Pursuing Veritas

The Major League Baseball offseason is here, the hot stove is (allegedly) heating up, and labor unrest is already crackling in the distance, with people are whispering about a potential work stoppage in 2027. So, in the spirit of hope, frustration, and maybe a little foolish optimism, here are a few of my proposals for a better way forward for baseball.

My goal here? Simply what I think will make the game better for all involved, but especially for fans who are concerned about the continued health and longevity of the game. Will some of these make people angry? Sure. But here are my thoughts,

Systematic Changes

Reduce the Season to 154 Games: Let’s start big: return the season to 154 games, restoring a more reasonable pace, reducing injuries, creating better competition late in the season, and giving players room to breathe, especially if MLB is increasingly committed to global travel, mid-season events, and expanded playoffs.

Add Two New Teams: “If you’re not growing, you’re dying,” as the saying goes. It has been far too long since new teams joined the league, and it’s time to add some expansion franchises. Personally, I would favor Oakland and Montreal, but cogent arguments can be made for at least half a dozen cities. This would necessitate…

Realignment: Maintaining the American League and National League, create four geographically aligned divisions with four teams per division. Aim to maintain tradition while introducing cleaner scheduling, better travel efficiencies, and more meaningful division races with this format. This would also allow the current 6 team-per-league playoff format to continue.

Save Starting Pitching

Connect the DH to the Starting Pitcher: If your starting pitcher exits before completing five innings, your designated hitter exits too. That DH spot immediately reverts to traditional National League rules, meaning the pitcher’s spot returns to the lineup. The idea here is that if teams want an actual DH, they should be incentivized to develop and use real starting pitchers, guys who can actually go deep into games. This isn’t just nostalgia; it’s about restoring pace, strategy, and value to the role of a true starter. You want the DH? Earn it by investing in pitching that can last.

ABS Challenges: The Automated Ball-Strike (ABS) system is coming soon, so this is not so much a change as a proposal for implementation: challenges should get tied to the starter too:

• Each team gets one challenge per inning as long as their starting pitcher is still on the mound.
• A correct challenge returns the challenge back to you.
• Unused challenges roll over.
• The away team effectively starts with one challenge (because top of the first).

This gives strategy to ABS use rather than turning it into chaos—and rewards teams who keep starters in longer.

Expand Rosters to 27, But Cap Pitchers at 13: It is time to acknowledge reality: players break. The season is long. Pitching workloads are ridiculous. And bench depth has evaporated. My solution? Implement 27-man rosters but allow no more than 13 pitchers except on doubleheader days. This gives teams more flexibility without turning every game into a bullpen parade.

Salaries and Such

End Arbitration and Add Restricted Free Agency: Once players have three years of service time, they enter free agency. No more holding a player hostage for six or seven seasons until they are all but certainty past their primes. Three years and then they get to offer their services to the highest bidder—with the exception that each team may tag one first-time free agent player (per offseason) and match any free agent offer they receive. The idea here is that players will get to free agency faster, while also allowing teams the chance to keep homegrown stars.

Salary Cap and Floor: This goes hand-in-hand with getting rid of arbitration and speeding up free agency. The big ask here for teams is financial transparency; the big ask for players is the first official limit on salaries. The cap will need to be tied to league revenue and automatically adjust each year. And it will need to be accompanied by a salary floor, which will prevent owners from siphoning revenue-sharing money into private yachts rather than actually investing in their teams. An NFL-style hard cap (rather than an NBA-style apron system) would be my preference here, because baseball should…

Keep Contracts Simple: The NBA has a salary cap and floor but has approximately five million ways to work around it, defer contracts, figure out dead money, and make every trade more complicated that a lecture on atomic physics. Baseball should stay away from those kinds of shenanigans, making all contracts are fully guaranteed for a set number of years, with no deferred money. Signing bonuses, tiered contracts, and options would still be allowed. This will maintain the MLB’s competitive balance without turning the league into the NFL or NBA.

Integrity

Avoid Any Appearance of Favoritism: Professional sports will not survive a long-term erosion of trust. Sure, plenty of kids like WWE, but its popularity pales in comparison to major league and major college sports. Rule controversies, betting scandals, and collusion and conspiracy chatter might make headlines now, but the longer these problems persist, the more damage they do.

Baseball cannot afford even the appearance of favoritism, which means some changes are in order. First and foremost, the league needs to get a handle on sports betting and their attendant sponsorships. It is beyond hypocritical to talk about a player’s suspension for fixing games on a segment hosted by Draft Kings.

Likewise, the league needs to be careful with how it handles big-market teams, preferred matchups, or preferred networks. An above-board approach that includes transparent replay protocols, clear public explanations for controversial calls, and neutral network presentation (no more “league-preferred” partner bias) need to be adopted and enforced. If fans stop believing the game is fair, the game is dead.

Only the Best Umpires for the Playoffs

This shouldn’t be controversial, yet somehow here we are. Assign the postseason to the umpires who performed best that season. Period. These games should not be based on seniority, rotation, or dues paid. Simply have your best umpires call your best games.

Create a Select Committee on the Steroid Era: Baseball must tell the truth about its own history. The Steroid Era was complicated. MLB leadership looked the other way. Fans cheered. Records fell. Money poured in. We need a Select Committee tasked with answering one question: How do we tell the story of baseball in the 1990s and 2000s with integrity? The commissioner who oversaw this period is in, so let the players who didn’t actually break the rules in. Tell it accurately. Put the whole messy saga in context. It’s time to own up and tell the whole truth about baseball’s history.

Access and Entertainment

In-Season Highlight Games: Reducing the season to 154 games opens space for 2–3 “highlight game” mini-breaks each season that can be used to create national baseball moments, similar to how the NHL uses Winter Classics or the Four Nations tournament. There are options aplenty here, both in terms of international games (in London, Japan, Mexico) or at historic sites in the US (the Field of Dreams, Raywood, Cooperstown, Williamsport). Pausing the league to focus on these games can bring some much-needed national energy and focus.

Team-Specific Streaming Subscriptions on a Central MLB App: With all due respect to the generation running major sports leagues, the single best way to grow your following with younger generations is to make content more accessible, and a single access point is the best way to do that, If you subscribe to a team—let’s say the Cubs—you get every single Cubs game, no blackouts, no exceptions, plus select highlight games (ASG, special event games, maybe Sunday Night Baseball). That’s it. Simple. You pay for the team you love. Watch the team you love. The MLB needs to stop making it harder to watch baseball than it is to file your taxes.

*****

This is just my early-offseason brain dump. What other changes do people want to see? What’s missing? What did I get wrong? What do I need to tweak?

The only guaranteed outcome of proposals like these is disagreement—but baseball is worth arguing about. And if we’re going to fix the game before labor chaos hits in 2027, we might as well start now.