The NBA is doing an "In Season Tournament", so why doesn't MLB do this, too??

The NBA is doing a mid-season, or an in-season, I shouldn't say mid-season because it's not mid. It is an in-season tournament and it's done much like European football. So it's not quite like what they have in FA Cup because that's essentially just a knockout tournament from the start.

It's a lot more like group play like we would see in a World Cup or a Euros and you play within a group and then if you finish first you advance to a knockout round. And I think it will work great for NBA basketball. But I also think that it would work better for Major League Baseball.

I think it would work so great for Major League Baseball. So my friend John Manuel, who is a pro scout for the Minnesota Twins, is a baseball fan first and foremost like most of us are. And he joins me. He has no idea what I'm about to present to him.

None. I simply said, John will you react and help me hash out this in-season tournament I think would work great for Major League Baseball. First of all, the Minnesota Twins, if I'm not mistaken, are in first place. Is that correct? That is correct. We'll take it while we can get it.

You're so awesome. All right, so here's what we know. We know that the baseball season is a six-month marathon. That basically every day from April 1 to September 30 we are playing a game.

Obviously there are days off, but there's not a ton of them. So what if we did something that the NBA is starting this? What if we did an in-season tournament where all 30 teams are involved and all 30 teams are involved and you put them in groups that aren't divisions? So dividing them as evenly as possible to get them out of the division, the teams that they are normally competing with, and play a, you know, you'd have a home and home with each team within a group, and then you get down to your eight teams, the six group winners plus the next two best teams, and you played a knockout style tournament from that with one-off games on Thursdays to create games that really seem to matter in the middle of weeks that just kind of get lost in the grind of the season?

Would there be a stomach for that? I think it's possible. I do think Major League Baseball, what we know from what has happened in recent years is they know that people like events. They want events. That's how you got the Field of Dreams game. That's how next year you're getting the game at Rickwood Field in Alabama and Birmingham. I think they're trying to come up with other events.

The London game, I guess they're going to go to Paris in a couple of years, and it's really hard to do that in, say, Japan, but we had the game in Mexico City this year. So they're trying to come up with events. I think if they came up with a plausible tournament of some kind like that, or maybe the winning team moved up or got an extra $2 million in bonus money for the players, and then they got $2 million in bonus money for the draft, that would be the kind of thing that the players would want to win and the team would want to win. So there are incentive structures that you could build in to do that. Adam, I've always thought the best way to do this is to shorten the regular season. I like the Japanese model of 144 games. It's basically a game off per week, and you could use some of that savings in the Major League schedule, and instead of having a traditional All-Star game, you could do a World Baseball Classic type of tournament every year, every other year. In my mind, international play has a significant ceiling for MLB, so I do like the idea of some kind of in-season tournament to bring some drama and to bring an event to get people to pay attention when they otherwise just get zoned out by the fact that, oh, I missed the game last night. There's another one tomorrow.

I could just watch that one. Right, and that is the problem. It used to be, first of all, I grew up, I'm older than you, I guess, I grew up in an era where you didn't have every game on TV. Right, exactly. I made the TV games more of an event.

Right. I mean, the Saturday game of the week was like, man, I never missed the Saturday game. I didn't care who was playing. I mean, was it always the Cardinals, Red Sox, Yankees, Dodgers? It was somebody like that. The Reds, actually, as I was growing up were the best team in baseball. So it was always somebody like that, but I mean, I watched the baseball bunch every Sunday leading into the game of the week.

Ditto. So the sport just isn't the same. My fear is that, and I think this would end up being a moneymaker. You could actually sell a separate TV package for just these games to a network. Does the current commissioner, I'm not even sure you're allowed to say this, so feel free to say no comment. Does the current commissioner like the game enough to do something like this? I think he likes the revenue that would come from something like that. So yes, I do think that's the way that I think all these things are pursued. So I don't think I'm being a cynic and I'm usually not cynical about these things.

I don't think I'm being a cynic to say that would be the motivation. I think that to me, the biggest issue with the sport is, you know, I go back to Chris Rock's spiel about this a couple of years ago about how baseball wants to be relevant in the culture, capital C culture. It just isn't very black.

I just can't get past that. Nobody watches NBA games, but it matters in the culture, but nobody watches the games. I watch more NBA games than 98% of Americans. I guarantee I watch NBA games start to finish.

People don't do that and nobody cares about their regular season, but it matters in the culture. And most things in pop culture, you know, Bomani talks about this on this show too. When Bomani paid attention to baseball a lot, you know, with the brave and the Astros or whoever it was 18% of when we were kids, the peak was 18% of the players were black players. And right now the coolest player in major league baseball is Ellie Dela Cruz. And there's a language barrier. And if the coolest player is not Ellie Dela Cruz, it's Shohei Ohtani.

And there's a language barrier. I thank goodness that we have players like that to market, but you know, like major league, like the NBA, it's hard to market Joker, the guy, like I win the championship and now I can go home to Serbia. Good luck marketing that.

It's just not the same as the smiling Helene Giannis Antetokounmpo who loves smoothies. That's a little bit easier to market, you know, but I just think we have a relatability and marketing issue in baseball. And one of them, it has to be frankly cooler and younger.

And I'm 51 year old fat Greek nerd. I do not know younger and cooler, but there are people who are paid to do that. So I think a tournament can help. And I think it would raise some in-season relevance for baseball that it lacks right now. I have a big picture problem is Rob Manfred does not know what's cool.

And he does not know what is young. And, you know, he's basically showing up with the skateboard slung over his shoulder, Steve Buscemi style. So, you know, like that, that's basically what most commissioners are going to do. And they need to find someone who can, marketing wise, nudge them. How can you not market Shohei Ohtani and Elie De La Cruz? Did you see what Elie De La Cruz did last night? Yeah, absolutely. That's what we need. That's the little daily dramas that baseball needs to capitalize on. And instead, I'm sure on MLB network today, most of the discussion is probably like, well, I don't know. I don't really think that's the way you want to react after you hit a home run. Maybe you shouldn't show up the other team. I mean, no, we should try or something does not push our game forward.

We should, we should, we should celebrate every, every victory, every, uh, every, uh, every bit of success. Uh, what the, the kid Alvarez who hit the home run for the Mets last night in a three, two game down one with two outs in the top of the night to tie it. I mean, he got almost backpedaled halfway around the bases and you could tell that Arizona was seething, but you know what? Get over it.

Right. You left the ball over the outer half of the plate waist high. You don't want the guy to celebrate, get him out. I saw, I was at a minor league game last night that had 30 runs scored and they didn't, there wasn't much celebrating going on on the field last night. I was almost disappointed, you know, honestly, when will math has been for Greensburg, it's a grand slam to make the game 14 11. I wanted to see him enjoy it a little bit more than he did.

So I was very glad to see the LA highlights. And there's nothing better in baseball right now than watching show here on the best athlete to play major league baseball since Bo Jackson, I would say he's the best professional athlete in terms of pure athletic ability since Bo Jackson, someone who could try to prove me wrong. That guy's insane. And people just don't know enough about Shohei Ohtani. So I forget my trout that we couldn't market my trout.

He didn't want to help. Right. You know, and he was just, well, his greatness was just his every day, just, you can't get me out. I'm going to hit 45 home runs, yada, yada, but Shohei Ohtani is different. He's so dynamic. He's one of the fastest players. He's the longest home run. He might be in the top five pitchers in baseball all on the same time. You and I have followed the sport a long time. We never imagined a player like him literally. So he's, he's, he's treating major league baseball like he's the best player in little league.

Yeah, exactly. And, and people don't know much about him and I'm almost begging him to sign with the Yankees next year, even though that would be horrible to watch in many ways, just, it would make people sit up and take notice in the media capital of the world, but it shouldn't take that for American fans who do like baseball. And again, I'm very minor league focused, but I see bigger crowds everywhere I go this year, major league baseball attendance is up. The changes are working in terms of speeding up the game, making it, opening it up to the casual fan a little bit more and making it more accessible. Those things are working. There's a limited amount of help they can do. You know, the pitcher still fell a hundo and guys still strike out, especially if they wear Minnesota twins uniforms, they strike out a lot, but the sport is better.

It's trending in the good direction and people are catching on. So something like what you're proposing in the, in the general, you know, big, big scheme thing, an in-season tournament where there's a nice pot of gold at the end, some of these rookie players wouldn't like that extra pot of gold. They would. And I think the teams, if you sweeten the incentive for them, like if you win this tournament, you can move up five spots in the draft and that's more money. Or you can have a half million or million more dollars in your international bonus pool. Well, Ellie Dela Cruz signed for 65 grand.

She's here's my favorite. I'll leave you with this. He has a twin brother who's five foot eight. Wow. Yeah. Ellie Dela Cruz is like six four. How does that happen?

That's a player baseball and hit falls 120 miles an hour. And his twin brother is like David DeVito to his Arnold Schwarzenegger twins. Very good. Preston is in this scenario, but very nice. All right. So I'll see you on threads, John Manuel. Make it. So I'll be there. I'm already there. All right.

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