I would fundamentally disagree with this, because to make the playoffs, you still have to win a lot over the long haul (outside of some chaosball seasons -- thinking the 2005 NL West or 2006 NL Central, off the top of my head). But expanded playoffs aren't the reason shitty teams get in; I'm thinking of the 1973 NL East, for example, where I think the Mets won it with 82 wins, the Cardinals were at 81 and the Pirates were at 80. When you have now 30 teams, there are going to be fluke seasons, and that's just a matter of statistical reality (hell, half the reason the 2001 Mariners won 116 games is because the rest of the AL was really,
really bad outside of a couple of teams). Every now and again chaos reigns, and that's a feature, not a bug. I mean, we're still not at the point of the NFL or especially the NBA, where in the latter case fully half the teams in the league make the postseason--especially when you consider that the second wild-card is just a play-in game, it doesn't create another short series.
Revenue is an odd duck in MLB, since you have so many billions of dollars going to so many different entities. The Pittsburgh Pirates, for example, are literally profitable every year before selling a single ticket (concessions and putting asses in seats represents something like only 27.7 percent of their annual revenue stream). And I don't know if I buy the argument that a longer season leads to the lowering in the quality of play.
Fundamentally, a 154-game season would be ideal, but it would be a huge pain in the ass for everyone: The league has made it clear that the union would have to agree to an across-the-board rollback in salaries and get the owners' share of their pension contributions gutted (and losing ground on the pensions would make zombie Marvin Miller walk the earth and seek to eat the brains of Tony Clark), you've got a lot of stadium employees--though, really, they're just independent contractors, because fuck late-stage capitalism--who'd eat pay cuts, and television and radio contracts would have to be renegotiated for the lesser amount of games (since stations would insist on lowering their annual rights fees because of fewer opportunities for advertising, which would mean less revenue to teams, who would then again take it out on labor, even though they just had it codified in the FLSA that they don't have to pay minor-league players minimum wage).
Honestly, the first way to get back to fixing the schedule would be to get rid of the randomization computer that was used in 2005 to replace the husband-and-wife couple who did the entirety of MLB's schedule for like 25 years.
