Mets News: New CBA changes DL rules, All-Star winner as World Series host

MLB’s new collective bargaining agreement will change the game in a couple of interesting, and useful ways going forward.

Both owners and the players association agreed to a new deal late Wednesday night before the old expired on Thursday, December 1st. The Associated Press is reporting two of the biggest changes will have to do with the disabled list, and the All-Star Game.

According to the AP’s source, MLB’s new disabled list policy will require players to stay on it for a minimum of 10 days now, down from 15. While it’s not as great a MiLB’s 7-day DL, it is an improvement that should help clubs out, specially teams like the Mets.

The last couple of seasons, the Mets staff has been hesitant, it seemed, at times to put their players on the DL hoping to keep them from missing the two weeks that was required while nursing a minor injury. Unfortunately, this hasn’t always panned out how they liked, so maybe this will change the way teams look at injuries and will hopefully allow them to play short-handed less.

The other flashy change the AP heard about has to do with home-field advantage in the World Series. Since 2003, the World Series’ host has been determined by which league wins the All-Star Game, but now, that is going out the door. The new CBA stipulates that the team with the better record will get four out of the potential seven World Series games at home, regardless of the outcome of the All-Star Game. No word yet on what happens if both teams have the same exact record, but we’re assuming they’ll have a tie-breaker if that occurs.

Ultimately, it seems like both MLB and MLBPA realized the All-Star Game experiment wasn’t worth it even if the numbers show it didn’t really skew titles that much. In the 14 AS games played between the two leagues since its competitive inception, the AL won 11 of them. However, in those 14 years, the AL won 8 World Series titles to the NL’s 6.

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It’s going to be interesting to see how these changes affect the 2017 Mets squad. Health is an issue with every team, so I’m willing to bet the 10-day disabled list helps us out quite a bit. As far as the All-Star Game is concerned, I’m a fan of this idea. The team with a better record should always be the host, but as the Cubs showed us this year, that doesn’t even matter some of the time. Nevertheless, the Mets hopes are pinned on a championship, and I’d love to see the World Series start in Queens, so bring it on.