Hombre said:
I've often wondered if baseball, hockey and basketball only played once a week, and all playoff games were do or die, how the ratings would compare to the NFL.
I completely agree with this (and was reading this thread preparing to post pretty much the same thing). If baseball were a weekly or biweekly sport with a 30- or 60-game season, pitchers were fellated like quarterbacks, gambling lines were analyzed for days, fantasy teams only had to be adjusted once or twice a week, and a "Scoring Position" channel showed the best action from every game in a seven-hour loop without ad breaks, I bet its popularity would be much higher. The structure of game itself wouldn't have to be any different - NFL games last three-and-a-half hours or more, and nobody complains - although the game would look much different insofar as you'd obviously need far fewer pitchers to staff a roster, and the overall quality of pitching would be much higher, so you might want to tweak the rules or juice the ball, etc., to increase run scoring.
Within baseball's current structure, my own dumbass proposal (which will never, ever be implemented) is along the lines of the English FA Cup or other similar soccer competitions around the world - or if you prefer, Bill Simmons' "Entertaining as Hell Tournament" idea for basketball: shorten the regular season to roughly 144 games and add a knockout cup competition to be run in parallel with the regular season. Set aside three-day blocks at the end of each of April, May, June, July and August:
--In April, the two teams from the previous year's World Series get byes, and the other 28 teams are randomly drawn - no seeded teams, home field advantage determined randomly - to play best-of-three series against each other, with the same team hosting all three games. (If one team wins the first two games, you don't play the third game.)
--After the first round, you're left with 16 teams, and at the start of May you conduct another random draw to determine who plays who in the next best-of-three series at the end of May. (Eliminated teams get a few days off during the second round.)
The same format continues through to the best-of-three finals at the end of August. The rewards for advancing in the cup competition would be as follows:
1) The draft order and/or slot money allocations in the following season would be based upon which teams advance the farthest in the cup competition.
2) All statistics accumulated during the cup would count as part of the regular season - so counting stats (HRs, wins, saves, etc.) would be slanted in favor of teams which advanced in the cup.
3) Most importantly, all wins - but not losses - accumulated during the cup would count toward your regular season totals. So a team which won the cup would add an extra 10 wins to their total from the other 144 games, which could be enough to get it into the regular season playoffs.
Meanwhile, eliminated teams would get more rest, which in theory ought to improve the overall quality of play in the league. But the main benefit of having a cup competition is that it would help remove some of the sameness the regular season currently possesses: when you're playing more or less every day for the better part of six months, the games can start to blend together, particularly for the casual fan. Having blocks of interleague play was an older idea to help reduce the sameness, and it worked to a small degree for a while, but something bigger - whether this idea or something else - might be needed to break up the monotony on a larger scale.