Fixing baseball

Ross Douthat links to a post from Peter Gammons where he talks about the direction baseball is going in:

When this World Series finally ends, there will be a great deal of discussion about how to avoid this sort of misery. The first will be to figure a way to shorten the schedule. Say the schedule was reduced from 162 to 148 games (records or no records; the Steroids Era made too many baseball records meaningless), then the division series and League Championship Series could be played between Sept. 20 and Oct. 6, with the World Series theoretically completed by mid-October. Granted, the loss of the seven home dates would hit teams' revenue streams, but they'll just have to adjust player salaries; CC Sabathia and Manny Ramirez might have to make ends meet on measly $20M salaries.

Ross suggests that they aim to shorten to 154 games to give themselves at least an extra week. I think this misses an easier fix. Well, two of them really. First of all they could change opening day. Right now they start on the first Monday of April (usually) with a single game on the Sunday before. It would be easy enough to add three days right there. Put ESPN's opening game on Thursday night. Then start the regular games on Friday and add some weekend games.
The second fix is to add some doubleheaders into the schedule. Maximize those weekend days in the summer! And don't forget the holidays. A 4th of July doubleheader? That's money, baby! There are legitimate questions of how many of these would cause too much pressure to on the players (especially the pitchers) but certainly there is some room here.
The last two weeks of the year have roughly twelve games played in them. We get three from the opener and another three from holidays (Memorial Day, July 4th and Labor Day). That leaves six doubleheaders or two apiece during June, July and August. Voila, the playoffs start earlier and we finish the Series in mid October.