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Although I’m a stathead at heart, I’ve become a bit more willing, as I get older, to give credence to my subjective baseball opinions. Baserunning is generally worse than it used to be. Umpires call too many checked swings, swings. The canned noise at ballparks has crossed the line from “tolerable” to “punishing.”
Watching the last week of ball before the break, the game seemed dead. I don’t just mean the baseballs themselves, though that was part of it. I mean the players, the level of energy in the games, their intensity. Again, this is entirely subjective. I can’t back this up. I just know that watching players gut through a July heat wave made me think of late-September baseball, when so many guys just want to go home.
Maybe they did.
This year’s All-Star break hits as 59.5% of the schedule has been played, the third-latest the All-Star Game has been played by this measure. Last season’s was the second-latest.
The Midsummer Classic (highest % of schedule played by ASG, full seasons)
1973 60.2%
2024 59.7%
2025 59.5%
2018 59.4%
1974 59.1%
(For today’s purposes, we’re excluding years with no All-Star Game (1945, 2020) and years with a curtailed first half (1981, 1995). We’re also only counting the first Game in years when two were played.)
Before we dig any deeper, let’s talk about how the All-Star Game is scheduled. The first one was held back on July 6, 1933, planned as a one-off benefit during the Great Depression. Since then, the Game has always been scheduled in July, and most often during the second week of July.
All Four (distribution of All-Star Games by July week)
First 9
Second 64
Third 13
Fourth 4
The early and late windows have fallen out of favor. No All-Star Game has been scheduled outside of the second or third weeks of July since 1983, when the league held the game on July 6 to mark its 50th anniversary. (Also a big day in Joe Sheehan lore, ask me at the next in-person event.) The late window was a short-lived thing from 1969 through 1974; there has never been a late-scheduled game since. In modern baseball, the All-Star Game always occurs on the second or third Tuesday of July. It has been on the third Tuesday in four of the last seven years, though the 2020 game was scheduled for July 14, the second Tuesday.
So what explains this trend? The Y-axis here is the percentage of games played by the All-Star break. The X-axis is just time.
First off is Opening Day, a topic ESPN’s David Schoenfield looked at way back in 2015:
"For example, here are the starting dates for various years:
1910: April 14
1920: April 14
1930: April 14
1940: April 16
1950: April 18
1960: April 12 (although the American League didn't start until April 18)"
In 1961 and 1962, each league expanded by two teams and added eight games to the schedule. In 1969, a round of playoffs was added, and in 1994, another one. In 2012, a play-in game was added, and that expanded in 2022 to a best-of-three, with two more teams making the playoffs. These changes have made a mid-April start to the season a distant memory. Setting aside late starts due to pandemics and lockouts, the season has started in March five straight years now, and will probably start in March until the regular season is shortened sometime in the 2030s.
The season starts 17 days earlier than it did when the All-Star Game was invented. It starts one to two weeks earlier than it did in the 1980s. You can go back and look at my awesome chart if you want, but here’s an example of just how stable the sport’s schedule was for a long time,
Like A Rock (percentage of season played by the ASG)
1984 52.4%
1985 53.3%
1986 53.8%
1987 53.8%
1988 53.4%
1989 53.1%
1990 50.6%
1991 49.8%
1992 53.9%
1993 53.9%
I stopped there, but the numbers continue like that well into the 21st century. The All-Star Game happened just past the midpoint of the season, around the 14-week mark, like clockwork. Your baseball-tuned body just knew when it was happening. The All-Star Game hasn’t happened before the 55% mark since 2017, or 2012 if you round a lot of 54.8s up.
One of the points I have hammered over the years is that sometime around 1990, the people who run baseball stopped believing in the game. Maybe you can tie it to the disastrous CBS contract that ended the Game of the Week, or a changeover in ownership groups that brought in people less invested in the game as an institution, or the growth of the NBA as a second challenger alongside the NFL. Whatever the reason, the people who run baseball have spent the last 35 years chasing rather than leading. Playoff expansion, the conversion of leagues to conferences, the constant grab for every nickel.
In all that, MLB broke the season’s rhythm. The All-Star Game, still slotted in the calendar where it has been for most of its history, now arrives later in the season. The players have to play an extra week or two to get to the break, and it shows. We’ll exit the break with just two weeks to the trade deadline, barely 40% of the schedule left to play. It’s still the Midsummer Classic, but it feels more like the 60% Exhibition.
The fix here is simple: Move the game up. The All-Star Game is scheduled to be played at the same date it was when the season began in mid-April. Its scheduling should move in the same direction that Opening Day has moved. There’s plenty of room to push it forward a week and still have it in July. It even sets up the 100th anniversary Game, which can be played on Wednesday, July 6, 2033.
The “first half” is too long, the “second half” too short. MLB can make one small change to its calendar and, in doing so, make the season flow much better.
