split into six divisions of five and everyone plays everyone. We could have near-parity, but we don't because of greed surrounding "rivalry" series; instead of a near-fair schedule of 162 games—14 vs. 4 divisional opponents, 6 vs. the other 10 same-league teams, 3 vs. 14 teams in the other league, 4 vs. the "rival" opposite-league team—we have an unfair schedule to accommodate extra games for Mets/Yankees, Cubs/White Sox, and so on. If we were to return to a 154-game slate, the cleanest way would be 12 × 4 intradivision teams, 6 × 10 same-league teams, 4 × the "rival" opposite-league team, and 3 × the other 14 opposite-league teams. But you know that's not how it would go, they'd want to keep all six "rivalry" games and screw it up. Unless they went to 156 games, which would work even though it's not parity when the Red Sox get three extra games against Atlanta but the Rays get their three extras against the Marlins (or whichever teams are strong/weak in a given year). 

  Then there's the specter of further expansion—Manfred has stated this as a goal, and if MLB goes from 30 to 32 teams, how's that going to work? I know how I'd do it, but that just means Manfred and company would do something else. (I'd split 16-team leagues into four divisions of 4, have each team play each intradivision team 14 times, other league teams 8 times, and half of the interleague teams 3 times: 14 × 3 = 42, 8 × 12 = 96, 3 × 8 = 24; 42 + 96 + 24 = 162. Too clean, and it dispenses with the "rivalry" concept, so it would never fly.)

  The point being, whatever they do to the schedule probably won't be fair so whatever happens there is status quo.

  I've clearly spent far too much time thinking about schedule parity, it's been a bee in my nerd bonnet since 1997.

• Division Series going from best-of-five to best-of-seven is fine. Either way. What isn't fine is the unmentioned part of the idea, which is that there would be more off-days during the playoffs. There are already too many of those, it changes pitching choices dramatically. The last thing we need is more bullpen games in the playoffs.
• Choosing your playoff opponent? Eh. Added drama for its own sake. Don't like it, but also don't care that much.

Elsewhere, via Craig Calcaterra, is yet another timewaster on the Internet that has sucked up part of my day. It's called Tentpole, and it's a game wherein you pick elements from randomly-selected movies—stars, director, rating, genres—to create a "new" film. When you've finished filling the slots, you get a result. Here are a coupe that I got:

It's fun for a few goes, then it's not, but here you go.

I had more stuff to write, but, like I said earlier, it's hard to keep focused right now, so nothing else for now. I need dinner.