Back to the Chicago Cubs Newsfeed

Rob Manfred has tried to make MLB a national sport. Now TV rights might go national, too.

One of the reasons for the balanced schedule being adopted by Major League Baseball beginning in 2023 was the professed desire for more players to play in more cities. The argument went: Why should some players play in certain cities only once every six years because of some artificial “league” construct that was mainly an accident of history?

Presumably, this would make players like Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani more popular and marketable by having them play in every MLB stadium at least once every other year.

Has the balanced schedule done this? Not really. MLB attendance was up significantly last year over 2022 (70,747,365 compared to 64,556,658), but a lot of that can be attributed to more normalcy returning after the pandemic, not the schedule.