Baseball season is too long

Baseball season is too long

By COOPER JACOBELLI Staff Writer

So here we are, late September, and the media has shifted its focus to the beginning of the NFL season, the beginning of the college football season and the preseason of the NBA. One thing is being overlooked as it usually is this time of year: the baseball playoff race. Why is that?

The simple fact that there are 162 games within a baseball season, with every team playing a three–hour game every night, it is hard for people to get excited and riled up about one single baseball game.

As someone who has been a lifelong Cincinnati Reds fan, I can confidently tell you that I have never watched a quarter of the games within a single season. For even the most diehard fans to watch every single game is just impractical. In a 162–game season, the average team will spend 500 hours on the field in gameplay. The average team will play 6.07 games a week, which breaks down to 18 and half hours a week. That’s a part time job just to watch games. I don’t have that kind of time, nor does the average American.

The other problem with having so many games that is they’re more insignificant than any other sport. In the NFL, a sixteen–game season means that every single game is played will have postseason implications. In college football, every single week is as important as the next simply because, for a team to make the playoffs, they can’t lose. Even for teams outside of the playoff picture, all games will have bowl implications. Every single game is important.

The insignificance between two sub–500 teams playing on a Wednesday afternoon in the middle of July will fail to make anyone, including the players, excited. From a financial stand point, it looks as if the MLB will never shorten the season.