Time to inter interleague play

Cubs vs. White Sox is one of the few interleague series that manages to be compelling every year. AP

In the past, I haven't found myself in agreement with Jerry Reinsdorf on too many issues. I shuddered when the White Sox owner helped pave the way for the 1994-95 work stoppage with his hardline anti-union stance. I cringed in '97, when he ran up the white flag at the trade deadline by giving away his best starter and closer, even though his team was only 3 1/2 games out. I rolled my eyes back in the 1980s when he threatened to move the Sox to Florida if he didn't get a stadium deal.

But I have to admit Reinsdorf made some serious sense this past weekend. On Sunday afternoon, shortly before the White Sox finished off their weekend sweep of the Cubs, Reinsdorf got real about that annual scourge on the major league schedule, interleague play. "I wish we didn't play any interleague games," Reinsdorf told the Chicago Tribune. "At the end of the year, when you look at 162 games, the games in your division are far more important.

Amen, Jerry. Not to go all Hank Steinbrenner here -- speaking of owners I'm loath to agree with -- but like gas guzzling SUVs and The Real World, interleague play is a 1990s fad whose time has come and gone. When it debuted in 1997, interleague play was a welcome novelty, a much-needed attendance- and interest-booster for a sport that wouldn't fully heal from Reinsdorf's strike until a certain home run chase a year later.

It was fun and, as a goose to attendance numbers, it worked. On the first interleague weekend in 1997 I covered -- my grandchildren will be so impressed -- the Royals-Pirates series in Pittsburgh. Mets-Yankees it wasn't, but I was shocked at the buzz in the Steel City that weekend. Pirates ticket takers must have been shocked too, not to mention exhausted: 108,536 people turned out for those three games, a 115 percent jump in the Pirates' average crowd.

Attendance for interleague games still outpaces that for intraleague games -- but who cares? Drawing fans to ballparks isn't much of a problem these days (baseball has set overall attendance and revenue records each of the last four years), and the harm interleague play does far outweighs the benefits of higher attendance figures. It's not just the way interleague play puts American League pitchers like Chien-Mien Wang and Bartolo Colon at risk by asking them to bat and run the bases -- right on, Hank! -- or the absurdity of having two leagues commingle even while playing under different rules. (It's a debate for a different day, but if interleague play has taught us anything it's that the designated hitter should be an all-or-nothing rule. Ban it in the AL, institute it in the NL: I don't care, as long as both leagues are on the same page.)

The real harm in interleague play is in the scheduling inequities it creates. With the wild card, teams are competing for playoff spots against clubs that, thanks to interleague play, might have much easier schedules. As Joe Sheehan at Baseball Prospectus has spelled out in fascinating detail, this inequality has decided several postseason races in recent seasons. Last year, for example, the Padres finished the season with the best record in NL games (83-64) of any NL West team. But they had the division's most difficult interleague schedule -- though they're all in the same division, the Padres, Rockies and Diamondbacks had some unique AL opponents -- and, eventually, the worst interleague record. Arizona (8-7 against the AL) won the West, while San Diego's poor interleague mark (6-9) dropped it into a wild-card tie with Colorado (10-8). You remember how that turned out for the Padres.

It's bad enough that baseball's imbalanced schedule -- teams play more games against divisional opponents than other league foes -- forces clubs to chase wild-card spots with varying degrees of difficulty. The 18 interleague games only imbalance the schedule further. I'd rather see a team play those games in its own league, against opponents outside its division. Would interleague play be missed? Maybe in New York, Chicago and L.A., but even in those places, where there are legitimately interesting interleague rivalries, the luster seems to have faded from the matchups. Time and repetition have dulled the interleague's novelty. Those matchups are, as the Brewers' Russell Branyan said a few weeks back, "Just another game."

So, Mr. Reinsdorf, I beseech you: Call your pal Bud Selig, use some of that influence you supposedly had during the strike, and see if you can't convince him that interleague play should be a thing of the past. Need another reason? The 1 1/2-game lead your team (12-6 in interleague play) has in the AL Central might be larger if the Twins (14-4) and Tigers (13-5) hadn't spent the last month fattening up on the NL. I hop you don't miss a playoff spot by a game or two. Those crowds at U.S. Cellular Field this weekend were nice, but wouldn't you rather sell those tickets in October?