The San Francisco Giants played nine MLB games in their efforts to make the National League playoff field this season before seeing a National League opponent.
The Philadelphia Phillies had a seven-game American League losing streak before winning a game in defense of their National League pennant — and that win, five games into this season, came at Yankee Stadium.
Welcome to the first season of true interleague play in Major League Baseball, the first year every team is scheduled to play every team in its opposite league, a season in which the unbalanced part of the schedule has been reduced from six series against each division opponent to two.
Like it? Hate it?
“We’re going to find out if it’s a good move or not,” commissioner Rob Manfred told New York Post baseball writers Jon Heyman and Joel Sherman on their podcast just ahead of the season openers.
As for competitive balance, more than half the teams in the majors have played at least one interleague game through the first 12 days of the season (through Monday), with AL and NL teams splitting 36 cross-league meetings.
The New York Yankees and Texas Rangers are both 4-2; the Tampa Bay Rays, 3-0. The Pittsburgh Pirates are 5-2 (against both sets of Sox and the Houston Astros); the St. Louis Cardinals 2-1 against the Toronto Blue Jays; the Chicago Cubs 3-1 against the Rangers and Seattle Mariners.
Whatever that might suggest about the strength of either league after such a paltry sample, the obvious schedule-integrity issue is the one that has existed since interleague play began at the more abbreviated level 25 years ago: AL games can disproportionately impact NL playoff races and vice-versa.
The fact everybody plays each team in the other league at least once mitigates that by a chunk, and it’s further mitigated by expanded playoff fields that went into effect last year (40 percent of MLB makes the playoffs).
Will MLB’s new interleague schedule add more excitement?
But the biggest of the big deals is that the new schedule breaks up the often teeth-grinding monotony of 19 games against each division opponent every blanking year, whether Cubs-Reds, Rockies-Diamondbacks, Royals-Tigers or even Yankees-Red Sox.
“You can only watch so many games against your division before it becomes tedious,” Cubs president Jed Hoyer said. “I feel like we have reached that point. It’s a great rules change. I wish it was even less.
“I just think the more you play different teams in different leagues, the better. The more the fans get to see different players and to have those guys come into this ballpark more often is good.”
It’s no wonder Hoyer — on behalf of Cubs fans — wants to see even less division play and more games against the AL. This year’s home schedule won’t include Aaron Judge’s Yankees, Shoehei Ohtani’s and Mike Trout’s Los Angeles Angels or the World Series-champion Houston Astros.
All the Cubs’ games against those teams are on the road this year.
Whether Hoyer gets his way in future seasons with an increase to at least a home-and-home against each team in the other league might come down to attendance trends and marketing impulses for the league after this first big change.
“One of the things [behind this move] — and relates to our media strategy and the commitment to the [local broadcast rights-holders] over time, but it also relates to our schedule — is the game became really local,” Manfred told Heyman and Sherman.
“People watched their individual teams; they saw their division opponents coming in very, very frequently. And one of the things we think is important to the growth of the game is that the game become more national. You can’t make the game more national unless fans in markets on a regular basis see some of the greatest players in the game.”
The benefits of interleague play
That means Ohtani on the north side of Chicago and Philadelphia and Milwaukee and Denver every year — even if he doesn’t sign as a free agent with a National League team. It means Mookie Betts going back to Boston — and to Kansas City and Baltimore.
“You may not love interleague games,” Manfred said. “But if you’re a Met fan, and you’ve got a chance to see Mike Trout, that’s a pretty good thing.”
As easy as it often is to find argument with Manfred, it’s hard to argue with any of his points on this one, even if TV money and marketing are driving the interleague increases, like all the other decisions from the commissioner’s office.
Heck, if this turns out anything like Manfred’s pitch clock this year, he might actually start earning a semblance of popularity around the game and its fans. God forbid.
Gordon Wittenmyer covers Major League Baseball for Sportsnaut. You can follow him on Twitter.