Bet on the Brewers? Um...no.

It’s been one long writing hiatus (my longest since starting this website),  but in my defense I was extremely busy watching baseball.  When I invested yet again in MLB.TV at the beginning of the season, I had assumed that by mid-May my lowly Brewers would be bringing up the rear and I’d be onto other summertime activities like tending the garden and exercising (oh yeah, and writing). Fortunately, the Milwaukee Brewers have saved me from that fate, and while my tomatoes are suffering from dry rot and my waste line is enjoying recent growth, my Brewers are in first place by 51/2 games at the All-Star Break.

Surprised?  Well, yeah, but perhaps less by the Brewers and more by the other teams in the NL Central.

I had predicted a win total of perhaps 77-83 wins this year, an improvement over last year’s 73, but not enough to make a shot at the playoffs, especially with the Cubs and Cardinals in the division.  And that’s the real surprise, that to date these two teams haven’t been able to get it together.  As for the Crew, well...there’s still time to meet my prediction.  Yes, I’m cautiously optimistic, but I also have a memory, albeit one that regularly forgets where I placed my phone.

As the Doonesbury character Duke discovered back in 1982, it’s never wise to bet your last ten dollars on the Brewers.

Brewer fans don’t need long memories to remember two disastrous second half collapses.  We need go no further back that 2014, the year the Brewers enjoyed the best record in baseball and a 6 ½ game lead at the end of June, only to go 31-47 the rest of the way to finish third with an 82-80 record (which ordinarily would have been a pretty good season for the Crew).

And let’s not forget a decade earlier, when the Brewer suffered the worst second half ever for a team that entered the All-Star Break with a winning record, going 22-53, scoring two or fewer runs 33 times, and finishing last in the division.

And even in 2008 when the Brewers managed to make the playoffs for the first time in 26 years, the Crew had a terrible September, going 4-15 before winning six of their final seven to squeeze into the post-season with a 90-72 record.  It got so bad that final month of the season that Ned Yost was fired as manager with just 12 games to play.

Will the 2017 Crew suffer a similar fate?  Hard to say, but there are a few reasons to remain optimistic.  First, this year’s team has suffered some enormous blows without folding, two of them the result of National League rules.  Opening day starter Junior Guerra lasted just three innings before going on the DL after injuring his leg leaving the batter’s box.  Similarly, Chase Anderson - the best Brewers starting pitcher this season - suffered an oblique injury while taking a swing and will be out likely until the end of August.  Add to that the continued injuries of Ryan Braun (no steroids equals no playing time, apparently), and you might expect this team to struggle.  Not so.  The bench on this team as constructed by general manager David Stearns is deep, so much so that manager Craig Counsell claims his team doesn’t have a bench.  Rather, they have interchangeable parts, all of them formidable, from waiver acquisitions Eric Sogard and Stephen Vogt and trade acquisitions Travis Shaw and Manny Pina,  to utility men Hernan Perez and Jesus Aguilar to recent signee Eric Thames, every day seems to highlight a new hero.  If there’s cause for concern, it’s the alarming number of strikeouts (the Crew one again leads the league in this category) and I have to wonder how the lineup is going to fair against the elite pitchers on the Dodgers and Diamondbacks.  The weakest link in the chain so far is center fielder Keon Broxton, who - despite moments of brilliance and solid defense - can’t seem to find any consistency behind the plate, and it wouldn’t surprise me if he isn’t a Brewer next year.

But if the Brewer position players generally lead one to feel optimistic, the pitching staff may cause a few fans to squirm in their seats.  When Matt Garza is your third most reliable starter, you might concede that the second half could be rough, yet somehow through it all - through injuries to two starters and a bullpen that struggled mightily early in the season, Milwaukee has the 8th best ERA in the Major Leagues.  And recently the starting staff, bolstered by Anderson’s replacement Brent Suter and a reinvigorated Jimmy Nelson, has finally given the bullpen some rest after it was overused for the first two months of the season.  Will the young pitching staff be able to stay strong throughout a long second half?  This is the biggest question mark the Brewers face, and no doubt one that David Stearns is eying carefully.  

If I’m allowed to alter my prediction of the 2017 Milwaukee Brewers, it would be to add 4 games to the total.  Instead of 77-83 wins, I think they have a chance to finish with 81-87 wins.  Enough to win the National League Central?  Possibly, but I doubt it, as I keep thinking the Cardinals and Cubs will eventually find their way and turn the 2017 Brewer season into a pleasant surprise, but not one that includes games come October.

Either way, I’ll be watching baseball and procrastinating on my hope to one day write the Great American Novel.  But will I bet my last ten dollars on the Crew?  Not a chance.  

But next year?  Quite likely.

World Series Start Times: MLB's Shortsighted Gamble

Woe to the child sports fan who has the misfortune of living in the Eastern Time Zone.  The 2013 World Series is only two games old, and I doubt there’s a kid on the East Coast under the age of 16 who’s watched beyond the 8^th inning of either game.  Both games began at 8:07PM EST and lasted in excess of 3 hours.  These start times are slightly earlier than the 2008 series, when games didn’t start until 8:29 and 8:37, but the MLB and FOX ought to look at more dramatic changes if the health of baseball is to be considered over immediate financial gains.

In 2009, Bud Selig said, “Our goal is to schedule games to allow the largest number of people to watch.”  With a country as vast as the U.S., this goal is unquestionably a tricky balancing act.

The approximate makeup of the United States by time zone is as follows:

Eastern.......................47.0%

Central........................32.9%

Mountain.......................5.4%

Pacific.........................14.1%

Alaska and Hawaii........0.6 %

Assuming children are distributed in the same proportions as the overall population, this means that 80 percent of kids would have had to stay up after 10PM to finish games one and two of this year’s World Series, with nearly half having to stay up after 11PM.  Couple this with the fact that this year’s representative cities are located in the Central and Eastern time zones, and it’s easy to see that the goal of scheduling “games to allow the largest number of people to watch” probably isn’t being achieved, especially among young fans.

All this is in light of recent evidence that baseball’s popularity is decreasing among our youth.  Google the phrase “popularity of baseball kids decreasing” and see what comes up.  It’s doubtful that a child who doesn’t care about baseball today is going to start investing time and money into the sport as an adult, so why not make it easier for kids to actually watch the games right now?

World Series games used to be held in the daytime, also not an ideal scenario for kids since many of these games were played during school hours.  But in the 70s and early 80s, there seemed to be a nice balance: weekday games took place during the evening (albeit a little too late at times), and weekend games were often played during the day. 

In 1982, when the Milwaukee Brewers made the series, I was fourteen years-old, and I watched every game in its entirety, even attending game five (without parents!).  Start times were as follows (all times CST)

Game 1, Tuesday, 7:30

Game 2, Wednesday, 7:20

Game 3, Friday, 7:30

Game 4, Saturday, 12:20

Game 5, Sunday, 3:45

Game 6, Tuesday, 7:20

Game 7, Wednesday, 7:20

Push the weekday start times to 7PM CST for the East Coast fans, and I’d say that’s a pretty perfect schedule.  As it was, both teams were from the Central Time Zone, so the start times were ideal for the most interested fans.  Unfortunately, short-term greed changed things, and the last day game played in a World Series was game 6 of 1987.

In light of the recent downturn in popularity, Major League Baseball should consider the following:

1)      Incorporate flexibility in the schedule so that start times can be adjusted based on who’s playing in the series.  In 2008, two East Coast teams played each other, and games didn’t start until around 8:30 EST – absolutely ridiculous.  Games could easily have started an hour to an hour and a half earlier while still attracting the primary audience.  Last year’s series between San Francisco and Detroit was perhaps best served with the 8:00 EST.

2)      If flexibility is impossible, schedule start times that favor the Central and Eastern time zones, since these zones not only comprise 80% of the country’s population, but 73% of Major League Baseball teams.  It’s true that a West Coast series like in 1989 could make things challenging.  But I argue that even a 7:30 EST start time wouldn’t be catastrophic for this scenario.   Networks would still get to attract most of the country’s population, and a 4:30 local start time in the West isn’t as debilitating as it might have been years ago.  Internet access could allow working people to follow the games for the first few innings before returning home, kids would already be out of school, and most working adults could tune in live by the third inning or so.  TiVo and the like could be employed as well, and although fast-forwarding through commercials isn’t what Fox wants, it’s probably better than losing the East Coast entirely.

3)      Start weekend games earlier.  Why not take a cue from football and start the games at 6:30 EST like in recent Super Bowls?  True, the World Series isn’t the event that the Super Bowl is, but starting games an hour and half later certainly isn’t going to help turn it into one.

Folks who disagree with me will likely talk demographics, and how advertising dollars need to target the right audience.  I get this.  But will there even be an audience in 15 years if today’s children haven’t the ability to watch the games?

Sometimes a short-term loss is a long-term gain.

MLB and NFL Parity

As the MLB playoffs roll on with the usual suspects, I’ve pondered what has often been passed for conventional wisdom when comparing professional baseball to professional football.  For years, the argument went like this: parity in NFL football allows for more teams to have a chance to win a Super Bowl, therefore generating greater fan interest, while MLB baseball has too many teams that are eliminated from a World Series hunt before the first ball is pitched in April.  I remember spouting this argument myself in the 1990s as my lowly Brewers were relegated to a perennial loser.  But a review of the champions and runners up of baseball and football since 1966 – the season of the first Super Bowl – tells a different story. 

Out of 30 MLB teams, 10 haven’t won a World Series since 1966, and of those, six are franchises that weren’t around that year (though all have been in existence for at least fifteen years):

Washington (1969, formerly called the Montreal Expos)

San Diego (1969)

Milwaukee (1969, formerly called the Seattle Pilots)

Seattle (1977)

Colorado (1993)

Tampa Bay (1998)

The other four teams are the Chicago Cubs, Cleveland, Houston and Texas.

Although some recent teams haven’t yet won a World Series, many winners since 1966 have been from franchises that started after that year:  Kansas City in 1985, Florida in 1997 and 2003, Toronto in 1992 and 1993, and Arizona in 2001.

Of the ten teams who’ve not won a World Series since 1966, 7 have at least appeared in an October Classic.  The only three teams that have been excluded entirely from the World Series are the Chicago Cubs, Seattle and the Washington Nationals/Montreal Expos franchise.

Compare that to the NFL.  Of thirty current NFL teams, 14 have never won a Super Bowl.  Of those, six weren’t around in 1966, though all are now at least eleven years old:

Carolina (1995)

Cincinnati (1968)

Houston (2002)

Jacksonville (1995)

Seattle (1976)

Cleveland (1999) – note: for the purposes of this analysis, I’m considering Cleveland an expansion team from 1999 even though they kept the franchise statistics from the Browns team that moved to Baltimore in 1996.

The other teams are Minnesota, Detroit, Atlanta, Arizona (formerly the St. Louis Cardinals), Philadelphia, Buffalo, Tennessee (formerly the Houston Oilers) and San Diego.

Only one team that didn’t exist in 1966 has won a Super Bowl – the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 2003.  Again, I’m not including the Ravens’ victories of 2000 and 2013 since they inherited the players from the Cleveland Browns in 1996, and therefore aren’t a true expansion team.

Of the fourteen teams who’ve not won a Super Bowl since 1966, all but four have at least appeared in a Super Bowl.  Those that have been excluded entirely are Cleveland, Jacksonville, Detroit, and the Houston Texans.  It should be noted that three of those four teams are relatively recent introductions in the NFL if you include Cleveland as an expansion team in 1999.

The following summarizes the above statistics:

SINCE 1966
	MLB	NFL
% of teams not winning a championship	33%	47%
% of teams not appearing in a championship	10%	13%

Couple these stats with the fact that new franchises are more likely to win a World Series than a Super Bowl, and it might be tempting to disagree with the usual argument about parity between the leagues.  The World Series has actually been more inclusive than the Super Bowl.

What if we focus on the last 20 years?  After all, profit sharing and free agency changed dramatically since 1966, potentially affecting championships.  Let’s look at the same statistics for 1995 to 2012 (I’m choosing these years since there was no World Series in 1994.  Also, revenue sharing was first introduced to baseball in 1996).

SINCE 1995
	MLB	NFL
% of teams not winning a championship	67%	60%
% of teams not appearing in a championship	40%	30%

Counter-intuitively, here the stats change to favor the NFL, though not dramatically.  If we shorten the timeline further and take into account only the past decade, which also coincides with the 2002 baseball negotiations when revenue sharing was fine-tuned, the MLB has 7 different winners plus an additional 5 who've appeared in a World Series  – a total of 12 teams out of a potential 20.  The NFL has 7 different winners plus an additional 6 teams who've appeared in a Super Bowl  –  a total of 13 out of a potential 20.

What conclusions can be drawn from this?  Perhaps nothing definitive, as you could continue to crunch numbers that help fine-tune or perhaps even contradict some of what the above reveals, but I think you can say that under current rules, parity within the leagues is about the same in the MLB as it is in the NFL.  What was surprising to me is how historically the MLB wasn’t as lopsidedly in favor of the big market teams as I originally thought, even before revenue sharing and playoff expansion.  Outside of the Yankees’ run in the 90s, there has been a good deal of turnover in the World Series, and expansion teams have had success, sometimes fairly quickly.