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Major League Baseball Made Major League Error

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By JOHN HERBERT, From Where I Sit

Hernando Today

Published: November 5, 2008

Exactly 60 years ago, my father took the afternoon off from work to drive little me to a World Series baseball game between the Boston Braves and Cleveland Indians.
Afternoon baseball? That really dates me. It belongs to the nostalgic "good old days."
In recent years, the highest-bidding TV network dictates when the World Series will be played. Games start at 8:37 p.m. and usually continue until after midnight — on week nights, no less. Many bleary-eyed baseball fans had to juggle a 7 to 8 a.m. job start.
There's no unearthly reason why we can't stage afternoon games, at least on weekends. Except for feared competition from football. But, isn't the American way all about competition?
Current holders of World Series rights, Fox TV reminds us of viewers three hours behind on the West Coast. So what! This year's fall classic wasn't, and often isn't, even between West Coast teams. It was between Philadelphia and Tampa Bay. Series games should have started at 7 p.m. on the East Coast, regardless. West Coast viewers will always find a way; Fox came off as greedy.
I suspect Fox has been twisting the arms of Major League Baseball so the World Series could compete with popular late talk shows. Major League Baseball (MLB) was spineless for not rejecting such inhumane hours. No wonder TV viewership was at an all-time low for the championship of our national pastime.
NBC didn't have Fox's chutzpah when that network negotiated to broadcast the Olympics from Peking. Broadcasts from the Red Chinese capital were at 3 a.m., live, or at 8 p.m., taped; take it or leave it. The Games, like the World Series, were reality shows, after all.
How many of us baseball fans, in school, on a job schedule or retired, can keep our eyes open until a game ends at 1:45 a.m., like last week?
The recent World Series was also plagued by steady rainfall. All-too-frequent drenchings and frigid wind gusts delayed the start of one game in Philly until 10 p.m. while another was suspended in the sixth inning. Common sense alone should have ruled out a 10 p.m. first pitch.
Finished when the weather cleared up two days later, that second controversial game was ripe to have been called off at least an inning earlier. Pools of rainwater formed beyond the foul lines and on the clay infield. In short, the field was often unplayable, laughably disgusting.
Game Five had to be interrupted twice, for 20 to 30 minutes each time, to rebuild the soggy pitcher's mound and so the players could scrape mud out from between their spikes with emergency supplies of tongue depressors.
Players' and umpires' jackets were soaking; some players even wore Elmer Fudd earflaps against the biting 20 mph wind. Many fans donned plastic rain capes. Drenched spectators paid well over $2,000 each — for supposedly the "best" seats in the rain-soaked stadium.
If the dampest games had been postponed, though, Fox stood to take a big commercial hit in its bottom line. Ultimately, so would MLB, which earned a percentage of TV's income. I'm sure MLB and Fox colluded, if not conspired, to play under conditions that introduced hydroplaning as a new element of the sport.
Baseball executives should know better and care more. The average baseball player today is a finely-tuned super-human athlete worth millions of dollars. Who among them wants to risk shattering a kneecap to catch a ball or steal a base in a bone-chilling rain?
Game quality deteriorates in inclement weather. Players shouldn't have to see their own breath, keep their big leather gloves dry by tucking them under their uniform shirts or contend with powerful gusts of wind that redirect a fly ball's normal trajectory. And, they shouldn't have had to splash-slide just to grab a more-or-less "routine" extra base.
Clearly, something was radically wrong when one of Tampa Bay's fastest players narrowly scored from second base on a long single, something even notoriously slower players can do without a hitch when they don't have to slog through the rain.
More was at stake during the suspended game. Tampa Bay won a World Series berth in part with its explosive team speed. The lousy weather slowed the Rays, both offensively and defensively. Playing through heavy rain robbed both the players and the spectators of any speed thrill.
The Philly storms should have stifled the last outbursts from loud advocates for a new, outdoor baseball stadium in Tampa Bay. Domed Tropicana Field is just fine for rainy-season baseball in the lightning capital of the world.

A regular columnist for Hernando Today, John Herbert lives in Spring Hill.

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