This celebration might happen again, and at a reasonable hour.
One of my sports pet peeves has been the starting time and length of postseason baseball games, particularly the World Series. It has always been baseball’s showcase event and, in those olden days when games were played on weekday afternoons, kids of all ages and the young-at-heart would skip work or school, or sneak a transistor radio into the classroom or the office in order to enjoy the games.
In recent years, as television money took precedence over everything else, games had to be played in prime time, even on weekends, leading to lower ratings and reduced interest (particularly among the younger generations). Additional advertising time factored into games often ending well after midnight, leading to lower ratings and reduced interest. Adding an additional playoff round led to some playoff games actually starting at the ridiculous hour of 11 pm Eastern time, and a few instances where National and American League playoff games were played at the same time, meaning that many playoff games are now shunted to cable. This led to — repeat after me — lower ratings and reduced interest. It also led to the World Series being pushed later into October, to the point where a rainout or two or some other issues (such as the one-week delay in the 2001 regular season after the 9/11 attacks) can cause a World Series to actually end in November.
Finally, a slight amount of sanity has crept into the process. Fox has announced that World Series weeknight games will be scheduled to start at 7:57 pm ET, and Saturday night games could begin even earlier. (No luck for Sunday because of their NFL commitments.) In addition, the AL Championship Series games on Fox will also have earlier start times.
TBS will cover the NLCS and hasn’t announced any plans to follow suit, but considering that Fox is taking some valuable early-evening time away from its affiliates, while cable network TBS has no affiliates to serve, there’s no reason they shouldn’t jump on board.
Every World Series game last year went at least 3 hours. Game 3 took 3:41 to play, and that was after a long rain delay, so it ended at 1:47 am ET. Remember how nice it was when the fifth and final game ended? And not just because of the result (he said with a smile), but because the suspension from Monday to Wednesday resulted in the final pitch being thrown before 10 pm ET. Almost everyone could stay up that late. Kids can’t fall in love with baseball if they can’t stay awake long enough to see its most important moments. It’s probably too much to ask that the games start even earlier than 7:57 pm, but this is better than nothing.
on May 18th, 2009 at 6:59 pm
Our deer camp (Oregon rifle buck deer season) is concurrent with the World Series and I haven’t caught many games on TV in 20+ years. We usually have a transistor radio going in the wall tent while we play cards and hang out in the evenings. In areas of particularly bad reception I might have to sit out in the truck and listen to the game there. I’d be happy w/an earlier season where I could watch the series at home on TV.
on May 19th, 2009 at 3:14 pm
FOX has also eliminated that extra half-hour they tacked onto their Saturday Game-of-the-Week last season in an attempt to sell more commercials. They bumped game-time up to 12:55 instead of 1:05 so that affiliates would have to take the extra half-hour, which resulted in 25 extra minutes of (shudder) Kevin Kennedy and Jeannie Zelasko. Those 2 must have a safe-deposit box with blackmail photos of Rupert Murdoch having sex with a goat…