In honor of Halloween, which is not actually a day workers get off, I want to say some words about off days. I’ve been thinking about this a lot as I’ve been watching the baseball postseason. From September 6th through September 29th — 24 days — the New York Yankees played 22 baseball games in five different cities over the whole continental United States. From September 30th through yesterday — 31 days — they played only 14 games, in just four total cities.
Similarly, the Los Angeles Dodgers played 24 games over the same September span. Their postseason series went a little longer than the Yankees, so they played 16 games since then, but they didn’t have to leave California for over two weeks. Each team had only two stretches where they had to play three days in a row, and neither had to play four days in a row at all — not a single postseason format that MLB has tried in the modern era requires a team to play four days in a row.
This is absolutely ridiculous. Baseball’s postseason has way too many days off. It is, by far, the single biggest problem with the playoffs. Baseball is an everyday sport for six months, and then suddenly they get more off days than the NBA? What is this bullshit?
As reluctant as I am to take away a worker’s days off, Major League Baseball really ought to do something about this. In the postseason, baseball almost becomes a fundamentally different game, since managers can use their rosters in ways they never would during the regular season. For all the complaints about October baseball being a “crapshoot” (complaints that are, as I’ve written before, mostly bullshit), people rarely point to the most obvious source of upsets: Weaker pitching staffs get covered up because all those off days allow teams to rely more heavily on a few great players, which has only become more of an issue as relief pitching becomes more dominant.
And, obviously, more off days are good for workers, but this gets at a key tenet of this newsletter: In sports, the labor itself is the product. The whole reason we are watching the game is that it’s hard. In most workplaces, a day off for workers does not change the product itself. An employer might have to hire additional workers or invest in more efficient technology to produce the same amount of widgets, but the widgets themselves do not change. But in sports, there are no widgets — the only output is the work itself. So if you give so many days off that the game itself changes, then you are making your product worse.
Players may object to playing a postseason with fewer off days — although I honestly doubt it, since playing a week or more without a day off happens pretty routinely in the regular season. But if they DO object, then just give them a bigger share of the revenue. After all, they really deserve all of it…
Anyway, here’s everything from Undrafted this month:
Just Put Pete Rose in the Hall of Fame
I never liked Pete Rose, but now that he's gone, can we not end this silly charade?
What Happens to Good Quarterbacks?
Another young quarterback, Anthony Richardson, has been benched since I wrote this....
Episode 51: Hakeem, Giannis, and the Global NBA (ft. Mirin Fader)
Thanks to Mirin Fader for joining me for this one! Her books are a great look at two defining NBA superstars.
Moneyball and the End of the Oakland A’s
An exploration of how "Moneyball" ultimately killed A's baseball in Oakland...
Speaking of that last post, check out my latest YouTube series on the legacy of Moneyball: