Tomorrow is Halloween, and until last night I was petrified with fear, scared almost out of my wits ... of an asterisk.
The one on the World Series schedule. * Game 7, if necessary, on Halloween night.
It was possible if the Philadelphia Phillies hadn't won the World Series in five games. And had the storms stayed in the Northeast one more day, we would have moved that asterisk back to November. The only other time that has happened, it took the 2001 terrorist attacks. This time, though, it might only have taken an extended bout of bad weather.
However, baseball has ensured that next season, bad weather will not push the Series into November. It went ahead and pushed on its own.
The tentative 2009 schedule, released to scandalously little fanfare in mid-September, places a potential Game 7 on Nov. 5.
Enough is enough. Shorten the baseball season.
And while you're at it - since the two seasons now intersect, which is also horrifying - trim the NBA season as well. More on that later.
The idea that a season can span 10 months, including spring training, is ridiculous. Everybody concerned - players, fans, the leagues, the networks - suffers on nights like Monday's Game 5, Part I in Philadelphia, potentially the season's climax, played in conditions similar to the bishop's round of golf in Caddyshack.
There's simply no way to remedy this except to shorten the regular season. There are too many teams, traveling too much, playing too many games crammed into too narrow a window. It's better to go backward in regular-season games than in postseason games (and teams).
The last time there were only 154 scheduled games, there were 14 fewer teams, four fewer divisions and two fewer playoff rounds. But 154 seems to be the magic number.
The easiest place to trim is interleague games: The American League plays 18 each, the National 15. Get them down to nine each. Keep the division schedules as they are, juggle the interdivision games accordingly and you're there. Juggle how? That's baseball's problem; it never should have created two leagues with an uneven total of teams.
If that's not enough, knock the league championship series back to best-of-five. But that should be enough. Eight fewer games, with a few old-fashioned doubleheaders - worth considering anyway, now that we're entering the next Great Depression - and the season can both start later and end earlier.
