Snyder’s Soapbox: Bring back the mom and pop game schedulers

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Welcome to Snyder’s Soapbox! Here, I pontificate about matters related to Major League Baseball on a weekly basis. Some of the topics will be pressing matters, some might seem insignificant in the grand scheme of things, and most will be somewhere in between. The good thing about this website is that it’s free, and you are allowed to click away. If you stay, you’ll get smarter, though. That’s a money-back guarantee. Let’s get to it.

Have you ever heard an older baseball fan lament how the schedule is shaking out and say something like “bring back that one couple” or “go back to the mom and pop schedule?” 

This isn’t just a saying. The husband-and-wife duo of Henry and Holly Stephenson built the MLB schedule from 1981-2004. I can only imagine back in the pre-computer days how many different sheets of paper they had laying around trying to fit things together in a working puzzle that would be the Major League Baseball schedule for the season. My hat is off to them. 

And, boy, do I want that back. 

Monday night, the Dodgers and Padres played a wild thriller in Petco Park. The Dodgers prevailed, 8-7, in 10 innings to hold onto their top spot in the NL West. 

This was the first time the two divisional rivals played each other all season. The Dodgers haven’t even played the Giants once. You know, possibly baseball’s biggest rivalry? The Dodgers and Giants haven’t played yet! How insane does that even sound here in June? They’ll first face off for the season on Friday of this week. The Dodgers have, however, played the Braves and Marlins six times each along with the Cubs and Mets seven times apiece.

Speaking of the Cubs, they hold a four-game lead over their biggest rival, the Cardinals, in the NL Central division. The Cubs and Cardinals haven’t played each other yet this season. In fact, they don’t play until June 23. How about that one, huh? The season will be nearly half over before one of the biggest divisional rivalries in Major League Baseball happens. 

Sticking with the Cubs, did you see their West-heavy early schedule? It was bizarre. They only played teams from the NL or AL West until their 27th game. They didn’t play a division game until their 30th. They were done playing the Dodgers (seven times), Diamondbacks (seven times) and Padres (six times) before ever seeing a team that wasn’t in the West. 

There are oddities like this all over the place that seem to fly in the face of what baseball should be hoping to accomplish with divisional rivalries. The Braves haven’t done their part this season and are probably buried, but they were thought to be a major contender in the NL East this season along with the Mets and Phillies. The Mets and Braves play this year for the first time on June 17.

In glancing at the Mets/Braves schedule, though, another pet peeve of mine from these last several years surfaces. As noted, the Mets and Braves haven’t played yet. Starting June 17, they play seven times in 10 days. 

Go back in your memory and think about how many times in the past five years or so that your favorite team has played teams seven times in 10 days. That usually means back-to-back weekends. 

How about a little spacing here? Why are teams going nearly three months without playing a division rival but then stacking up seven games in less than two weeks against them? 

Now, here’s the part where I say building the schedule for 30 teams to play 162 games and tailoring it so they each play certain teams — depending upon division — more often than others is incredibly difficult. Especially dealing with travel and trying to make it fair, regionally, it’s really tough. This season it had to have especially been a challenge with how the Rays‘ schedule needed to be built to avoid lots of home games in the middle of the summer. 

Here’s also the part where I say, no, I absolutely do not want to be in charge of doing the schedule. 

I do have some requests, though. 

• Stop doing the thing where teams play each other two out of three series. If it has to happen every once in a while, I’ll trust that it was due to the difficulty of building the schedule. As often as it has happened the last several years, though, it seems like a pattern that the schedule-makers fell in love with. Please fall out of love. It sucks. 
• Divisional rivals need to see each other with some level of frequency without the overload I mentioned above. They shouldn’t be playing seven times in 10 days, as it should stay fresh, but we also don’t need to go 75 games without them seeing each other. A general rule of thumb? Well, there are roughly 26 weeks and division rivals play each other four series a season, so they should all play each other once every 6-7 weeks. Obviously, with the chore of making everything fit, that’s very challenging, so how about just saying once every 4-8?
• There will obviously be misses here due to unforeseen contenders and disappointing teams (such as the Braves and Orioles), but the last week should be division bouts that have a chance to decide the champion. Even if we go back in time to the spring and glance at the final week of the season, you see some terrible matchups like White Sox-Yankees, Royals-Angels, Rockies-Mariners, Mets-Marlins, Astros-Angels and while Pirates-Braves looks OK now, it looked bad in March. 

I don’t know, man. It’s never gonna be perfect. Maybe this is as good as it gets. I know I’d mess something up if I tried it. Maybe this is my Old Man Yells at Clouds moment. It just feels like the schedule has been generally bad the last handful of MLB seasons and we know it can be better because it has been.

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