At Home Plate - TV Scheduling becoming Outdated

At Home Plate

Written by Jonathan Leshanski (Contact & Archive) on June 15, 2009

Maybe I’m the only one, but I often feel cheated on Sunday night when I finally get home after a busy weekend and turn on the television to sit down and watch baseball. Maybe that’s because I am spoiled by the magic of cable television and the MLB package which allows me to watch just about every game every day. Thus when I come home on Sunday night, having just a single game to choose from, and only on a single station, it is inevitable that I feel that way.

Sunday Night Baseball - It's nicer in person anyway

Photo by EAWB, used under creative commons license.

That’s not to take away anything from ESPN (who has exclusive rights to broadcast the game) or from MLB (which has chosen to grant exclusive baseball to ESPN at that time), but after offering us so much choice on every other night, it seems archaic that baseball be only on one channel only on Sundays. Times have certainly changed for the game over the years. It was only about a twenty ago that our choice in baseball was limited to the local teams, the few games broadcast by superstations WGN, TBS and WOR, and maybe one or two games aired on network TV including the Sunday game of the week.

Those were the only times we really got to see teams from outside our home market, and unless you were a fantasy baseball addict it was your chance to see a lot of guys who you had probably never even heard of. Often that was exciting, but sometimes you found you just could care less about the teams involved. That always was one of the flaws of the game of the week -- the average fan’s point of view about baseball was generally limited to games that were relevant to their team.

That began to change back in 1990 when ESPN picked up a contract to air MLB games, including the crown jewel, Sunday Night Baseball, a single game broadcast nationally on cable TV. But ESPN at the same time was broadening our whole view of baseball’s little universe, by showing us more games, from more teams then we had ever seen before. For the first time we had more out-of-market games then we had ever had in a single season.

Our personal view of MLB was growing. Now we weren’t just watching games directly involving the home nine, while following the box scores and the standings in the newspapers -- we were seeing them on TV. It was still a limited view, but it was a bigger one than any we had ever seen as fans.

The internet, satellite television and the MLB extra innings package took that view and made it explode. At first it was only bars and big venues which could afford to broadcast pretty much every game, but soon we could all do so from the comfort of our living room, either on television or on the computer.

Suddenly, the only place we couldn’t go in the baseball world was inside the locker rooms and dugouts. We could watch just about every game, every day -- and in truth a lot of us pretty much do that. We use the access to watch teams who interest us, check on our fantasy players, or just flip between channels when the game being broadcast locally happens to be a bit of a dog. The world essentially became our oyster when it came to baseball.

Except, of course, for Sunday night. On Sunday night, we’re still restricted to a single game, ironically enough, still broadcast by ESPN, the same network that opened our eyes to the whole of baseball to begin with. It doesn’t matter if the game is good or bad, nor if the teams playing are ho-hum. It’s the only game in town and your options are to watch or not to watch.

Certainly I understand the logic. Having a single game on Sunday night gives the hosting network a chance to have a captive national audience, to rack up bigger ratings, and charge more for advertising due to an increased market share. It also allows, or perhaps forces, teams around baseball to play more daytime games then they might opt to otherwise, creating a more family friendly time for baseball during the summer.

But for the diehard fan, it still seems like a cheat. Baseball has given us access to over a dozen games per day, if we want them enough to pay for them. That allows us to walk away from bad games and flip to another game just about any time that baseball is on the air. It’s an unprecedented level of choice for those who love the game.

Except of course for Sunday, where we are still caught up in this type of scheduling.

How archaic.

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