Last week, Major League Baseball published the program for its 2015 season. You could have realized it starts later and ends after previous seasons, however, each team plays 162 games, as they have the same baseball season length for years. But the question is that did MLB arrive in this a seemingly random number?
The number of matches and competitions
Let us come from 19-20. There is baseball then, however that is when the National and American Leagues depended on a season span that could endure for more than 40 decades. At the moment, it had been simple mathematics: 2 leagues eight teams there weren’t any branches yet supposed each team had seven competitions. For a couple of decades ago, teams had played all their opponents 20 times to get a 140-game year old. Back in 1920, it has been enlarged to 22 matches against all seven competitions, 11 at home and 11 away, leading to a 154-game year old.
Subsequently, leagues started enlarging. To play 22 matches against each competitor could call for a 198-game season, therefore MLB depended on 18 matches per competitor for nine competitions, for an overall total of 162 games.
(Thorn explains yes, in 1961, after the AL had enlarged, however, the NL had perhaps not the championships played distinct baseball season length. “The two World-Series contestants started their regular seasons April 11 and concluded on October inch,” he states. “NL had days away.”)
The summer season
The summer season was 162 games since, however, it has taken a while to maintain it all there. “Despite further expansions, 162 became the defacto standard, and you’d to get increasingly harder arithmetically to create it work,” Thorn says. “When we moved to two 6-team branches [per league] at 1969 the – that I presume brilliant – the solution is to possess more matches from the teams in your branch, hence permitting one to conserve the 162-game season”.
Along with a third branch in every league in 1994, the debut of interleague-play in 1997, your last expansion to 30 teams full of 1998, and, of late, the realignment of those leagues which required perpetual interleague games last season was designed for more complicated scheduling yet the summer baseball season length reaches 162 games.
What is baseball season length today?
Nowadays, teams play with 76 competitions against division competitions, 66 contrary to non-division club teams, along with 20 interleague games – or even 162 games. It works, however it seems somewhat arbitrary. The reason why the program has remained at 162 matches is mainly due to altering it’d be quite so tricky.
“Nobody would like to stop trying dwelling dates,” Thorn says. “If we moved along to 158 matches, then each team could need to offer two dates and that has earnings” A more season could indicate an end even after in the season compared to overdue October/early November World collection lately. And if the teams decided to play at a warmer, more impartial location (improbable awarded, again, the possible hit to ticket earnings ) this might lead to some serious winter at the championship matches.
It isn’t merely the bureaucratic intricacies that have retained the entire year interval constant (even though trying to assume the MLB Players Association and the team members attaining a deal to ever add or subtract an individual game will be most likely excuse enough). Baseball is also, after all, a sentimentalist’s match. “It turns into the 11th commandment: 162 games” and has its own baseball season length.