Should the 162 game, six month MLB regular season be shortened?

Daniel Hansen: No

Yes, the MLB season is long, but it needs to be. 162 games are necessary to determine if teams are legitimately good or legitimately bad. We view the Cubs as being miles ahead of a team like the Twins, but in reality, the Cubs only won two more games than the Twins out of every eight games this year. That’s a close enough spectrum that if the season were reduced to even 80 games, chance events might favor a lesser team making the playoffs in place of a better, more deserving team. If the season had ended this year on June 15 after about 65 games, the Dodgers wouldn’t have made the playoffs and Cleveland would have needed to win a tiebreaker with the Royals to be included. Baseball is a game where even the best of hitters succeed only three times out of ten, and teams usually need to string multiple hits together in order to score. In order to eliminate the factors of luck and chance, the full 162-game schedule is necessary in order to determine who the best teams in the league are.

Jaden Johnson: Yes

The Major League Baseball season is entirely too long. I mean, come on, 162 games per season? Even as someone who loves watching baseball, a four hour long 1-0 baseball game in mid-May between two teams playing game number 46 out of 162 is incredibly difficult to get invested in. If the team I’m cheering for wins, great. If they lose, whatever, they’ve got six more games this week. This is one of the things that makes college football so great, you can’t just shrug off a loss. One loss can dramatically alter your season, so every game is that much more important. The MLB postseason is one of my favorite events in all of sports because of this same reason. Every game matters a ton, so you get high-quality, high-intensity baseball that even casual fans can enjoy. Of course, I’m not suggesting that the season be cut down to the size of a football season, but I think cutting it in half, or even down to 100 games, could dramatically increase the number of people paying attention to the regular season and give the fans a less watered down product.