A bold-faced lie
Well, it's noon in Midwestern America as I write this. Only ten more hours until I can watch baseball's only 100 win team (two years in a row) play a potentially series-clinching playoff game. Better get my nap in. I touched briefly on this topic Thursday, but this late start time is preposterous, and I want to thank Sen. Christopher "Kit" Bond (R-MO) for calling commissioner Bud Selig to complain on Friday. (This almost makes up for Bond's pro-torture vote earlier in the week.)Selig claims he has no veto power over network decisions, but get this: (and I vaguely remember it) Selig received a call from Bond in 2002 over a similar scheduling fiasco against the Diamondbacks. How did Selig respond then? The direct quote, reprinted in today's St. Louis Sports-Dispatch: "I told my people, no more 10pm starts. That's the end of it." Read his lips, I guess.
Selig says "the networks have a lot of football commitments," and by "the networks," he means ESPN. FOX scheduled a baseball doubleheader today beginning at three, but ESPN has Purdue and Iowa at that time. (A real "Clash of the Titans." My brother is a sports fan who went to school at Iowa, and he probably couldn't tell you who the Hawkeyes play today.) The problem, as I see it, though, still lies equally with FOX and MLB. FOX gets first crack at the Yankees. A Game 4 between Chicago and Boston would have been played at noon, but in its absence, the Cardinals and Padres can't move into its slot because the series matchup has shifted to the west coast.
The Cards and Padres should have had the Yankees timeslot at three, and a game in a more flexible time zone should have been given the other slots. That's what the league did to the Cardinals last year. Do the Red Sox and Yankees get the highest ratings? I guess, but maybe that's because their teams and players have been the only thing promoted by baseball since 1998. That never seemed like a good long-term strategy for the game. You might be surprised to find out that the most watched World Series of all time-- not the highest share of TV sets, but watched by the most households in North America- is the 1985 World Series, played between Kansas City and St. Louis on ABC. FOX execs would poo their pants if they were handed that matchup next year.
12:20pm News Alert: The Yankees/Angels game has already been rained out for today. Now we're down to two playoff games, neither of which starts until 6 o'clock, and a Saturday afternoon in October will pass without any baseball on TV, whatsoever. This commissioner is a genius! Listen up, Bud Lite, this is the self-loathing I've been talking about. You should be "all up" in the face of the ESPN president, "Kit Bond-style." You say, Jump. He says, How high? Threaten to walk. You think ESPN wants to go back to second-tier college sporting events, 17 Sunday Night NFL games, and 300 nights a year of televised poker.
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I realize my baseball topics spend a lot of time bashing the league itself, but so be it. This is a major difference between the sports, it seems to me. Football broadcasters are vomit-inducing in their failure to criticize the game's shortcomings. This is why football players continue to grow and grow in physical size in virtual obscurity, despite so-called "stringent" steroid testing. Let's at least admit that the media holds baseball to higher standards, nearly across the board. (Here's an example: Rafael Palmeiro never killed his wife. For all the reasons cited for OJ Simpson's crimes, we never hear about the inherently violent nature of the sport in which he made his living.)
I heard it said once of liberals and conservatives in the political spectrum-- by fellow liberals-- that they love America the way a parent loves a child, while conservatives love America the way a child loves a parent. I don't subscribe to this theory, although the latter does seem to apply to both Bush Republicans and Clinton Democrats. The axiom does however apply, almost entirely, to baseball and football announcers. Football desperately needs more Bob Costases, which is probably why Bob's HBO productions are the best NFL programs available on television.
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I wept no tears last night for the Boston Red Sox, swept out by Ozzie Guillen's White Sox. Just what I thought would happen to Boston has begun to happen-- they have begun a long nose-dive into obscurity, having broken the Curse of the Bambino. With an 86-year championship drought, the Red Sox were tortured and relatively fascinating. Stephen Jay Gould called them "an opera." Now they're just a shitty franchise with one World Championship in 88 years. Take comfort, Cubs fans. You can still root for the same beloved and assured losers you grew up with, and with less competition for the ultimate crown of ineptitude.
Better luck next year, Edgar.
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Boston's loss in three games was delicious in more ways than one. In its last year, Busch Stadium in St. Louis has the opportunity to retire having hosted more post-season games than any other ballpark in baseball history other than Yankee Stadium. The stadium in the Bronx is the run-away leader with 155 (after last night,) and Boston added only one this year to reach 54. Busch's total stands at 50 after Tuesday and Wednesday. The best case scenario is to reach the World Series, though. It's not worth coming back home to face the Padres in a Division Series Game 5 just to pad this record. (FYI- Busch started this year in a tie for third (48) with Oakland's now-called McAfee Coliseum.)
Don't forget to take that nap today.
posted by CM @ 1:15 PM
4 Comments:
Chris, MLB, ESPN, and FOX are involved for one obvious reason that has nothing to do with your love for Cardinals baseball. But be careful what you wish for. The day the White Sox and Cardinals receive the same media coverage as Boston and New York is the day DesMoines and Cedar Rapids have comparable population numbers. That would be ugly. It's a small price to pay for living in "fly-over country." I'm looking forward to another all Midwest World Series. Go Sox! TA
Go Sox, indeed! Normally, I think it's bad form, not to mention bad hoodoo, to say which team you want to play in the World Series when your team has yet to qualify, but I'm pulling hard for the White Sox. That match-up would be enormous for baseball people in the know. We would have an original American League franchise and an original National League franchise, both still playing in the city of their birth, regional rivals, to boot-- (and for sixty years of baseball's history, the westernmost outposts of their respective leagues) going head-to-head in the World Series for the first time.
Due to the White Sox name and pedigree, and a direct line in the Cardinals franchise, the rivalry, in a sense, actually goes back even further than the first World Series in 1904. It goes back to a handful of "World Series" in the 1880s between Cap Anson's National League champion Chicago "White Sox," which became the Cubs, and the American Association champion St. Louis "Browns" or "Brown Sox," which became the Cardinals, and were led by player/manager Charlie Comiskey (yes, that Comiskey.) It's one of those great interleague rivalries that used to be just a hypothetical, and one of the fewer still that still exists in people's minds largely in that context.
No one ever mentions it, but the Cards and Sox are actually closer rivals in geography than the Cards and Cubs. A Sox fan co-worker and I have conditionally agreed to call it the Route 66 Series, even though the national news media would surely label it the I-55 Series. It's sort of the equivalent of the Red Sox playing the Mets in '86, only much better because the Mets were an expansion franchise. A better hypothetical matchup from baseball's history would be the Red Sox against the Brooklyn Dodgers. We never got that one, or even the Red Sox and "Los Angeles" Dodgers, at this point.
All that being said, you've got to give it up to the Padres, Braves, and Astros. Those are some tough teams, boy.
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Correction: The White Sox were never the westernmost team of the American League. For those years in question, it was the St. Louis Browns. I'll send a mea culpa to next summer's gathering of the "Great Brownie Roundup" in St. Louis.
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