2027 Season - Thought Exercise

[tzill]

An idea I was thinking of today:

The CBA expires on 12.1.26. No deal is reached. The owners vote to lock out. I would think the Giants (and other teams) would try and get all their young players off of the 40 man and onto a minor league roster. The minors will play in 27, so they wouldn't lose a year of development. They'd have to be careful with DFAs and such, but any player with an option could be reassigned to a minor league roster without the risk of losing him to another team.

That said, say the impasse breaks and MLB is ready to play regular season games around August 1. They decide on a truncated 48 game season. Here is my proposal:

Each team plays eight, six game series against ONLY teams in its division. For example:
Week 1: SF at LA
Week 2: SD at SF
Week 3: SF at AZ
Week 4: COL at SF
Week 5: SF at SD
Week 6: AZ at SF
Week 7: SF at COL
Week 8: LA at SF

Top two teams in each division make the playoffs. The two best records in each league get byes, the third division winner plays the #2 team with the worst record and the other two #2 teams play each other. Five game series. Division series would be top seed vs lowest seed, 7 games. CS 7 games, WS seven games.

Teams would save a lot of money on travel and it'd be interesting to see teams play each other all week. Mondays could be an off day for all teams (unless they have to make up a game).

This would only work in 2027 with a shortened season.

Thoughts, my alts?

 

[LHG]

An idea I was thinking of today:

The CBA expires on 12.1.26. No deal is reached. The owners vote to lock out. I would think the Giants (and other teams) would try and get all their young players off of the 40 man and onto a minor league roster. The minors will play in 27, so they wouldn't lose a year of development. They'd have to be careful with DFAs and such, but any player with an option could be reassigned to a minor league roster without the risk of losing him to another team.

That said, say the impasse breaks and MLB is ready to play regular season games around August 1. They decide on a truncated 48 game season. Here is my proposal:

Each team plays eight, six game series against ONLY teams in its division. For example:
Week 1: SF at LA
Week 2: SD at SF
Week 3: SF at AZ
Week 4: COL at SF
Week 5: SF at SD
Week 6: AZ at SF
Week 7: SF at COL
Week 8: LA at SF

Top two teams in each division make the playoffs. The two best records in each league get byes, the third division winner plays the #2 team with the worst record and the other two #2 teams play each other. Five game series. Division series would be top seed vs lowest seed, 7 games. CS 7 games, WS seven games.

Teams would save a lot of money on travel and it'd be interesting to see teams play each other all week. Mondays could be an off day for all teams (unless they have to make up a game).

This would only work in 2027 with a shortened season.

Thoughts, my alts?

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but optioning a player doesn't remove him from the 40 man roster. No players can even be optioned in the offseason because they cannot assign to minor league teams until spring training. Its similar to have the Injured Lists work. No season means no assignments to those lists.

The only way the Giants can get players off the 40 man roster is to release them or designate them for assignment. Both opens them up to being picked off by other teams. And the guys the Giants may most want to play in the minor leagues in 2027 are the ones most likely to get claimed by other teams. If the Giants are able to make those transactions (i.e. placing them on waivers) then other teams will be able to make claims or signing guys released outright.

Now maybe the teams collude to all do the same thing and have an understanding not to go after each other's players but then that just inflames tensions even further with MLBPA. No way do they let that skirt by without taking every action to stop it.

All that said, I hope that this plan doesn't go through. If the owners get the opportunity to do this, then they may see better opportunities to make money to make it permanent. If it doesn't work, meaning the fans don't show up for it because they don't want to see the same 4 teams for a mini season, then that further damages the sport's ability to rebound from the lockout. I think it would be a bad look. It is an out of the box idea that is intriguing in some ways, but probably not the way to go.

And, of course, I recognize that I could be horribly wrong on everything I said.

 

[calsnowskier]

Yup. Any player on the 40 is covered by the MLBPA, so they are “stuck”. And no way could the teams move forward with mass DFAs as that would be clear collusion (in what world would Eldridge not get claimed, for example?).

As for a shortened season nd the series of 6-game series’, I also agree with LHG in that the fans would bore of that too quickly. Maybe they could do something similar the the NFL, though, and have some kind of weighted schedule. Home/away series’ with your division, 1 series each with teams in your league, then West v West, Central v Central and East v East? I am not doing the math, so maybe that doesn’t line up. Not sure.

 

[LHG]

Yup. Any player on the 40 is covered by the MLBPA, so they are “stuck”. And no way could the teams move forward with mass DFAs as that would be clear collusion (in what world would Eldridge not get claimed, for example?).

As for a shortened season nd the series of 6-game series’, I also agree with LHG in that the fans would bore of that too quickly. Maybe they could do something similar the the NFL, though, and have some kind of weighted schedule. Home/away series’ with your division, 1 series each with teams in your league, then West v West, Central v Central and East v East? I am not doing the math, so maybe that doesn’t line up. Not sure.

Part of me wants the owners to overplay their hand and collude that badly and get taken to court and have the judge declare that all players are free agents and all teams have the ability to negotiate with any player. Probably couldn’t happen and even if it did, it may well kill baseball. Or maybe it would be wildly entertaining and help baseball recover nicely. Even if the latter, the giants would probably come out the worse for it, and that is saying something.