Sports Media

Baseball on Fox? That’s Crazy

I thought baseball season was over. At least on television, it seemed that way. Major League Baseball went out of their way in the playoffs to actively discourage fans from watching baseball, and now it’s on network television, leading me to believe this must be the start of next season.

I mean, what better way to air playoff baseball than on cable television, squeezing an inning in between commercials featuring the Frank Caliendo propaganda machine. The baseball playoffs this season have gone by largely unnoticed, on account of the games being hidden.

Seriously, who in the hell thought it was a good idea to air Games 6 and 7 of the ALCS on TBS. You know what was on Fox those nights? Nothing. A cops marathon was on one night in my town. I don’t know about yours, but that’s some bad programming.

It’s amazing how these leagues and networks executives spit on sports fans like this, then complain when the ratings are down.

There’s one recipe to sports ratings success: Show the event live, and give people an opportunity to watch it. We don’t need much more than that. And you’d think this is simple. But…

NBC screwed the entire west coast during the Olympics by airing everything on a tape-delay, leaving us on the left coast to know what happened before it aired, leading us to not watch the prime time coverage.

CBS chose to tape-delay Kimbo Slice and the EliteXC debacles, leading to poor ratings, which may or may not be the reason they are now out of business.

How about local CBS affiliates not airing the men’s final of the U.S. Open in tennis? They didn’t want to offend the soap opera fans, I was told by the local Program Director.

Or maybe you prefer ESPN and NBC teaming up to screw west coast viewers of Wimbledon, by showing a tape delay on NBC of a match, to be picked up by ESPN at the conclusion of NBC’s programming. The problem with that was that NBC was on a tape delay, airing at the same time as the conclusion of the match on ESPN.

It’s bad enough that FOX makes us watch and listen to Joe Buck during anything they consider a major sporting event. The guy is an absolutely terrible play-by-play announcer, with nearly no emotion. But to put the entire baseball playoffs on basic cable is just asking for bad ratings.

How many more ratings nightmares do these leagues need before they learn to do it right?

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