The wild-card round was now going to expand from one game to best of three.Ģ. Rescheduling all of those games above would have seemed impossible enough if they didn’t come with these two thorny little issues on the other end:ġ. Can we ask this again: How even? How will the postseason schedule change? But in the end, every team will play exactly the same opponents - and each of them the same number of times - as in the original schedule. There will be ugly road trips and unfortunate doubleheaders. But in ’95, MLB gave up on having all teams in a division play the same schedule and just dropped in random games so at least every team wound up playing 144 total games.Īmazingly, that mess won’t be repeated this time. That year, every team played the same number of games (144). What it didn’t do was go down the rocky scheduling path that followed the 1995 strike. But hey, it beats the alternative - of tumbling the whole sport over the cliff and not playing those games at all.Ī ROUND OF APPLAUSE: We should appreciate what baseball did here by recognizing what it didn’t do. But you can expect weirdness that could include the Brewers playing a “home” game in San Francisco, doubleheaders in which each team bats last, and teams jetting across the country just to fit in an emergency doubleheader on what used to be an off day. Rearranging those games is going to involve some difficult gyrations that are still being sorted out. These four required a second dose of Tylenol: Giants at Milwaukee, Yankees at Houston, Tigers at Oakland, and the interleague nightmare of Rangers at Miami. So those games were more easily rescheduled as doubleheaders or on mutual off days.īut then there were the remaining four series. Fitting in those games made working on a 1,500-piece jigsaw puzzle look as neat and clean as solving today’s Wordle.Īgain, fortunately, 11 of those 15 series involved teams playing within their own division. The hard part was what to do about rescheduling every team’s second “canceled” series. UN-CANCELED GAMES 2.0: But moving that first set of series to the end of the season turned out to be the simple part of this equation. So that means those teams - Yankees/ Rangers, Tigers/ Mariners - have to play a scheduled doubleheader in the final week of the season. Just to make this even more convoluted, the series in Texas and Seattle were originally four-game series. The four exceptions: Diamondbacks at Milwaukee, Yankees at Texas, Tigers at Seattle, and the interleague entry, Phillies at Houston. 2.Īll but four of those series were division matchups, so that part was relatively uncomplicated. Got that? In other words, instead of being played March 31-April 3, they’ll be played Oct. UN-CANCELED GAMES 1.0: The games that originally were supposed to serve as the opening series of the year will now become the final series of the year. This is how the regular season will get spun through the blender: What? How even? All right, here’s how even. The challenge: Not just taking “canceled” games and un-canceling them, but fitting them into a puzzle that included an expanded postseason - yet without changing the dates of the World Series. How can baseball still play all 162 games?įrom the way it was described to us, this took a spectacular exhibition of heavy lifting from baseball’s scheduling gurus, led by MLB’s chief operations and strategy officer, Chris Marinak.
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