Lists about negativity are way easier to come up with, especially when it comes to complaining about baseball.  I personally still think that MLB is the best sport and it’s my favorite, and I think often times it gets unfair treatment that isn’t given to other major sports (steroids, exclusivity on packages, etc.).  In fact, just for that, next week’s list will either be the best things about baseball or the biggest double standards when it comes to comparing baseball to other sports.  But until then, it’s time for some complaining.  Here are the worst ideas baseball has had since the 90s.

7. Day Off After Opening Day
Finally, after suffering through the winter and pretending to have your own fantasy NBA team to get through the worst months of the year, you have baseball!  And after Opening Day, clearly one of the best days of the year, you have…nothing.  I guess the reasoning is in case there is a rainout they can make the game up the next day, but Opening Day should not be simply a tease that you have to wait 48 hours to get your next fix.
 
6. Keeping Bud Selig as commissioner
Most of these ideas came from him, especially if you believe in “the buck stops here.”  I’m not as anti-Bud as many other people are, but some things he says in interviews absolutely is maddening.  For example: in a discussion about why the team with the best record in the league can’t get home-field advantage in the playoffs and World Series, he says that it’s because of “travel concerns” with respect to getting hotel rooms and transportation.  What?  Sometimes the LCS ends on Thursday and the World Series begins Saturday…so you don’t know where the first game of the World Series is going to be played two days before.  If you’re going to lie, at least have the lie make sense.
 
5. "What a Game!" Ad Campaign
This was back in the mid 90s when baseball was facing its “identity crisis” and had to reach out to new fans, and try to make the game seem hip.  They produced a series of annoying commercials with the tagline “What a Game!”  They were incredibly lame.  Some of them featured bands singing Take me Out to the Ballgame, including one version by the Goo Goo Dolls that threatened to become the worst rendition ever played.  Worse yet, it got about a 6 times per game rotation.  Baseball was never and is never going to be known as a hip sport because of how slow it moves and the fact that there is a lot of standing around.  Its appeal is in its second-to-none live experience, history, strategy, and stats.  Thankfully, they have kind of figured that out since this abomination of a campaign.
 
4. Not embracing fantasy baseball
And to a different extent, you could put gambling into this discussion too.  The NFL pretty much opening embraces the fact that people gambling trillions of dollars on their games every week, which is why they do what they do with their injury reports being mandatory and withholding information to be a huge no-no.  But since that’s really not provable, the fantasy portion is.  You will hear announcers, studio commentators, the NFL website, and even players themselves openly discussing their fantasy teams.  That doesn’t happen much in baseball. 
In fact, I can’t ever remember a single case of that happening.  If you took away fantasy from baseball, how much would its popularity decline?  I’d say 15%.  By embracing the fact that hundreds of thousands (millions?) of fans play fantasy, you’d open the door to more people playing out of interest.  Instead, baseball threatened to sue websites that carried their stats for copyright infringement, which may have been their worst single decision.  They have improved a bit since then, but it’s still nothing like the NFL.
 
3. Playoff game start times
3 p.m. start times are bad enough.  The 10:00 p.m. games (or freaking 11 if you’re east coast) are horrible.  But the worst of all are the noon starts.  Think about 2008 Brewers fans.  They finally get into the playoffs, couldn’t be more excited, and then they are forced to take off of work or play hooky because of oddball start times.  The thinking is that there are more viewers available for the rest of the games…but that doesn’t stop MLB from sometimes having the freaking NLCS and ALCS on at the same time.  What sense does that make?  And I doubt that casual Brewer fans are tuning into the Rays/Angels ALDS series either.
 
2. Home field in the World Series for winner of All-Star Game
This one has been discussed so much that it’s pointless to go through all of the reasons again, but the simple fact is that there are about 500 stupid things about making the game for home field, and precisely zero positive reasons, or reasons that make sense at all.  If someone has no passing interest in watching the World Series, then why in the world would that same casual fan give a crap about seeing an exhibition game that determines whether one team gets one extra home game three months later?
 
1. Blacking out all Saturday games
This one makes me angry just thinking about it.  If you live in Chicago, the only times you ever get to see Cardinal games on Saturday is if they are playing the Cubs or Sox, if the Cubs and Sox both have a night game, or if the Cards have a night game.  That comes to about 5 or 6 games a year.  Sometimes, even if the Cubs and Sox both have a night game, they were inexplicably still show a different game despite the fact that there are unquestionably more Cards fans than any other non-Chicago team in Chicago except the Brewers.  Two Saturdays ago, they showed the freaking Yankees over the Cardinals.  Whenever you try to explain to someone this rule, they are in disbelief the first time they hear it.  It goes like this:

You: We can’t watch the Cards game today.

Other person: Why?

You: Blackout rules

Other person: Well let’s just go to a sports bar and watch it.

You: No…that’s blacked out too…you literally can’t watch the Cardinal game anywhere today.

They then drag you to a sports bar, only to see it blacked out, and then get furious.  The process is then repeated the next time that person tries to explain it to someone else.  It’s just as bad when you’re in Vegas, want to put some money on a Saturday game, and then are forced to watch on Gamecast or the scrolling sports book thingys.  It is the most annoying thing about baseball.  And it’s completely without logic.  MLB thinks that I will watch any Saturday game because it’s the “game of the week.”  Instead, a potential viewer is lost for the day.