Major League Baseball is patting itself on the back for convincing Fox to move up the start time of weeknight World Series and ALCS to 7:57 PM ET.
The new weeknight start times on FOX will be earlier than championship events in every major professional sport but the Super Bowl, as well as the NCAA men's basketball title game. Coverage will begin with a pregame show at 7:30 p.m. ET.It's a step in the right direction, but only a small one. Gaining 30-40 minutes is nice, but because postseason games last so long (thanks in part to longer commercial breaks), younger children in the Eastern and Central Time Zones – and adults who still have jobs – still won't be able to stay up to watch entire games.
Kids won't be up quite so late due to earlier start times.
No regularly scheduled World Series game has started before 8 p.m. on a weeknight since at least 1975, according to MLB.
Postseason games on FOX last year started, on average, at 8:28 p.m. ET. In the early 1990s, the first pitch was sometimes as late as 8:38 p.m.
And that, in the long run, is bad for the game.
Of course, moving the games any earlier means moving them out of prime time partially in the East almost entirely in the West. And the TV networks – paying out big bucks for broadcast rights (bucks that make players very handsomely paid) – won't go for that.
"It certainly was considered," [Fox's Ed] Goren said, "and the Commissioner has certainly expressed his interest in it. But it gets back to economics: What I do know, from our research people, is that if we played Saturday afternoon, viewership would be 30 percent lower. And there would be an economic impact to that."In other words, Fox told MLB, "We'll do a little something for you, but nothing that really costs us money."
This is typical for Major League Baseball, which has become the champion of pandering. People complain about late postseason finishes, so baseball does something which is little more than cosmetic.
How about a 7 p.m. start, like most regular-season games? How about shorter commercial breaks? How about speeding up the games?
Nah, Bud Selig is satisfied.
"I think this move will help us big-time," commissioner Bud Selig told FOXSports.com. "This is reaching out to fans. This is precisely what we want to do."
