Column: Neutral-site World Series hopefully a one-and-done

In the midst of a pandemic, one can’t be too picky.

Major League Baseball is less than a week away from completing its truncated season, and given the odds it faced at the beginning of this perilous, three-month-long journey, that’s quite an accomplishment.

So, we’re surely not going to complain about a World Series between teams from opposite coasts being played in a sparsely populated stadium in the heart of Texas.

That said, let’s hope this is a one-and-done.

MLB isn’t the NFL.

Any thought of transforming the World Series into some sort of Super Bowl-like spectacle, played in a single city that is chosen years in advance, should not be part of a much-needed discussion on modernizing the game.

Scott Boras, the most prominent agent in baseball, has been pushing this idea for at least a decade, long before anyone could’ve envisioned it would become necessary to help navigate through a pandemic that has claimed more than 220,000 American lives and some 1.1 million around the world.

He brought it up again this week in an interview with The New York Times, coinciding with the start of a World Series between the Los Angeles Dodgers and Tampa Bay Rays that is being played at Globe Life Field in Arlington, Texas.

When Boras speaks, it’s certainly worth listening. He wields enormous influence within the game, and anything he is proposing is surely with a well-honed eye toward increasing revenues — and, by extension, the salaries of his clients.

“We have to be forward-thinking about how we create a game that has attention above all other sports,” Boras told the Times. “It’s already given us an indication of what the current, traditional approach has provided, and that is that baseball does not receive the attention of the Super Bowl.”

No one can...

source https://www.chron.com/sports/article/Column-Neutral-site-World-Series-hopefully-a-15671178.php