Baseball’s 2013 Schedule Will Begin On A Monday

Wednesday, Major League Baseball released the entire 2013 schedule for all 30 teams. This gives fans and teams several months to make plans to attend games.

The season is scheduled to begin Monday, April 1 (although there’s already talk that a game might be switched to Sunday, March 31 for ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball) and end on Sunday, September 30 — the first time since 2010 that it will end on a Sunday.

It won’t be too long — perhaps another week or two — before Major League Baseball will release the 2013 schedule. This is the most-anticipated schedule in recent years, due to the move of the Astros to the American League, realignment, and year-round interleague play.

They could probably use those extra days for tiebreakers this year, due to the tight wild-card races. That could get real interesting down the stretch in 2012.

About this time of year, the thoughts of some -- at the very least, the thoughts of those whose teams are out of playoff contention -- turn to the following season and their team’s future. Part of those thoughts, of course, include team schedules.

We received an intriguing hint about at least one team’s 2013 schedule during the announcement by the Dodgers Sunday that Vin Scully will return next year:

About a month ago, I wrote on this topic, laying out some of the proposals and noting:

Sources cautioned that the 2013 Major League Baseball schedule, and the precise new configurations, are still being discussed.This doesn’t appear to have changed in the intervening time. Wednesday, Rob Neyer weighed in on this topic, wondering if proposals to make the schedule more balanced are misguided, and writing that perhaps a more unbalanced schedule wouldn’t be so bad.

There’s really just one guarantee in life.

Nope, not taxes. If you’re smart enough you don’t have to pay them.

Whatever Major League team you root for, that team’s schedule is likely to be quite different in 2013, both in the teams it plays and the number of games played inside and outside its division, once realignment occurs.

There’s also this:

One of the biggest complaints about the unequally sized major leagues -- 16 teams in one, 14 in the other -- is that teams don’t play identical schedules, as they did in the pre-Wild Card era.

Oh, it was so simple then. With single leagues before 1969, everyone played everyone else 22 times, or 18 after expansion to 10 teams. With two divisions, you played everyone in your division 18 times, everyone in the other division 12 times (this changed a bit after the AL expanded to 14 teams in 1977).

This will require changes in the way schedules are created, because that alignment will require at least one interleague series to be played at all times during the season.

ESPN.com’s Jayson Stark has a summary of the sorts of changes that will occur.