DENVER — Who hates baseball this morning? No, we’re not talking about the game, because there’s no sense in hating the game, nor, in fact, the player. Plus, I hate racism and injustice and that makes baseball seem trite by comparison.
Bear with me people. It’s been a long week.
Anyway, the way Major League Baseball has scheduled these playoff games in the first round has been utterly ridiculous. Night games in Colorado in October on the weekends? Day games in Philadelphia during the work week?
What in the name of the wide world of sports is going on here?
Look, I understand the idea of TV contracts and how TBS and Fox want to have the games on exclusively in order to maximize the number of eyes on the set. But putting the Phillies on TV for a Sunday night game at 10 p.m. is just stupid. It’s especially stupid when there was a four-hour window where TBS showed “Road Trip” instead of baseball because they probably did not want to compete with the NFL games.
Look, I'm not hating on "Road Trip." In fact, it's a fine film and is easily some of Tom Green's best work. That part when the snake chomped on his arm... brilliant!
But logic has to win out at some point. Instead, the MLB TV arm decided to penalize the ball fans in Philadelphia.
Look, baseball fans will watch whenever the games are scheduled. Plus, technology has advanced to a degree where a person can watch an NFL game on a second TV set or on a computer. People have insatiable appetites for sports and have the ability to multitask if need be. That’s what makes it so silly to schedule the games the way MLB and the TV networks have.
It’s not fan or player friendly… it’s just mean.
“When you’re in the playoffs, and you’re in a city where there’s a chance of snow at all, yeah, I think it should be a day game,” Scott Eyre said before Game 3. “But TBS paid a lot of money, so they can dictate when the games are played, and they don’t care about us. I used to not understand, but now that I’m older, I understand more about the business end of it.”
That doesn’t mean anyone likes it.