What is the next thing that can be done to improve baseball?

I love your suggestions!!!

1. Put the mound back up, maybe even to 18 inches.

2. Get rid of the DH in the American League.

3. Instead of adding teams, reduce it to a round number, with 4 in each division for a total of 24 teams, or

3a. put 4 teams in each of 4 divisions in the 2 leagues for a total of 32 teams. (This would get rid of that stupid wild card junk!!)

4. Play on grass.

5. Change contracting around to a low base contract with incentives for performance. (For instance, give A-Rod about a million dollars and let him play to see how much he wants it!)

6. Never put the instant replay in!! (The nice thing about baseball is that it is a game of inches determined by the umpires . . . the "human factor" keeps it real. Not fair, but real.)

7. Kick anyone found using a drug on a specified list from this point out of the league, never to return. Eliminate all talk about what happened before and just move forward with it. Make a freaking impact today!!

8. Forget parity in the league. I hate the Yankees, but if they want to buy the championship, let them. Gives the Rays something to shoot for . . . (Same goes for the Red Sox!)

9. Eliminate the domes.

10. More double-headers on Friday afternoons.

11. Re-invent the cheap seats for the lower-income fans. It costs a mint to go. Want to get the game back respond to the people in the cities wherein the teams play. It isn't about the burbs anymore, it's about young boys and girls getting as close as they can to Albert, Derek, Alex, and Miguel.

12. One of those teams above needs to be from Japan, and the other from South America or Mexico. Start the thing going truly international instead of the Ichiro-Show!

There's a round dozen. Off the cuff. Hope you enjoy!!

Great question!!!!

1.) Agree with raising the mound, but leave the ball alone. With the mound raised back up, the power pitchers might be able to complete a few games. It was actually thrilling to watch the box scores to see who, Juan Marichal or Sandy Koufax, would get enough shut outs to lead the league. Now we're lucky if a guy gets 2.

2.) Ditch the DH. Either make a better rule (there IS a possible better rule) that both leagues can agree to or lose the AL atrocity.

3.) Ditch replay. For crying out loud. Baseball doesn't need it and they have made all the sports pretty generic as it is.

4.) Put all the playoffs on mainstream TV. Even if most people do have cable, some don't. Football is beating the pants off of baseball by mainstreaming everything.

5.) Keep in mind the fans in, oh, one or two decisions a century. The Players' Union and the Commissioner's office really act as if the fans are the dirty unwashed hicks they must tolerate in order to make their money.

Players can't actually call time-out; they request it, but umpires almost always grant it. Stop that practice and speed up the game. Nomar and Ichiro don't need to step out of the box after every pitch.

You could contract players without contracting teams by reducing rosters to 22 players. No team should need more than 10 starting pitchers. This would also reward more versatile players from the bench.

Eliminate body armor or specify that being hit on armor will not count as an automatic walk. Move the batter's box off home plate to give pitchers the inside corner again.

Intentional walks would be worth two bases--maybe this would be hard to judge, but you might say that a 4-0 walk will be judged as intentional. At the least, a pitcher would always have to throw one in the strike zone.

A return to the 15" mound would be very hard to adjust to all of a sudden. I doubt if that is a great idea.

Scoring is pretty high, i think the Yanks and Red Sox were pulling about 5 maybe 6 runs a game and that Texas output versus Baltimore, 30 runs? Ridiculous. But as previously stated, "chicks dig the long ball", and offense apparently brings in dollars.

These rule changes are in every sport: the semi-circle under the rim in basketball, lower pitching mound in baseball, no hand-checking (installed because the Knicks defense was too good for people like Jordan and Reggie Miller), all the changes to hockey (plus the shootout, which i hear people enjoy actually), increased enforcement of defensive holding on cornerbackers (the Ty Law Rule essentially), tighter baseballs increased home runs....

Sports is cyclic, eventually we'll get to a point where there's TOO much scoring and they'll adjust but 30 years after that, they'll go back again.

I dont kno about getting rid of teams, that seems a little drastic. Unless the cities aren't supporting the teams and those teams are falling in the red, you can't just disband them altogether.....the Florida Marlins front office, maybe, cuz they can't afford a hot dog stand, let alone a baseball team.

Braves need starting pitching, players that can hit when it counts, players who can bunt and move runners around, and players who play with consistancy and know how to run bases. Now that I think about it, they need a team. Any team can have a bad year. Injuries are part of the game and are no excuse. But you would think the hitting coach could teach these guys how to bunt and not swing at so many bad pitches. If a batter swings at non-strikes, why should the opposing pitcher throw strikes. It also seems odd that so many pitchers on one team get injured and for so many seasons. Makes you wonder if the pitching coach is doing something wrong. Anyway, they are my team and this next season will be better.

I don't know maybe it can vanish from the earth.............

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Na I'm just kidding I know many people are gonna give me thumbs down, jeeze now a days no one can take a joke or have a little sense of humor. Anyways, I think they should stop paying these athletes so much money. For whay they do they get paid too much money. No wonder they're putting so much things in their system. If this crap(excuse my language), gives them the ability to perform better even though it's illegal and harmfull, then of course they'll keep using it so they can win more$$$$$. Think about it it's all about the $$$$$$$$.

Return the mound to 15 in. in height..i like to see a nice pitcher duel every once in a while...they should also change the DH rule to both leagues this is good for the offensive part of the game...

I brought up a lot of these points a few weeks ago, another point I made was having minimum specifications for ball parks. they are to small today.

On that note they will never change it. Every chage has been made to benefit hitters because they want to lure average fans to the ballparks at the expense of the true fan. Remember A-Rod needs that $300 million to feed his family.

they defintiely need to get rid of a couple of teams- I'd like to get rid of 6 (leaving 6 divisions of 4, 12 teams in each league)

who would miss: TB, FLA, KC, PITT? still need to find 2 more though...

They could also call a strike a strike and limit the number of pitcher replacements you can make in an inning or a game. There 's no reason for a game to take more than 3 hours.

A salary cap, but the union will never allow it. Baseball needs a cap with a ceiling to keep the Yanks and Sox in check, and a floor to force cheap owners from pocketing all of the team's money.