I have the exact opposite opinion.
The season is long for a reason, it is traditional, and is good.
It provides enough time to determine the best teams.
That’s why baseball has been great and a pastime and reflective of the American spirit.
The biggest problem with the MLB right there. Pointless worship of tradition. The grind of the season doesn’t determine anything. When the “best” team in the league only wins 60% of the games and the “worst” team in the league wins 40% of the games there really is no best and worst. It’s the team was least effected by the pointless grind and the team that was most effected. The schedule provides enough time to determine that schedule is too damn long and allow the randomness that effects all sports to even out the results. Baseball is the perfect example of the coin toss test, the more times you flip a coin the closer you’re going to get to 50-50 results. And we see in baseball that 162 coin flips shrinks your deviation down to 60-40.
And all that “pastime” horse hockey is really just because it was the first seriously established sport in America. And it was well built for radio. With a general lack of competition it ruled. Once it got competition, especially TV which the other sports all work much better on than radio, baseball started dropping in importance to the country. And the 162 game season has a lot to do with that. The American spirit doesn’t have a lot of time for a sport where 1/3 of the games don’t matter.