Awesome night card, pt. 180

Major League Baseball isn't any different from any money-making business. It's always looking for new ways to rake in the cash. Often that means turning to the marketing department and asking "what gimmick ya got?"

But gimmicks have lousy stamina.

Take the use of black uniforms for teams that had never before incorporated black into their color scheme. This is what the website Uniwatch defines as BFBS or "black for black's sake." The color choice seemed like a good idea at the time. Black became so popular for a period that it seemed like half of major league baseball was the Raiders.

I grew tired of it quickly. The uniforms left me numb, then irritated, then so enraged that it's all I could think of for two innings as I mentally burned every black jersey in the team gift shop. They are ugly to me now. We've fallen so far from when Frank Thomas first started walking around in those things.

I submit that the same can be said for interleague play.

Interleague play was a cool venture when it first began. Personally, I never stepped on board because I'm a traditionalist and I like my World Series unsullied, but, whatever, I can't deny that a lot of people thought it was awesome when it first began.

Years later, there is now interleague play every day, which we're supposed to like better than pockets of interleague play. But I don't like it any better. Personally, I find it confusing. It actually makes my job at work more confusing.

I'll bet there are a few people in baseball who are more confused by the development, too. I know I wouldn't want to be a schedule maker. We're also seeing another result of interleague: bizarre rain delayed games.

Do you think that the Indians and Rays would have waited so long to re-start a game -- all the way until after midnight -- if they knew that the teams would play at some other point in the season? But with rain in the forecast for the other games in that series, and no other opportunity to meet again, umpires decided to wait it out. Maybe they shouldn't have, but that's the kind of pressure that interleague is placing on everyone. Two teams in the American League play each other just six times because supposedly everyone is bored if MLB dared to play the same two teams 8 or 9 times in a year. We have to make sure "rivalry week" is intact when the Rays play the Marlins! (And we can't schedule doubleheaders anymore because they don't make teams enough money).

So, because MLB needs to placate the casual fan and get its interleague bucks, poor game-goers in Cleveland waited around for a game that ended at 3 in the morning.

This isn't to say that all new ideas are gimmicks or aren't thought through. But "big-picture" people are lacking in a lot of facets in life and the result is you get a lot of people looking around saying, "what happened here?"

It's the same thing I say when I see a card of a Met, Blue Jay, Red, Royal or Oakland A dressed in a black uniform.

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Night Card Binder candidate: Al Leiter, 2004 Leaf, #164
Does it make the binder?: Yes. There is room for everyone in the night card binder. Ebony and ivory living together in perfect harmony.