A plea to Commissioner Selig: Give fans a reason to care

The Major League Baseball regular season lasts six months — a staggering 162 games. Yet the final few weeks, a time that should be a culmination of the efforts of hundreds of ballplayers, are a veritable snoozefest. The average American, the typical baseball fan, or even the diehard fanatic, becomes numb to the excitement of "just another ballgame" by the time September rolls around.

To combat this annual apathy, members of the MLB commissioner's scheduling committee ought to consider the last weeks of the season in a unique way as they create the schedule. Why let the concluding weeks of the season be a formality between the regular season and the playoffs, when they have the potential to be nearly as exciting as the playoffs themselves?

How about this situation: A second-place team is three games off the lead going into a weekend series with a divisional frontrunner and, come Monday morning after a stellar weekend of play, the team finds itself in a tie for first place in the standings. Imagine the buzz that would surround a series of this magnitude during a pennant race. Fans may watch this sort of matchup in June with varying degrees of interest, but similar scenarios down the stretch would intrigue even casual fans. Games that were fleeting thoughts during the summer months become water-cooler conversation during September.

Essentially, September matchups have the potential to be especially captivating to fans because the results of these games have immediate and dramatic effects on the playoff race. The league office needs to take advantage of this to revolutionize the way baseball is viewed during the season's final month.

The scheduling committee ought to place games with potential playoff implications near the end of the season. This way, baseball fans would be tuning in for the drama of the playoff push, not just for the two teams on the field. I'm a Red Sox fan, and you would be hard-pressed to convince me to watch a seemingly irrelevant Phillies game during the summer. But give me a game between the Phillies and the Mets with immediate playoff implications, and you've got yourself a viewer.

Under the current model, a second-place team must rely on a combination of its own wins and the first-place team's losses if it hopes to move up in the standings and earn a playoff berth. Sound daunting? It is, because this creates a passive situation in which the second-place team must prevail over its random opponents while praying that the first-place team goes into a slide against another team.

I'm not thinking anything too extreme, like the Red Sox and Yankees playing all 19 of their games over the final 19 days of the season. But what's the sense in a season like this one, in which the Red Sox and Yankees played six games before May 1 and only three games during all of September?

Consider a situation that I mentioned earlier: the jam atop the National League East. At press time, the Mets are in first place, with Philadelphia two-and-a-half games back. Even if the Phillies have a perfect final week and go 5-0, the Mets will need to play sub-.500 ball for Philadelphia to have a chance to catch up.

Some fans will argue that the Phillies had their chance earlier in the season, but that's archaic thinking at best. They were the top two teams in the NL East last season, and under a renovated scheduling system, they would be playing each other during the final weekend this season to instill some meaning into their final three games.

Let the Phillies play the Mets instead of playing Washington, and make the Mets defend their lead by playing the Phillies instead of the woeful Marlins. Most baseball fans would not watch the games in the current schedule — good luck selling a Phillies-Nationals game to people outside Philadelphia or Washington, D.C. — but most could be convinced to watch a scorching playoff race.

On a superficial level, this new system may seem like nothing more than a publicity stunt; after all, the teams would play each other the same number of times anyway, be it in May or September. But the renovated arrangement does much more for the game. A revamped schedule for the final month of the season would inject some much-needed excitement into what is currently a dwindling interest in September baseball.

As it stands now, September is football season. If baseball wants to compete, it needs to evolve.