Major Changes In Baseball Next Year

This week MLB players and owners agreed to a new labor contract that will give us labor peace for 5 more years. Considering the amount of lockout talk we have had with the NFL and NBA it is nice to see one sport wrap things up quickly. The new agreement also will be giving us many big changes in the coming years:

Houston Astros moving to the AL West in 2013- As part of the deal in the sale of the Astros the new owner agreed to a move to the AL. This will now give us 15 teams in each league. Before the AL West only had 4 teams while the NL Central had 6. It seemed rather odd for them to be so unbalanced like this and I think this is a great move for baseball. This will now also give us interleague play all year round. This may be tough to get used to for some of the baseball purists but I dont see a real problem here. The exact details have not be ironed out but it doesnt look like teams will play more interleague games.

2 more wild card teams- There will now be 5 playoff teams in each league. People seemed to have loved the 1 game tie breaker games over the past few years so baseball is trying to capture the excitement and give us that every year. The first round of the playoffs will now only include the wild card teams and will only consist of 1 game. This will create a win or go home scenario for each team and should create a ton of excitement. The winner of the game will then go on to the regular 5 game series against the top seed.

HGH testing- The MLB will be the first team sport to have full HGH testing and let me tell you it is about damn time. Everyone knows about the baseball steroids problem over the past 25 years and the MLB is finally doing something about it. The testing will be year round and should help to prevent players from using performance enhancing drugs.

Increased use of replay- If agreed to by the umpires you will now be able to review if balls are fair or foul. You will also be able to replay if a player made a sliding catch or if he trapped the ball. I think you should always get the call right so anything to make sure of that is a good thing.