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After months of waiting, the Kansas City Royals are back on the field. Granted, it’s for Spring Training games, but still–you can watch professional baseball players in actual games against other teams. The Royals last played a game on September 28, 2025, so it’s been almost five months since diehard Kansas City baseball fans were able to watch their team.
We all know that baseball is a marathon, which is part of its charm. The National Football League plays 17 regular season games a year. The National Basketball Association plays 82 regular season games a year, with the National Hockey League moving to 84 games a year soon. Major League Baseball? MLB blows them out of the water with 162 regular season games a year.
Nick Kappel, the Royals’ director of media relations, posted this, which really puts into perspective what is about to play out over the coming months:
The Royals played their first game a few days ago on February 20. Their last scheduled game is on September 27. That means that, outside the four-day All-Star break, Kansas City will have played a baseball game in nine out of every 10 days for over seven consecutive months.
Don’t get me wrong–I’m glad the Royals are back to playing baseball. I prefer when it’s baseball season to when it’s not baseball season. But at the same time, I wonder if MLB’s total number of regular season games has surpassed the point of diminishing returns, and that a return to the 154-game regular season is the way to go.
From 1904 through 1960, MLB had a 154-game season except for a few outlier seasons like immediately following World War I. The league only shifted to 162 games coinciding with the American League’s 1961 expansion. So many legendary MLB players played all of or most of their careers before the 162-game season, from Babe Ruth to Jackie Robinson, Ted Williams, and Stan Musial.
The argument for a 154-game season is that it maintains baseball’s unique cadence while eliminating the “filler” that happens in a 162-game season, and we can think of this on two core axes.
The first axis here is simply player quality. You want your best players to play all your games, but a 162-game season is grueling and very few players play in the whole thing. Last year, only 6 hitters played in 162 games, and only 22 starting pitchers made 32 or more starts. Every time one of the clear best players in the league doesn’t play, they are replaced by a less talented and less exciting player. Meanwhile, there were 51 hitters who played in 154 games, and 54 starting pitchers who made 30 or more starts–all of whom would have played every possible game in a shorter season.
The other axis here is game quality. There are some games that are just not attractive for fans or teams alike, and those games are early-season weekday games. That’s when the weather is the most questionable, when school is in full swing, and when teams haven’t built up excitement in the product. I took a look at the five least-attended home games for each of the AL Central teams last year, and the results are just about what you’d expect for those 25 games:
- 19 were April games
- 5 of the non-April games happened when teams were 9+ games behind first place
- 24 were Monday-Thursday games
- 0 were Saturday/Sunday games
You can’t just cut eight Monday-Thursday games in April and call it a day. But you can do some of that, and also cut weekday games throughout the year to provide more off days.
While it seems unlikely that the union or the owners would want to cut 120 games off the books, it can be balanced in two ways. First, increase the divisional series to seven games to get multiple high-revenue playoff games on the books. Second, timing it alongside an expansion from 30 to 32 teams would increase the total games played from 2,430 to 2,464.
Baseball will never get to a truly short season, and it shouldn’t. However, cutting just a few games from the calendar could have a knockdown effect that gives everyone a breather and just might result in a better product.