THE FRONT ROW with MARK NELKE: Some of these baseball ideas are a swing and a miss

I think about my dad a little more this time of year. 

He passed away on this day in 1980, during baseball's league championship series.  

(Why do I remember family deaths by the sporting events going on at the time, you may wonder? 

I dunno. Maybe it's a sports fan thing. Or a sports writer thing. Whatever. 

My mom, by the way, passed away during the 1992 Summer Olympics. The day before, we watched Charles Barkley elbow a player from Angola.) 

ANYWAY, DAD'S favorite baseball player was Pete Rose — the Charlie Hustle version with the Big Red Machine in the 1970s. 

By 1980, Rose was playing with the Philadelphia Phillies in the aforementioned league championship series, against the Houston Astros. The Astros, of course, began their existence as a National League team before eventually becoming a nemesis of Mariner fans and hated by many because ... well, you know why. 

Dad, of course, was not around by the time his favorite player Pete Rose' gambling saga went down. 

Had he been around, no doubt dad would have had a reaction to that, likely unsuitable to be printed in a family newspaper. 

I WONDERED what dad would have thought about the latest news to come out of Major League Baseball. 

In 1980, all baseball had was a league championship series, followed by the World Series. There was no wild card, no division series. 

The LCS, which started in 1969, was a best-of-5 back then. It was expanded to a best-of-7 in 1985. 

The division series started in 1995, following the players' strike in 1994. The wild card came aboard in 2012. 

We've gone from just two teams advancing to the postseason to now, where just about everybody, it seems, gets a participatory ribbon (except the Mariners this year, of course). 

With a lockout looming at the end of this season, MLB this week proposed several changes — some make sense, some are downright silly. 

Expand the league championship series from five to seven games? Sure, why not. More money for the owners, maybe to help make up for MLB's proposal to shorten the regular season from 162 to 154 games. 

MLB also wants to further spread out the postseason, by playing best-of-7 series over 11 days, rather than nine. More rest for pitchers, and the hope is, more star pitchers starting games, less bullpen games. 

Perhaps. 

Since "running up the pitch count" is now a strategy, teams still feel the need to yank their pitchers as the count nears 100, lest their arm fall off. 

Tell that to Nolan Ryan. 

Seems like guys started Games 1, 4 and 7 before, and lived to tell about it. 

Eventually, we'll just play one game a week in a series, and the same guy can start all seven games. 

The cool thing about the playoffs is, there is usually a game on every day. But more days without baseball, people start to forget the playoffs are still going on. 

Eliminate day games during the early rounds, because attendance for some games isn't quite as good? 

Why? As a TV watcher, I love baseball games scattered throughout the day.  

And, if the game is that big, fans are going to find a way to get to the ballpark, no matter when they start. Use those "sick" days, they say. 

Finally, MLB's proposal to have higher seeded teams pick their opponents in the first two rounds of the postseason sounds way too gadgety. Play who you're supposed to play. 

What next? A football game where the ball is placed at the middle of the field, and one player from each team races to the ball from opposite end zones, leading to a heckuva collision at midfield, and possession to the winner? 

Oh wait ... 

Dad probably would have a reaction to that last proposal in particular, likely unsuitable to be printed in a family newspaper. 

In the end, we'll probably just get used to whatever MLB gives us in the future, I suppose, like it or not.

Even the pick-your-opponent idea. 

Mark Nelke is sports editor of The Press. He can be reached at 208-664-8176, Ext. 1205, or via email at [email protected]. Follow him on X (formerly Twitter) @CdAPressSports.