04/26/24
August 24, 2022
MLB Teams Will All Play Each Other in 2023: For the first time, the Major League Baseball schedule in 2023 will feature every team playing each other. This reduces divisional games from 19 to 13. Part of the schedule is a "natural rivalry" four-game series for each team, which is where I learned the natural rival of my Texas Rangers is the Arizona Diamondbacks.
Maybe because Fort Detroit and Fort Duquesne were somehow made bitter rivals during the so-called Pontiac's Rebellion?
posted by NoMich at 03:02 PM on August 24, 2022
Combination of this post + me seeing the Cardinals email announcing the 2023 Schedule led to a brief moment of hope that I might get to see the Rangers live next year.
Cards play a three-game series in Arlington in early June.
/sadtrombone
posted by Ufez Jones at 05:14 PM on August 24, 2022
Philadelphia-Toronto is ridiculous, too. They should have done Philly-Pittsburgh (intrastate) and matched the Blue Jays with Detroit (the closest MLB city to Toronto). But the whole thing is kind of silly.
posted by werty at 11:35 PM on August 24, 2022
Seattle is not who I would have guessed for the Padres, either. Neither would I have guessed that they'd put the Angels and Dodgers together instead of Giants-Dodgers. But I guess if the pairings are one NL team vs one AL team, sure, fine.
posted by LionIndex at 01:33 AM on August 25, 2022
One thing to keep in mind about these forced "natural" rivals that MLB has created is that these are AL v NL matchups. Still, I would've gone Detroit v Milwaukee
posted by NoMich at 09:42 AM on August 25, 2022
Texas-Houston would've been the matchup if the Astros didn't move to the AL.
Rangers-Cardinals would have been nice, given the World Series meeting and the fact that a lot of fans in the pre-Rangers years in DFW were Cardinals fans. St. Louis is the first MLB team west of the Mississippi and its radio station was a 100,000-watt blowtorch that reached all the way to Texas.
But the Cardinals-Royals is a no brainer.
posted by rcade at 10:05 AM on August 25, 2022
I always thought the Padres should have gone to the AL instead of the Astros.
posted by beaverboard at 11:28 AM on August 25, 2022
Atlanta and Boston makes sense both from an historical view and from more recent rivalries in other sports. Until 1953 both teams played in Boston, and Fenway Park was only about a 20 minute walk from Braves Field. The rivalry between the cities began to grow in basketball with the duels between Bird and Dominique Wilkins. Celtics vs Hawks is still a special game regardless of their relative records. Then there is football; 28 - 3 says it all.
posted by Howard_T at 06:32 PM on August 25, 2022
Detroit and Pittsburgh are the two teams that stuck to the wall closest to each other when MLB did the spaghetti noodle test, I see.