The 2013 baseball schedule has been released. (Article; Red Sox schedule.)

The big new thing, of course, is the fact that there will always be an interleague series at any given time, since the Astros will be in the A.L., meaning an odd number of teams (15) in each league. I wrote about the possibilities this would lead to last November, and I kinda nailed it:

So they could do something like: A team plays its interleague games every 15 series, plus have two weekends where EVERY team plays interleague (since Bud obviously likes that). Instead of one interleague series in May and five in June, a team would have, for example, one in early April, one in mid-May, one in late June, one in early-August, and one in early-September. Those would be series where only them and their opponent are playing interleague. Then they'd also have a May and a June interleague series, at which point ALL the teams are doing so (maybe those could be the two "fake-ass rivalry" series).

So my suggestion had 8 interleague series, spread out through the season, with two of them being where ALL teams are in interleague at once, those being the rivalry series. I don't know if they were reading my blog or what, but that's exactly how they've planned it! The two rivalry series will be back to back, home-and-home style. Which is weird as you never play the same team two series in a row in our sport. I guess you do now. And it'll be a total of 20 IL games for each team, four 3-game series and four 2-game series.

I love how they've evened out things for games against your own league. Now it's 19 games against each of your divisional opponents, and two series each (one home, one away) against your non-division opponents, for a total of 6 or 7 games against each of them. So much better than the unbalanced crap.

Looks like our "natural" rival will be the Phils for the home-and-home, but we also get the Rockies twice. Our total IL schedule looks like this:

vs. Phils (late May)
@ Phils (late May)
vs. Col (late June)
vs. SD (early July)
vs. Ariz. (early August)
@ SF (late August)
@ Dodgers (late August)
@ Rockies (late September--2nd to last series of season)

We open the season at Yankee Stadium (Monday, April 1st, unless it's chosen as the season-opening ESPN Sunday night game). The home opener is against the Orioles, and April is a home-heavy month (17 home, 10 away). Of course we'll be playing the Astros twice as they'll be an A.L. team. Our season ends in Baltimore September 29th.

Tonight, Sox/Yanks, 7:10. Get there at 6:30 to see a tribute to Joe Castiglione, who's celebrating 30 years in the booth! (There will also be a special Johnny Pesky thing going on after the Sunday, September 23rd game--you don't need a ticket for that day's game, and you can hang out at Fenway until 9 p.m.!)