Baseball's regular season, which ended Sunday, has to be considered the best in the millennium so far. Five of eight playoff spots were not decided until the final week and baseball was introduced to an amazing and exciting crop of rookies in Seattle's Felix Hernandez, Atlanta's Jeff Francoeur and Oakland's Huston Street.
But despite the success of this season, which brought a record 75 million fans to the ballpark, I found baseball extraordinarily boring at times, and I racked my brain for a solution.
The answer came to me early this spring. Granted, the idea has been around for a while, but I had never seriously considered it until one May night when I was in Oakland watching the A's play the Tampa Bay Devil Rays.
At the time, the A's were at the low point of their season - 15 games below .500 - while the Devil Rays were being the Devil Rays. It was the bottom of the 11th, and the game was tied 4-4. Travis Harper was about to pitch to Charles Thomas, and the lowlight of my baseball season reared its ugly head.
I looked at the scoreboard: Harper had an ERA of 7.48, Thomas a batting average of .098.
I was watching the two worst players on two of the worst teams in baseball go at it. That's when I decided that baseball was in trouble, and there was only one thing to save it: contraction.
The strongest and most obvious argument for contraction is to preserve the integrity of the game. Having too many teams thins the talent pool around the league. Right now, I'm sure the average baseball fan could name, off the top of his head, at least a dozen players who don't belong in the major leagues. Mark Hendrickson, Aaron Fultz, José Lima - the list goes on and on. It's not that I don't love watching Buddy Groom coming into a game to face Greg Zaun, but it could just be more interesting.
Fans want to see the best against the best, and contraction would be a big step forward. The truly excellent players on the contracted teams would go to better teams and, in the process, bump some of the aforementioned mediocre-to-terrible players into unemployment. The result? More top-tier players on top-tier teams.
The second reason is for league parity. This may seem minor, but the American League has 14 teams, while the National League has 16, which makes it easier for AL teams to make the playoffs. I'm surprised that teams in the NL Central, which has six teams, more than any other division, don't make a bigger fuss that there are only four teams in the AL West.
So which two teams should get the ax? It has been rumored that MLB has considered condemning the Tampa Bay Devil Rays recently, and with good reason. In their miserable eight-year existence, the Deviled Eggs have lost at least 91 games each season. Only in 2004 have they finished out of the cellar, and even then they were still 30.5 games behind the division winner. In addition, the Devil Rays have finished in the bottom three in baseball attendance for the past five years, so it's not as if the team would be missed that much.
It's not so easy to decide what other teams to contract. A case can be made for the Kansas City Royals, who have averaged about 95 losses per year since 1997. However, Kansas City has a lot of baseball history, and the current team has some young talent that may lead the Royals to contention in the future.
The team that should go is the Colorado Rockies, who will never be competitive because they will never have good enough pitching. After seeing what Coors Field did to Mike Hampton, pitchers have been unwilling to pitch in Denver, the Mile High City, for several reasons, and the gross dimensions of the ballpark distort batting statistics. Each game at Coors,an extreme hitter's park, turns into a MLB Slugfest video game. In fact, the first 1-0 game was played at Coors only this year. In addition, attendance at Coors Field has been waning in recent years as a result of the team's struggles. Once one of the biggest draws in baseball, the Rockies had the fifth lowest attendance rate in baseball this season.
After Sunday, 22 baseball teams packed up and headed home for the fall and winter. Here's to hoping two of them won't return.
Despite his personal success at Brown, Stu Woo '08 has found college extraordinarily boring at times.
