Heresy! There's just too much (bad) baseball.

There’s a movement afoot to shorting the Major League season; or so says the web site MLB Trade Rumors. They’ve got a pretty good rep so we’ll just assume that someone along the way found out that someone else at least considered the idea. For whatever that’s worth.

Yeah, than and a bag of chips still ain’t a full lunch, but still…

At this lowly little boog, we like the idea. We love baseball, it's baseball 24/7 around here. When the Giants are playing, we’re watching (and howling and screaming). When they aren’t playing we’re watching for moves, checking on the competition, trying to keep up with news on the farm, and rooting against the Dodgers. Oh, and we argue about baseball. A lot.

Now that I see it here, we gotta get a life.

Baseball survived for years with shorter schedules, fewer playoff games, and fewer team for that matter. The game didn’t exactly suck. Now you can argue that the current state of the game is just fine, that it’s a natural evolution of the species. We’d counter that calling this natural is like calling the six-foot earthworms at Chernobyl the same thing. There’s nothing natural about it.

We have more teams, more games, and more playoff series than ever before because unnatural forces, the owners, want it that way. Every day the gates are open they make more money – except in Tampa Bay where it probably costs more money to run the AC in that concrete box than it’s worth.

But we’d argue that more money isn’t always good for baseball. Players get few days off, and many of those aren’t really off days. Any day without a game is considered “off”, even though the team might spent that period flying cross-country or trying to recover from a similar flight that hit the tarmac at 4 am. No wonder PEDs were so rampant. Guys needed some juice just to stay upright in August.

There’s also a glut of product. More games meant five-man rotations instead of four and a more attention to pitch counts because these “investments” have to last longer.  Would you rather see Madison Bumgarner throw every fifth day or every fourth? Yeah, us too.

This isn’t about seeing more or less baseball; it’s about seeing “good” baseball.

When this blogger began seriously watching baseball, there were no Colorado Rockies, Tampa Bay Rays, Florida Marlins, Toronto Blue Jays, Seattle Mariners or Arizona Diamondbacks. So there are, by basic math, are now 150 guys wearing major league uniforms who would have been told they weren’t quite cutting the mustard in 1977. Of those 150, 12 are in Major League starting rotations. I love watching Bumgarner vs. Clayton Kershaw. It’s a travesty that I get charged the same to see Zack Godley versus Blake Snell. That’s a night the season ticket holders choose to stay home for that “Hot in Cleveland” marathon instead.

That’s also leaving out the fact that, as written, the unbalanced schedule means we get to see the Giants play San Diego 18 times a year and the Cubs or Nationals six. I like knowing the division title is settled within the division but that’s a ruse anyway. Games in or out of the division count the same, and if you play roughly the same schedule, who cares?

So, how do we fix this? Baseball isn’t going to fold six (or any) teams and managers aren’t going to cut back on the rotation, but a few more off days might at least improve the level of play.

You can lose some of the games within the division. Don’t play the Padres (or any divisional foe) 18 times.  We’d be happy with 14, a four and a three in each place: 70 games.  Each team outside the division visits once, for a three-game set. That’s another 60 games. You like interleague (we could live without it, but whatever), then we’ll give you four with a rival, two at each park, and we’ll save the current interleague rotation with each series being two games. Let’s see: seventy plus sixth plus four plus eight is…. we ran out of fingers and toes a long way back.

Thank you Apple iPhone, that’s 146 games. Now you’ll scream “Oh, my God! You just dumped 16 games!”, or if you’re on a long break from classes at M.I.T. it’ll be “Oh, my God! You just dumped 9.87655 percent of the season!”

Yes, I did. The 2016 Giants season is 27 weeks long. In that time they have scheduled 20 days off, and that’s including the day of the All-Star Game.  This season five of those “off days” came between last Monday and this Thursday, so they get 15 days for everything else over six months. If those were your working conditions, you’d quit.

Now these guys are handsomely compensated for their inconvenience, and few of us would refuse to trade places with them. But as selfish fans, so we want to see the Giants out their every night or would we take a few less clunkers to see our heroes at their best?

While we’re at it make the Wild Card the best of three, cut the divisional and LCS rounds back to five games, and can we PLEASE reset the World Series schedule so Games 1,2,6 and 7 are played on the weekend again?

End of rant. Your thoughts are welcome.