Fixing Baseball, Part III: Go All In On Interleague Play

Albert Pujols at Fenway in July? How boring. Oh wait. Maybe not.

Let's summarize the arguments against interleague play; I'm aware of one:

It might dilute the World Series.

Curt Schilling made the argument on Twitter just last night. He said, in reply to someone, that the two World Series teams could end up playing each other at the end of the season. Well, OK, but that strikes me as an easy thing to prevent.

Now, as to the arguments for it:

One thing baseball people never seem to consider is the incredible length of the season. We all love a good Yankee game, but 19 games between the Sox and Yankees is too many. Nineteen games with the Rays is too many. Those matchups would be better, and more dramatic, if they happened less often. It's not fair to cite football, but here goes: if the Patriots played the Jets four times during the season instead of two, it wouldn't be as big of a deal. There are 162 games in the schedule; let's shuffle the deck a bit.

Small-market teams would really benefit from a series with the Sox or the Yankees (or, say, the Orioles hosting the Dodgers). Filling their parks would fill their pockets once in a while, and that would help them buy players later.

So what if we see a World Series team? I got a real shock when I saw the stats Ian Kennedy had put up this year. I want to see National League teams, and I don't think I'm the only one. (We might end up respecting them more than we do now.)

Of course, having a full interleague schedule would require having one set of rules. But we're on this.

Finally, MLB's experimentation with interleague play has been cautious, usually pitting natural rivals against each other. But that just emphasizes the disparity between markets. The fair move is to go all in. Who's with me?