Resumption of spring training/regular season/playoff format

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Viewing 25 posts - 51 through 75 (of 451 total)
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  • #126272
    jj-cf-stl
    Participant

    Paid - Annual

    I don’t understand how parent teams could try to play a schedule without a support team to draw players from for injuries, bereavement; you know all the reasons guys get called up. Doesn’t matter if the roster number is 25, 26 or 29. When you’re a man down, you need to backfill, from somewhere. Are all teams now going to play a schedule elsewhere so the taxi squad is game ready?

    #126372
    Brian Walton
    Keymaster

    Paid - Annual

    Speaking off the record, many players are skeptical. It would be hard for me to take exception. They would be the ones to take the risks.

    #126373
    Brian Walton
    Keymaster

    Paid - Annual

    Good questions, jj. I have heard ideas that the rosters could be even larger. Perhaps back to the old idea (which was discarded earlier) of a taxi squad or healthy scratches each game.

    However, there are salary and service time accrual issues that one or both sides may have trouble with. Add one more to the very long list of items to be negotiated, but at least this one does not seem to have external contingencies. (Unless you count bringing in as many as 1200 players (40×30) instead of the standard 780 (26×30) being an issue to someone!)

    #126382
    Brian Walton
    Keymaster

    Paid - Annual

    Here is another new spin on 2020, straight from the creative minds of MLB…

    #126383
    stlcard25
    Participant

    Paid - Annual

    Man, those Grapefruit League East and South divisions would be brutal. It would be hard to pick the Cards to finish higher than 3rd in that division and could easily finish 4th.

    #126386
    Brian Walton
    Keymaster

    Paid - Annual

    How about the Marlins? They would be fortunate to win once a week.

    I don’t get the part where teams would play games in other parts of Florida outside the divisions. That would have to be one huge bubble…

    #126391
    Brian Walton
    Keymaster

    Paid - Annual

    #126395
    gscottar
    Participant

    Paid - Annual

    I don’t like that realignment proposal at all. We get the Nats, Astros, and Mets while the Cubs would be in a joke of a division. No thanks!

    #126402
    Brian Walton
    Keymaster

    Paid - Annual

    #126444
    gscottar
    Participant

    Paid - Annual

    If this plan comes to pass I would hope they would also consider level of competitiveness within a division instead of just geography, especially looking at the Cactus League. The CL Northeast and Northwest divisions look relatively weak while the CL West is loaded with five teams good enough to be playoff caliber.

    #126456
    bicyclemike
    Moderator

    Paid - Annual

    If they can get the games going, I am not too concerned about strength of schedule. You play the hand you are dealt.

    As Brian’s article point out, the main issue is what kind of alignment and schedule do you use if and when teams are able to return to their actual home towns?

    You probably take the teams records at the end of the Florida-Arizona part of the season, and start with those in the “regular” division format. With the NL starting out with the DH, you might just keep that going during the regular part of the schedule as rosters will likely need to continue to be expanded.

    Whatever you do, the season is going to be an anomaly.

    #126464
    Minuteman3
    Participant

    Free

    Kind of strange but it may be workable. My only comment is that instead of a team playing a doubleheader against different teams on the same day how about just having one team getting a day off. Every 15 days a team would get an off day which is more doable than that double header idea.

    #126465
    858booyah
    Participant

    Free

    My thought originally was that Arizona should’ve been a springboard for not only ST but the regular season and then a return to the original cities. I didn’t assume that it would just play the whole season in Arizona. That won’t work and it appears the players aren’t buying it due to being away from families for months and emergency were they to happen. Also clearly some area’s are affected more than Others. I wouldn’t assume NYC team or anywhere else in the grasp of this would even be close to a return before July 1st.

    IDK what to do but they need to have something in place no later than Mother’s day if they want at least 100 game played with an abbreviated ST.

    Again there’s also a financial aspect to all this people forget. They may have a plan that most on both sides agree on but you know money is going to be the sticking point. I think the owners are going to want some sort of good homie discount playing an abbreviated season and the players are going to fight tooth and nail to get as much as possible.

    #126466
    Brian Walton
    Keymaster

    Paid - Annual

    MM3 asked:

    My only comment is that instead of a team playing a doubleheader against different teams on the same day how about just having one team getting a day off. Every 15 days a team would get an off day which is more doable than that double header idea.

    That could work in Arizona, but I am less sure about Florida, where the divisions (especially the one the Cards are in) are not close enough to avoid overnight stays.

    The schedule makers are going to have some real fun with this…

    #126467
    Brian Walton
    Keymaster

    Paid - Annual

    858booyah wrote:

    Again there’s also a financial aspect to all this people forget…

    Not everyone. I wrote about that very matter in depth on Wednesday.

    Major League Baseball Players are Men, not Machines

    #126469
    Minuteman3
    Participant

    Free

    The schedule makers are going to have some real fun with this…

    Well they always blame the computer on bad scheduling so maybe they will have to come up with a new villain this time…lol

    #126470
    Minuteman3
    Participant

    Free

    Here is a little something to perk up your day.
    https://youtu.be/gVTZL46-xkQ

    There is also a Dodgers/Cards video on the same page if you look to the right.

    #126471
    stlcard25
    Participant

    Paid - Annual

    That’s a great way to start my TCN day, MM3. Excellent stuff! (I still wish Carp had gotten to bat another time late in that 2018 game for a chance at a record)

    #126472
    bccran
    Participant

    Musial, after his 3,000th hit – “well, it was a curve ball. He had 2 strikes on me and I was just trying to meet the ball and get a hit there somewhere.”

    A lesson for some of these young players who are still trying to swing for the fences with 2 strikes on them. Interesting how Musial went to left field with that hit.

    #126475
    gscottar
    Participant

    Paid - Annual

    If they can get the games going, I am not too concerned about strength of schedule. You play the hand you are dealt.

    That might be the case in Florida where the teams are spread out but in Arizona all of the teams are in the same metro area. There is no reason they couldn’t balance the teams better by predicted strength. If we are going to have division winners with barely having a .500 record then let’s just wait and play in 2021.

    #126476
    gscottar
    Participant

    Paid - Annual

    Of course if the number of playoff teams are expanded then the imbalanced divisions won’t matter as much.

    I should also add that if they start the season in Arizona and Florida then they should end the season in Arizona and Florida. Maybe by the end of the season fans could be allowed back into the spring training parks. With the warmer climates they could expand the season into November and December easily without worrying about the weather.

    #126480
    Brian Walton
    Keymaster

    Paid - Annual

    We have no way of knowing if the Arizona divisions were created by Nightengale looking at the map or by MLB. Either way, those divisions reflect clusters of teams in the Phoenix area. If you have ever tried to drive between the ballparks in Surprise (extreme NW) and Mesa (SE) in mid-to-late afternoon (I have), you would appreciate the value in placing teams as close to one another as reasonable. That is what the proposed plan seems to do.

    Regarding the perceived competitiveness of the divisions, as soon as someone starts making arbitrary adjustments to meet their personal preferences, then you may as well throw all the names in a hat.

    Bottom line – I agree with bikemike.

    #126481
    Brian Walton
    Keymaster

    Paid - Annual

    gscottar said:

    I should also add that if they start the season in Arizona and Florida then they should end the season in Arizona and Florida.

    That assumes the virus situation would improve enough to allow them to do anything other than stay in the spring training bases.

    It also assumes MLB is willing to write off the entire season’s worth of game revenues. That is easy for us to say but may be hard for them to do, if they get a choice later on. (I wrote about this yesterday.)

    #126482
    gscottar
    Participant

    Paid - Annual

    Regarding the perceived competitiveness of the divisions, as soon as someone starts making arbitrary adjustments to meet their personal preferences, then you may as well throw all the names in a hat.

    There are numerous objective analytic sites that make projections that could be used in conjunction with geography to shape the divisions. Fangraphs is one example and there others. But like I said earlier, as long as the playoffs are expanded then the division assignments aren’t as crucial.

    It also assumes MLB is willing to write off the entire season’s worth of game revenues. That is easy for us to say but may be hard for them to do, if they get a choice later on. (I wrote about this yesterday.)

    Losing out on ticket revenue would be a blow but the opportunity to stage games until mid December would allow for a lot of TV revenue to cushion the blow.

    #126487
    gscottar
    Participant

    Paid - Annual

    This media outlet ranks the proposed divisions using Pecota. *They mistakenly referred to the GL East as West.

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