NEW YORK (AP) — This year’s World Series will be remembered for a rain delay that caused a game to end close to 2 a.m., a quagmire that led to a suspended game and a three-inning sprint to the finish.Strange, indeed.Still, Philadelphia Phillies versus Tampa Bay Rays also had its share of exciting moments, courtesy of some remarkable young players. For the first time in six years, the World Series produced three, one-run games.But no matter how entertaining the Series was at Tropicana Field and Citizens Bank Park, the audience at home largely tuned out. The 8.4 television rating was 17 percent below the previous record low set two years ago. When the Phillies last won the title in 1980, their six-game victory over the Kansas City Royals received a 32.8 rating.An average of 14 percent of TVs in use tuned to this year’s Series. In 1980, the average was 56 percent.”We had a very good rating yesterday. There’s no question that if the Series had gone further, the ratings would have gone up,” commissioner Bud Selig said Thursday from his Milwaukee office. He was referring to the 11.9 rating for the final innings of Game 5 Wednesday night.Baseball is caught in a scheduling quagmire of its own making, and Selig promised a full re-evaluation.The regular season is locked in at 162 games over 183 days. There are three rounds of playoffs, and four extra off-days were added to the postseason format in 2007 to shift the Series opener from a Saturday to a Wednesday.Next year’s schedule has been pushed back a week to accommodate the second edition of the successful World Baseball Classic. That means some teams may open spring training camps before Valentine’s Day and the seventh game of the Series wouldn’t be played until Nov. 5.”The schedule is out for next year. That schedule is done. It’s been announced. People are selling tickets to that schedule,” Selig said. “We’re going to work over the next year or so and work on a significant series of alternatives, if they make sense.”Owners don’t want to reduce regular-season games because they’d lose revenue. Players don’t want a shortened schedule because they’d have lesser chances to set records.No one is interested in going back to the days where teams played a dozen doubleheaders. Management can’t afford single-admission twinbills, and day-night splits are among the things players detest most.Rain, rain and more rain, plus temperatures in the 40s, were factors this year.”Weather is strange. Now today in Milwaukee and Chicago, it’s warm. And it’s supposed to get warm over the weekend, it’s supposed to get warm out East,” Selig said. “So here we’re going into November, and the weather is going to be better than it was a week or two ago. But it is mercurial at this time. I’m always sensitive to it and, look, we’ll review everything.”The World Series has had a changing-the-rules-on-the-fly quality about it. Selig told the teams that games would not be shortened to less than nine innings because of the weather.
 
 
 
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