The compromise: The Braves returned to Chicago for one game July 7. The fallout: That ate the Cubs’ only off day between June 16 and the all-star break. The Braves, by comparison, had it easy; they played 20 consecutive days. The Cubs’ resulting streak: games on 24 straight days.

“It was a lot of fun,” first baseman Anthony Rizzo said, complete with a smirk-and-eye-roll, you-gotta-be-kidding-me expression.

The Cubs’ schedule had already included what in the past would have been considered an odd road trip – three games in Milwaukee, then three in San Francisco, then back to the Midwest for three in St. Louis – but is now fairly typical, with time zones and time for travel seemingly an afterthought. And they’re just one team, one example, of why players consider the logistics of the schedule to be among the most important issues on the table in this session of negotiations for a new collective bargaining agreement.

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“It’s an industry, but at the same time, our bodies are not made to play at that level – at this high level – that many days in a row,” Cubs second baseman Ben Zobrist said. “You’re not going to get the best of us when you put us out on the field that many days in a row.”

There is agreement that there are opposite forces at work here. Clubs are in the business of maximizing not just performance, but revenue. Home teams determine the times their games start within certain boundaries established in the CBA – no night games if either team is traveling and playing an afternoon game the following day, allowances for travel from one coast to the other, etc. If a club draws better crowds at night, they’re likely to schedule more night games, even if it involves late travel for their team afterward.

The schedule, then, can grow demanding. Last month, the Nationals had a 10-game trip that went from San Diego to Los Angeles to Milwaukee. The last game against the Dodgers was a 7:10 p.m. start local time. The team’s flight to Milwaukee didn’t land until roughly 7 a.m. local time. Though the team was off that day, Max Scherzer, the pitcher due to open the series against the Brewers, said he went to sleep at 8 a.m. and slept till 4 p.m., but still had to work out in preparation for his start the next night.

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“I’m dragging butt,” he said. That, Scherzer and other players agree, impacts performance. Scherzer didn’t mention it, but that night in Milwaukee he allowed five runs in six innings, and the Nationals lost.

“You’re obviously not going to be able to play your best baseball if your scheduling is going on like that,” Scherzer said. “That’s a fact.”

Players also believe there is a relationship between things like consecutive days played, game times, travel – and injuries.

“I think on getaway day, you should have a day game every time,” San Francisco Giants ace Madison Bumgarner said. “Too many guys get hurt. I mean, you got to have rest and recovery. … The everyday guys, we can’t wear them down like that. That’s why you see so many injuries.”

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But the league doesn’t see it that way. Baseball moved from a 154-game schedule to 162 games in 1961 for the American League, the following year in the National League.

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“If we had changed the schedule to 162 in 183 days, and we had more injuries, I could see where that theory would make some sense,” Commissioner Rob Manfred said. “The fact of the matter is, we’ve been playing this way for decades, and we still have had this increase of injuries. I have a hard time with the correlation between those two.”

Still, Manfred and MLB are cognizant of the toll on the product they put on the field each day. When he first took over as commissioner last year, Manfred floated the idea of going back to a 154-game schedule – essentially adding eight additional off days to the existing calendar. He has since allowed that such a rollback would have significant economic ramifications, including four fewer home dates per team and new negotiations for television contracts, because networks wouldn’t willingly pay the same money for fewer games. Manfred said earlier this month that any decrease in revenue from an altered schedule would have to be shared by the players, a notion with which his counterpart at the union, former all-star first baseman Tony Clark, disagrees.

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So it seems unlikely that the number of regular-season games will go down. But Clark and the players believe the increasingly odd game times – the Nationals hosted one series with an 11 a.m. game followed by a 7 p.m. game followed by a 4 p.m. game – and the demands of travel have an impact on the fan experience. Players believe even seemingly small wrinkles are significant. A home game on a Sunday followed by a road game on a Tuesday looks like it provides an off day on the schedule, but the reality is that Monday becomes a travel day, and those things impact how players view the scope of their season.

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“We used to be in a world where we came into the season thinking about playing 162 and working backwards,” Clark said. “… In today’s climate what you’ve seen across the board is the goal of playing 140 games, 145 games, 150 games – strategically taking days off in an effort to stay as on top of your game as you possibly can over the long haul that is the 162-game season.”

Players understand, too, that this can all sound like some degree of whining. The minimum salary in the majors is $507,000, the average more than $4.1 million. But the discussion about tweaking the schedule would also include tweaking the product for fans, because rested players are available players, and a more manageable schedule would give teams a better chance of fielding their best nine each game.