The idea was simple: Create interest.

Fans, rightfully so, were very upset when the major league baseball players went on strike, resulting in a shortened season in 1994.

That strike shed some light on how much owners of professional baseball franchises were making, but it also made the players look greedy and uncaring about the most important people in sports, their ticketbuying fans.

If you really peel back the layers of the onion that is today’s perspiring arts, pro athletes are making more money than is imaginable for playing games that many guys still trade their lunch hour to play.

Initially, interleague play was interesting, and for a handful of teams still can be more fun than a Saturday night at Six Flags.

ADVERTISEMENT

You have some great geographical matchups, such as the Cubs and White Sox of Chicago, which could be dubbed the Windy City Series; Los Angeles Angels and Dodgers, the Freeway Series; New York Yankees and Mets, of course the Subway Series; and St. Louis vs. Kansas City, the I-70 Series.

Those are just a few of the games that were truly interesting, especially in the beginning.

Now, the overall idea of the interleague games is obscure because some scheduling genius has the St. Louis Cardinals against Tampa Bay. What do you call that, the Sunny Arch Series ?

Since interleague play began in 1997, what most of those games have done is gradually make the All-Star Game less attractive and, at least a little, caused a depreciation of the World Series.

Wikipedia, the free Internet encyclopedia, says having a rematch of the World Series during the regular season is a positive thing.

Hogwash. The World Series was created to determine the best team in the world by having American League and National League playoffs and then the winners meeting in a best-of-7 series.

The unknown of the competition helps make it compelling.

The same Web site, in an attempt to be fair, lists some of the cons of interleague play American League pitchers can’t be ready to bat and because they don’t run the bases could get hurt. The leagues do not have the same number of teams. Also, the six-game rivalries are not always fair. For instance, the Cardinals playing the recently poor Royals or the Cubs playing the recently strong White Sox could have a factor on the divisional league standings.

Of course, so could a strong team playing a weak team in its own division. Lastly, it accurately claims the World Series and All-Star games are robbed of some of their mystique.

Most sports fans who are only marginally interested in baseball don’t pay much attention to scheduling, but who in the world doesn’t watch the World Series ? And that is definitely more intriguing if the teams have not played during the regular season.

If baseball wants to shore up its TV rankings and overall popularity, it might consider shortening the season so that it doesn’t run from February, when pitchers and catchers report, to Oct. 30, if the Series goes seven games, which is about two weeks after the first BCS rankings.

That’s a ton of baseball even for the most passionate fan.

It is also time to re-examine the idea of putting a clock on the pitchers and if they don’t throw a pitch within an allotted time — 15 or 20 seconds from the time the pitcher toes the rubber — the batter is awarded a called ball.

Speeding up the game and shortening the schedule so that it doesn’t start during basketball season and end halfway through the NFL season would develop more interest than interleague play.

There are millions of people who love to watch baseball, and for those who live in New York, Chicago or Los Angeles, the interleague series are fun, but for the majority, it just gets in the way of the baseball season.