Enjoying this weekend’s sneak preview of interleague play? Let’s go over what to expect when this picks up in June:
1. The Yankees, as members of the American League East, play the National League East. Well, except that they’re playing the NL Central’s Reds right now. And they’re playing the Mets and Braves six games each. Which means they won’t play the Phillies or Marlins at all.
2. The Mets, as occupants of the NL East, will face the AL East. Well, besides the Red Sox. And, as you know, they play the Yankees six times.
Got that straight?
You know the drill by now: Baseball’s schedule is a train wreck, run more like a county fair than a professional sports league. It relies on favors rather than formulas, on sentiment over systems. And nowhere is that more apparent than in the interleague portion.
You could argue that, intellectually, baseball’s interleague schedule since 1998 — it was more fair in its 1997 rollout — has been more offensive than the steroids scandal. At least everyone got to play by the same rules when it came to drug-testing, or a lack thereof.
The good news for fans that care about schedule integrity is that the outlook should improve next year, when the Astros move from the NL Central to the AL West _ creating six divisions of five teams each. The Players Association pushed for this change, figuring that all of their constituents should have an equal chance at qualifying for the postseason, so logic dictates that the union will lobby for a more rational slate of games, too.
And on this front, the white whale is the “rivalry series,” none bigger than our very own Yankees-Mets.
“I like geographical rivalries,” commissioner Bud Selig said Thursday. “I think it’s great. … The fans like it. You always want to do the right thing. When your fans like something, you have to be responsive to that and sensitive to it.”
Eh. The fans like it fine in May and June. Then, if their team misses the playoffs by one game, they wonder whether the schedule burned them. Because the schedule is patently illogical and, therefore, unfair.
I’m not an NFL cheerleader (I wonder how the sport’s powers sleep at night, knowing what the players do to themselves physically), but by golly, they have the schedule down. The season ends, and you know instantly whom your team is playing next year. There’s nothing like what occurred in 2007, when the Rockies successfully lobbied to get a home Yankees series (instead of the Padres) because they wanted the revenue.
The two sides aren’t that far along in laying out next year’s schedule. The announcement of the 2013 All-Star Game at Citi Field delayed that process because budgetary concerns caused the Midsummer Classic to be switched from Tuesday, July 9 to Tuesday, July 16; the 2008 All-Star Game at Yankee Stadium also took place a week later than normal. That has forced the teams and players to tear up some of which already had been discussed.
Future Hall of Fame manager Tony La Russa, now working as an adviser for Major League Baseball, has been surveying teams, getting their input for what works.
Yes, interleague play will be occurring all of the time, by necessity. There still figures to be a cluster of exclusively interleague action, as will occur this season (with the exception of one NL contest) from June 8-24. That window likely will be shorter, though.
So what would work? I propose:
1) 72 intra-division games, 18 each against your four neighbors, maintaining the unbalanced schedule that owners love (lowers travel costs, intensifies rivalries).
2) 60 games against the other 10 teams in your league (six each).
3) 30 interleague games, with three each against 10 clubs. Every year, you hook up one division with two divisions in the other league. In a three-year cycle, you play each interleague team in two series.
This would allow the Yankees and Mets (and Cubs and White Sox, and Dodgers and Angels, etc.) to play each other a total of six games, with each team hosting a three-game series, over a three-year cycle.
Don’t bet on this becoming reality, though. There are too many important people who don’t want to eliminate the regular visits from their rivals, no matter the competitive impact. It might get pared down from six annual games to three, but no shot there ever will be a season with zero.
“You have to do what’s fair,” Selig said. “You have to have the right format and go from there. Frankly, the Yankees and Mets have never complained about it.”
Couldn’t agree more with the first two sentences there. Couldn’t care less about the last one.
If it would just sign off on the short-term hit, then baseball could benefit from a long-term gain: Its fans would know that each team, each season, enjoyed a fully fair chance to win the World Series.
kdavidoff@nypost.com