Wolfgang622 wrote:heyeaglefn wrote:Why don't people like interleague play, only because of the DH? It is weird baseball is the only sport where you don't play every team every year, but I can't imagine never playing an AL team outside of the WS. Doesn't seem like a smart move for viewership or fans if you play 162 games against the same 14 teams.
Because it made baseball unique. The AL was more interesting on one level to me before 1997 precisely because the Phillies never played AL teams. Having the AL around was the closest thing in real life you could get (if you were a baseball fan) to having an alternate or mirror universe. The DH-in-the-AL-exclusively only accentuated that feel. People would talk about the difference between AL and NL style of play, and AL and NL strike zones, and those differences were real and meant something. I imagine that must have been twice as fun when the Athletics were in town too (albeit no DH then), though obviously I post-date that by quite a bit.
It also made spring training, the All-Star Game, and the World Series all more fundamentally interesting, especially, as was always the case when I was a kid, if the Phillies had no shot in hell of participating except with a token player in the former, and not at all in the latter.
All those things lost a little of their luster so the Phillies can play an away series in Cleveland every sixth year. Whoopdee fucking do.
The best argument was always, "But now fans from every city get to see every team," but three things:
1. Modern media makes it so you can see any team you want at any time.
2. If you simply must see somebody live, most baseball teams are close enough to some other team that you could generally make a trip out of your home market without too much trouble and see an AL game or an NL game if that is what you wanted to do, and your normal thing was the other league. I myself first saw a non-Phillies game in Baltimore, and it felt doubly special not because of any one player in it, but because I was watching American League baseball. I realize this is easier in the northeast than pretty much any place else, but then Atlantans should have thought of that before stealing the Braves from Milwaukee, so fuck them.
3. I think baseball, like hockey, is mostly a parochial sport; that is, people's interest is generally more local than national (i.e., some people like basketball players or football players and will follow whatever team(s) those players happen to be on, but this is less so of baseball and hockey). I for one do not care who the Phillies are playing, in one sense, when I go to see the Phillies. I am there to see them, and see them win. I couldn't care less if Mike Trout or Joe Schlabotnik is on the opposing team. This might seem like an argument for interleague play - after all, what do I care then? - but, as I say, what was fun about consuming baseball at home was the mystery and mystique of "that other league."
It was unique to baseball, and anything unique to baseball that sets it apart in this day and age helps to differentiate its brand in a crowded entertainment market place and is good, I say. But obviously I don't matter, and watching pitchers get progressively worse at hitting as baseball, as all sports, has become increasingly specialized from an early age sucks big time, and so, FUCK IT, let it be so.
It's also stupid because the teams you play are still unbalanced so some of it has gotten dull. The Phillies have played the Red Sox 71 TIMES. Meanwhile they've played the White Sox just 19 times. They've played other AL teams even fewer times but I at least understand why they don't play the west coast teams much. We go to Chicago every goddamn year anyway so it's silly that's how infrequently they've played the White Sox while we play our fake rival Boston all the damn time.
