King Kaufman's Sports Daily

Baseball playoffs: Sweeps week. Off days abound thanks to first-round routs. MLB needs a flexible schedule. Plus: "Frank TV," more.

Read more: Sports, Baseball, TV, World Series, Major League Baseball, Steroids, King Kaufman, Baseball Playoffs, Sports Daily, MLB

Oct. 8, 2007 | Thanks to the New York Yankees beating the Cleveland Indians in Game 3 Sunday, there will be at least one more baseball game played before the home run that Manny Ramirez hit Friday comes back to earth.

The other three series are all in the books as sweeps, the Colorado Rockies over the Philadelphia Phillies and the Arizona Diamondbacks over the Chicago Cubs in the National League, the Boston Red Sox over the Los Angeles Angels in the American. Ramirez won Game 2 in Boston with a home run that may have left orbit, and he hit another one in the clinching Game 3 Sunday that would have been notable if not for Friday's causing an international incident by entering Chinese airspace.

Still, Ramirez's blasts notwithstanding, the story of this postseason so far is the Rockies, who have won 17 of their last 18 games. The pundits are debating whether the five-day stretch between the Rockies' clinching win Saturday and the first game of the NLCS Thursday will cool them off, but what we should be debating is why we need five days off in a row. Why isn't the Rockies-Diamondbacks series starting Monday?

If the Indians had beaten the Yankees Sunday, there would have been a three-day stretch with no baseball, the equivalent of an All-Star break, right smack in the middle of the playoffs. That's not right.

Baseball is predicated on playing every day, or close to it. For a six-month season, it's the everydayness of baseball that governs it. Teams have to find starting pitchers for six games a week, keep bullpens fresh, get through the grind of it all. Then, suddenly, when it's time to decide the championship, off days sprout like mushrooms. Teams are playing a fundamentally different game in October.

The main issue isn't momentum or rhythm or hot teams staying hot. It's pitching. Adding off days changes the very nature of baseball, because it reduces the number of starting pitchers a team needs to get through a series. If the Rockies and Diamondbacks had wanted to, they could have had the same starting pitcher work consecutive games, the last game of the division series and the first game of the NLCS.

For all the moralizing about how steroids are endangering the "integrity of the game," here's something that's playing kickball with that integrity. One starting pitcher in consecutive games, in this day and age? That's not big-league baseball, it's a video game.

And that's not to mention the increasingly long fallow stretches fans have been asked to sit through as the playoffs have expanded. Baseball and the TV networks wanted the World Series to start and end on weekdays this year, so more days off have been added to back everything up from a Saturday to a Wednesday start.

Next page: There could be seven off days before the World Series. Plus: Items. "Frank TV," Rollins, more