More Day Baseball: Always A Good Thing

Right now, we don’t care when the baseball comes. Saturday morning. Midnight on a Monday. Three o’clock on a Wednesday morning. Just give us baseball, and leave the bottle. We’ll deal with the rest later.

But there’s a change in when our baseball will come next season. From The Sporting News:

Fox plans to make five or six games available in prime time, instead of the three it usually has in its afternoon slot, USA Today reports. Last season, Fox broadcasted three times on Saturday night during the regular season and saw a big jump in ratings from its Saturday afternoon games.The ostensible news is that the Game of the Week, such as it is, is at night. You may or may not care too much about that. Either you’re the type of person who watches every baseball game, or you’re not. Without seeing the schedule, I’m thinking you’ll have a chance to watch some Yankees/Red Sox, Red Sox/Yankees, Boston/New York, or New York/Boston. When they want to mix things up, they’ll probably go with Yankees/Boston or New York/Red Sox. You might be into that; you might not be.

If your focus is more on the regional side of things — you’re interested in your team, and only your team — this still affects you. Fox’s deal with Major League Baseball requires that there isn’t another baseball broadcast competing with the game that Fox is showing. That means a game played at 1:00 PT in your home market was only going to reach your television if it was one of the three games that Fox had preselected.

Most teams weren’t keen on that, so they did the obvious thing: They adjusted their schedule to have more night games on Saturday. The teams had no choice, so I don’t blame them. But baseball on a Saturday night is horrible, horrible, horrible.

I’m not a zealot who crawled out from the under the bleachers of Wrigley Field in 1963, loudly announcing that I will stab anyone who doesn’t agree that day baseball is purer than the alternative. Night games during the week are swell. Most of us have jobs, and a baseball game is a nice way to close out the day.

But Saturday and Sunday baseball during the day is … well, sacred would be overselling the point. But it’s not not sacred. It’s sun, beer, and baseball. Grass smells differently when the sun hits it. You can eat hot dogs early enough that your body can still process them before going to bed, eliminating the horrible dreams they’d otherwise cause. Possibly about eating hot dogs.

With Fox moving the games to Saturday nights, there should be more day baseball on the weekend. Teams will likely adjust their schedules again to prevent blackouts, and that’s a glorious thing. Fox gets the ratings boost (which surprises me, but great), we get day baseball, and the baseball fanatics who want more get a nice night game waiting for them after the first games of the day. Perfect.

Well, not perfect, actually. Fox is choosing from a pool of five or six games now, so there’s a better chance that out-of-market fans won’t get the chance to watch their team if they’re playing in one of the Fox games. Don’t forget that Fox will prevent you from watching the game on MLB.tv if it isn’t in your area. There’s something very important about Fox making sure that you watch the signal they’re sending to an electronic device, so don’t even think about loading up MLB.tv and watching another signal they’re sending to an electronic device. Their profits would crumble.

But that’s an issue for another time. Right now it looks like we’ll get more day baseball. It’s a move that only vampires or the really, really pale can hate. And as a card-carrying member of the latter, I can assure you that we’ve talked this over, and even we’re fine with it.