- 7 weeks ago
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00:00Y'all still want the Giants and Dodgers to be in the same division with each other?
00:04Absolutely.
00:05You do?
00:06I don't yike this current, quote-unquote, balanced schedule.
00:11Rob Manfred screwed up again because you only get 12 games against the Dodgers,
00:17and what, the first game, the first series against the Dodgers wasn't until June or July?
00:24It's lame.
00:25I want, and I think baseball fans in general, you want the games against your rival to happen more frequently.
00:32And we always joke about Yankees and Red Sox on Sunday Night Baseball being on every single time,
00:38but 19 games between those two, it's a rivalry.
00:42It's good.
00:43It's exciting.
00:44Okay.
00:44I'm with you, but this is in reference to something, and this is over the weekend,
00:49and it was on Sunday Night Baseball on ESPN.
00:52Did y'all hear this?
00:54Because there's been some buzz about it.
00:56They're interviewing Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred.
00:59Take a listen to where the conversation goes.
01:01Expansion, realignment, expanded playoffs.
01:04I mean, can you see that down the road?
01:06I can.
01:07You know, I think that the first two topics are related in my mind.
01:14I think if we expand, it provides us with an opportunity to geographically realign.
01:19I think we could save a lot of wear and tear on our players in terms of travel.
01:24And I think our postseason format would be even more appealing for, you know, entities like ESPN,
01:31because you'd be playing up out of the east, out of the west, and that 10 o'clock time slot where we, you know,
01:38sometimes get Boston, Anaheim would be two west coast teams, and that 10 o'clock slot that's a problem for us sometimes
01:44becomes a real opportunity for our west coast audience.
01:48So I think, you know, I think the owners realize that there's demand for Major League Baseball in a lot of great cities,
01:54and that we have an opportunity to do something good around that expansion process.
01:59First of all, what the hell is happening in the background?
02:03Are they doing this during a rock concert?
02:06That's the Little League game.
02:08That was the game.
02:08What is that?
02:09That is...
02:10Like, what is happening?
02:15What are they doing?
02:16Probably a lot of in-stadium music.
02:19It's not a normal professional baseball environment.
02:22It's in Williamsport.
02:23Understood.
02:24Yeah, so it's a little bit of a different vibe.
02:27Anything to drown him out, I'm here for.
02:29Yeah, I hear that.
02:30But anyway, like, so that comment on radical realignment, expansion,
02:36and then the idea that we're going to set this all up geographically,
02:41sort of a college football feel, right?
02:44Who's going to come out of the SEC?
02:45Who's going to come out of the Big Ten?
02:46In the Pac-12, and then, you know, whatever.
02:49Like, that idea coming to baseball, at first glance, you're kind of like, okay, what do you mean?
02:58I get it.
02:59Baseball needs to probably sort of work with its broadcast partners in a little bit different way.
03:06Maybe the baseball's lagging a little bit, okay, so you need to make some changes.
03:11Now, there have been those out there who have taken that comment from Rob Manfred
03:16and put together a blueprint for what it would look like.
03:20And the first one that I saw, if you're really going to geographically realign,
03:25because I don't know about you, Dibs, when I heard him say that, I'm thinking to myself,
03:29well, maybe there'd be a California division.
03:32Maybe the five teams would be the Giants, the A's, the Angels, the Dodgers, and the Padres.
03:37A's no longer a California team, but I see where you're going.
03:40For the moment, they are, and I'll still believe it when I see it.
03:43I know somebody shoveled dirt and moved it across the room, but whatever.
03:47I'll believe it when I see it.
03:48As we stand here today, there's five teams in California, okay?
03:52So, something along those lines.
03:55But that's not what they did, because, and I had forgotten,
03:59expansion would probably mean going from three divisions in each league to four.
04:05Four divisions of four, not three divisions of five.
04:10So, that's probably what it would be.
04:12So, you would only have four teams in your division.
04:14And immediately, the division that the Dodgers were in looked like this.
04:21Dodgers, Angels, Padres, Diamondbacks.
04:26That's the division.
04:28Right.
04:29There's no Giants in it.
04:32No Giants.
04:33No Giants.
04:33No Giants.
04:34Not go Giants.
04:35No Giants.
04:36No Giants.
04:37The Giants division, I believe, looked something like Giants, Mariners, Rockies, A's.
04:55And I know what any real Giants fan's immediate thought would be when you see that.
05:00Because, and I don't know if the schedule would be balanced or whatever, but hold on a freaking second.
05:06Are we actually going to give the Giant-Dodger rivalry to the Padres, like so many in Southern California are now suggesting?
05:14Really?
05:15You're going to split up the Giants and the Dodgers?
05:19Oh, by the way, this particular idea was going to split up the Cubs and the Cardinals as well.
05:24But then I slept on it for a night.
05:27And I thought to myself, you know, the way baseball is structured right now, I don't know that anybody's ever going to win the National League West ever again.
05:37Not named the Dodgers.
05:38Well, the Giants just did.
05:40A couple years ago, 2021.
05:42Yes, they did.
05:43Yes, they did.
05:44And in order to do it, they had to have the greatest year in the history of their entire organization.
05:52And even that cleared the Dodgers by a game.
05:56One game.
05:58So look, if this is the way that you're going to structure things, and if the Dodgers are going to continue to use their resources to fill in all of the loopholes, this is not me criticizing the Dodgers by any stretch.
06:12It is much more criticizing baseball.
06:14The Dodgers do a great job of taking advantage of what loopholes are there.
06:18But if this is the way we're going to do it, I don't know.
06:23I get it for all of you traditionalists, but to borrow college football once again, tradition's dead.
06:29Pretty much.
06:29Like a doornail.
06:31And so, yeah.
06:34Let's go play with the Mariners, Rockies, and A's.
06:36No thank you.
06:37Sign me up, because I think the Giants will win that sucker 75% of the time.
06:41No thank you on, first of all, the eight divisions.
06:46And we all would have to wonder who the expansion teams are.
06:50ESPN put out a similar thing today.
06:53Their realignment included Nashville and Montreal.
06:57Montreal gets a team.
06:59ESPN is proposing four eight-team divisions.
07:02Which, to me, makes a little bit more sense, where, again, it's generally going to be geographic.
07:09It's Dodgers, Mariners, Giants, Padres, Angels, D-backs, A's, and Rockies.
07:15So you take all the teams west of the Rockies, essentially, and you put them all in one big division.
07:22And with this, you would probably go to, I don't know, an eight-team playoff format.
07:28So the top two in each division would get to go.
07:32So I think that this would involve much more of a regional rivalry to still be intact.
07:39And according to this, you'd go to 154 games.
07:43You'd play 10 against your division opponents.
07:46You'd have seven division opponents.
07:47So you'd have 10 games against the Dodgers and the Padres and the A's.
07:51Natural rivals, and the A's are becoming less of one now that they're moving to wherever.
07:57You would have six games against the other National League teams.
08:00And then you'd play the American League to fill out the balance of the schedule.
08:04This, to me, makes more sense as opposed to, you know, four-team divisions, eight of those,
08:10and you don't have the Dodgers, and you split up the Cardinals and Cubs.
08:14At some point, you've got to preserve the rivalry, not for posterity and history,
08:19but because that's actually what still moves the needle.
08:22First of all, you're listening to 95.7 The Game, KGM, ZFM, and HC1 San Francisco,
08:27and Odyssey Sports Station in the home of the Golden State Warriors and Valkyries,
08:29always live on the free Odyssey app, coming to you live from the Laughing Monk Studios.
08:33Look, I'm largely, this is a little devil's advocate here, because no, I'm not in favor
08:39of splitting up great rivals in Major League Baseball, because by the way, there aren't that many of them.
08:46I was starting to think about this, because the other thing that I saw in this realignment plan
08:51is that the Red Sox and Yankees would stay together, and in fact, would add the Phillies and the Mets.
08:55That would be a four-team division.
08:57Red Sox, Yankees, Phillies, Mets.
09:00And I thought to myself, will ESPN even know that any of the other divisions exist,
09:05or will they just follow those four teams around?
09:08So that would be a problem.
09:09But they'd be preserving Yankees and Red Sox, but blowing up Cubs-Cardinals and blowing up Giants-Dodgers,
09:15and I really don't think there are any other great rivalries in baseball, beyond those three.
09:20That's really about it, as far as true, great rivalries in baseball.
09:25You could pretend that Tampa and Miami or Florida are rivals.
09:30They're not.
09:31Houston and the Texas Rangers, are they rivals?
09:34They should be, but they're not.
09:36And everybody really is a rival of the Yankees, because nobody likes them,
09:40and it's a little similar with the Dodgers, too.
09:42Like, the Padres and Dodgers, that's a rivalry, for sure.
09:47Padres fans think it is, and right now the players think it is.
09:51Right.
09:52Because they're chasing what the Dodgers have.
09:53The Dodgers fans do not think.
09:55I keep telling people this.
09:57The dynamic in Southern California, they hate the Giants.
10:01They hate San Francisco.
10:03San Diego represents a weekend away.
10:06That's not hatred.
10:07Right.
10:07They're like, we should go down there, hon.
10:10We should drive down there and see the Dodgers.
10:12Go to TJ.
10:13Yeah, let's go.
10:14Gaslamp.
10:14It's fun.
10:15Let's get drunk.
10:15Like, that's, there is no, there's nothing there.
10:19That's the players on these particular teams, because they're the two best teams right now.
10:24So that'll die.
10:25I don't think it's sustainable.
10:26The thinking would be you could create rivals like Baltimore and the Washington Nationals.
10:31They're so close, they should be rivals.
10:34And if Montreal gets an expansion team, then Toronto and Montreal could be, should be rivals.
10:40Sure.
10:40But, you know, Cleveland and Cincinnati, the battle for Ohio and all the rest of it, I don't know.
10:45They don't exist now, but maybe by having these teams play more often, you could create that.
10:49Maybe, maybe, you know, maybe there'd be more between the White Sox and the Cubs or, or whatever.
10:56So, like, I'm open to this going a bunch of different ways, but I do think you got, you got to be careful.
11:04And if you are going to go with what Manfred just said, if you're going to think about making your playoffs geographic in nature,
11:14so that it fits TV slots and you're going to get certain markets and we're only going to be playing, you know,
11:21Dodgers, Giants, or Padres and Angels or whatever, if that happens in the playoffs, that's what's happening at 10 o'clock Eastern time.
11:29You'd never get a Red Sox game 10 o'clock Eastern time and vice versa.
11:33Okay, fine.
11:34If you want to do that, then you better re-unbalance your schedule.
11:38Like, if you're going to make the playoffs or you need to win the West, then you actually need to be a West team
11:45and you need to play the West teams more often than you play the other teams.
11:50So, if you want to bring on this, then there's got to also be some of going back to the way it used to be.
11:55That way you can truly see who's the best in the division.
11:58Right.
11:58You know, back in the day when you would play each other 19 times, those head-to-head matchups would determine
12:04who is the best team in the NL West.
12:07And you had five teams and you'd play Arizona and Colorado 19 times.
12:11Same thing with the Dodgers and the Padres.
12:13And that right there is 76 of your 162 would be just against your division.
12:19So, I'm with you.
12:21My biggest problem with this is very simple.
12:25Why are we expanding in the first place?
12:27The product is not good enough.
12:30There's not enough good teams.
12:32There aren't enough good players.
12:33There aren't enough stars.
12:34There aren't enough teams that even try.
12:37So, we're going to add in two more teams.
12:39Nashville, Market 41.
12:42Yeah, but it's hot.
12:43It's hot.
12:44I mean...
12:45Nashville's a hot market.
12:46Sure.
12:47Everybody loves it.
12:48Right.
12:48It's a hot market.
12:49And they've got football.
12:52And they don't have the NBA.
12:54Nope.
12:55You got Memphis.
12:57Okay, yeah.
12:57Memphis is not quite Nashville, but I get it.
13:00It's still Tennessee.
13:02We're going to add more mid-markets to a sport that does not really allow the mid-markets to usually thrive.
13:09One of your favorite words is the reason why.
13:11It's just math.
13:13Right.
13:13Like, what they're trying to create is basically playoff arenas.
13:17They're trying to actually use geography to their advantage.
13:21To where you can sort of do this kind of east-west thing.
13:24Like, when I hear what they're trying to do, it does sound to me like they're trying to create college football.
13:30That's what they're trying to do.
13:31But that's why I also, my ears perked up at this, and eyes for that matter, with this idea of like, are you really willing to split the Giants and the Dodgers up?
13:41And you'd be like, baseball would never.
13:44And then think to yourself, remember now, USC's in the Big Ten.
13:51With UCLA, though.
13:52Right.
13:53And Oregon.
13:54My point is, is that for years, college football used to tell all of us that its biggest selling point was tradition.
14:03You show up at the same building against the same opponent, and this year it's the world's biggest outdoor cocktail party.
14:10And this is what we do when this team comes to town.
14:14And we've got the axe.
14:15And we've got the, like, and this is a civil war.
14:17And we've got a nickname for this game versus, and it's all about the band.
14:22And the students do this, and we're all about tradition.
14:27And out west, the biggest traditional thing was the Rose Bowl.
14:32And the Big Ten played the Pac-10.
14:35And now the Pac-10 is in the Big Ten.
14:38Like, they have taken tradition and wiped their butts with it.
14:43And it hasn't affected them negatively.
14:46It's because of the almighty dollar and because it's football.
14:48So will baseball follow the same model?
14:52Let's make geographic arenas and take tradition and huck it into Max Muncy's ocean.
14:59They've already done that in many ways with the elimination of the DH and the Ghost Runner on second and the pitch clock.
15:06And it's no longer 90 feet between bases.
15:09It's now 88 feet and 8 inches because we had to make the bases bigger so we can steal more, even though the Giants still don't steal more.
15:18So we need bigger bases.
15:18Rob Manfred is already wiping his tuchus with tradition.
15:23My point is, unless you want to accompany this with a salary floor, which is something you've advocated.
15:29Absolutely.
15:29You're going to have Nashville Market 29, I'm looking at it right now, just behind San Diego, which is not necessarily mid-market,
15:38but you're asking a Nashville owner to come in and start spending with the big boys, and they won't because they're not equipped to do so.
15:47Yeah.
15:47Here's the other thing, though.
15:49Every time the idea of blowing up tradition comes up, everybody gets mad and says,
15:58we will not, like I can't even wrap my head around that.
16:02And then we do.
16:03Well, of course.
16:04I mean, we did this for years with the DH.
16:06We did it for years with the DH.
16:09And the pitch clock is a great example.
16:11You will get used to it.
16:12So if the Giants and Dodgers split up, and I know you don't believe me today, but you will get used to it.
16:18You will.
16:19Stanford and Cal are in the ACC.
16:22The Atlanta Braves are no longer in the NL West.
16:26Grandy, do you remember those days when the Atlanta Braves were in the NL West?
16:30Or does that predate you?
16:30It was like before I became aware of everything going on, but I knew it happened.
16:35Yeah.
16:36Still the, I mean, actually.
16:38The Atlanta Falcons were in the NFC West.
16:40They were also in the West.
16:41Yeah, the Braves being in the West, actually, for me, it still, it represents why there's a wild card in Major League Baseball.
16:48And it represents, for my childhood at least, or maybe adolescence or just youth, whatever, however you want to say it.
16:54But, like, that was the worst year of Giants baseball.
16:58It was 1993, I think.
17:00They won 103 in 93.
17:02They won 103.
17:03And at that time, you had to win your division to go to the playoffs, and the Braves won 104.
17:08So you went home.
17:09Yep.
17:09And immediately, baseball started plans to bring up a wild card, because it's like, can't have teams winning 103 games and going home the next day.
17:18That's right.
17:18And eventually they figured out that the Braves belonged in the NL East, because they're an Eastern team.
17:24They are in the East.
17:25So we went ahead and figured that out, but my issue with expansion is the product and the fact that we already have too many teams that are low income, and they don't try, and I just feel like this would add to that pile of crap.
17:39So we're going ahead and we're going ahead and we're going ahead and we're going ahead and we're going ahead and we're going ahead and we're going ahead and we're going ahead and we're going ahead and we're going ahead and we're going ahead and we're going ahead and we're going ahead and we're going ahead and we're going ahead and we're going ahead and we're going ahead and we're going ahead and we're going ahead and we're going ahead and we're going ahead and we're going ahead and we're going ahead and we're going ahead and we're going ahead and we're going ahead and we're going ahead and we're going ahead and we're going ahead and we're going ahead and we're going ahead and we're going ahead and we're going ahead and we're going ahead and we're going ahead and we're going ahead and we're going ahead and we're going ahead and we're going ahead and we're going ahead and we're going ahead and we're going ahead and we're going ahead and we're going ahead and
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