If baseball did these three things, more people would care about the game

While the St. Louis Cardinals and their Major League Baseball peers are idle, it’s a good time to think about the things leaders of the sport could do to address the growing problem of fan apathy.

The commissioner and his lieutenants have done a lot in attempt to make baseball more appealing to casual fans. Pitch clocks to speed up the pace of the game and instant replay to slow it back down while doing little to improve the accuracy of calls being made by umpires on the field and a lot to take the momentum and excitement out of games making a beautiful sport more difficult to watch.

Here are three things MLB can do to bring some of the excitement back to the game.

First, force teams to make more of an effort to be competitive by enforcing tougher spending minimums and by eliminating the strategy of “tanking,” putting a bad team on the field on purpose to amass draft picks to build for the future. It’s absolutely ridiculous that teams who spend more on talent have to give money to teams that don’t. If you think the owners of the Miami Marlins lay awake at night fretting about the lack of fans in the stands, don’t. They’re in no danger of shutting their doors even though their business is selling an awful product. Why? Because of competitive balance funding and lucrative league-wide broadcasting rights that guarantee a low payroll club will make money no matter how few fans come through the gates. Not only is there no financial incentive to try to be good, it’s a better bet to field a crummy team with a low payroll than to roll the dice and spend a bit more money trying to win.

Every time I write about tanking people insist it’s always going to be there because “it works.” But does it? For every 2015 Kansas City Royals or 2016 Chicago Cubs squad, there are many, many more examples of teams that are in perpetual rebuilding mode. The Royals were in taking mode from the early 1990s until 2015 — and when they finally broke though, they couldn’t make it last for more than a two-year run. So what? Well, it’s unfair to the fans and bad for business to field a lousy team year after year. Even when Kansas City finally won a World Series, they couldn’t sustain fan interest.

In 2019 the Cardinals, out-drew their cross-state rivals by a more than 2:1 ratio. For the Royals, two good years weren’t enough to overcome three decades of futility and their skeptical fans didn’t buy back in. Even though they hadn’t made the playoffs in three years before 2019, Cardinals fans still showed up because they believe their team is making a good faith effort to win every year. For the price fans pay for tickets, their team owes them the responsibility of trying to win every year.

Encourage trades and kill interleague play

2. Do something to encourage more trades. It seems these days when swaps are made, it’s always veterans for prospects. How about more of the baseball trades that used to happen. Remember when White Herzog traded half of his roster one winter over the course of a couple of days? That sort of thing almost never happens anymore. Why? It’s an exciting occurrence — much more interesting than fans serving as human pawns as the free agent game drags out all winter. More trades can keep fans interesting during the offseason.

But they’re also exciting when the campaign is underway. I wonder if one of the reasons trades happen less is because of interleague play. Teams don’t like to trade within their division because they don’t want to face guys they let go. Maybe the fact that there’s nowhere to ship off players where they can’t come back to haunt you is one of the reasons team are less willing to deal with each other. I’m more than willing to eliminate interleague play to find out. It’s a gimmick that’s run it’s course.

It used to be much more interesting when the World Series rolled around because the teams hadn’t seen each other all year and they didn’t play any of the same competition, so there was really no way to predict how they would match up. Now, it’s not unusual for teams that meet in the World Series to have already played head-to-head that season. Yawn. I’d rather see the Cardinals play their traditional rivals the Los Angeles Dodgers, San Francisco Giants and the New York Mets than watch them play the Minnesota Twins, the Seattle Mariners or the previously mentioned Royals every single year.

Change how instant replay works

Fix instant replay. It’s just awful to have play stopped again and again and again in games so the officials can spend several minutes trying to determine — and replays are usually inconclusive — if the runner was safe or out at first bast. Make it simple: managers get one replay request wrong and they’re done for the game. No stalling in the dugout waiting for word from the video room. Do it like they did back in the days when the manager would run out on the field to argue because he was so sure he was right watching with just his naked eye. That way the most egregious calls will be eliminated.

But we won’t have to sit there five times a game while someone tries to determine when the ball hit the back of the first baseman’s mitt. If they keep getting it right, they can object all night. But if the umpire is proved right, they have to pipe down for the balance of the game. That would at least take out the delays with the constant video reviews and it would also likely take out the perfunctory review request on late game changing plays — unless skippers save their shot for that moment.

MLB leaders need to have more faith in their product and work on making it more accessible instead of trying to water down the game to make it easier to follow for people who aren’t all that emotionally invested in it.

Scott Wuerz

Belleville News-Democrat

Scott Wuerz has written “Cheap Seats,” a St. Louis Cardinals fan blog for the Belleville News-Democrat, since 2007. He is a former BND reporter who covered breaking news and education.