Baseball's War On Bedtime

The signs of fall are upon us: The days are shorter. The leaves are falling.

And dads are sitting in their basements, watching the baseball playoffs and getting ready for the World Series. Alone.

There was a time when fall was for bonding between fathers and children. When the thrill of your team making the postseason became a moment of shared joy, a chance to do something together that matters - like root against the Dodgers.

No more.

We've all accepted night baseball, but it's gotten to the point where even the grownups have trouble staying up for the end of a World Series game, let alone our kids. I used to be a producer for Fox TV, so I know why this has happened, and I got to fight with the network over it every year. And every year I lost.

Fox has lost, too. And so have other outlets that carry postseason baseball. They've lost - at least on the East Coast - a generation of baseball fans.

My 5-year-old took wildly to baseball this year: He got to run around the bases at RFK. He got an autograph at Camden Yards. And, with 7 p.m. game times, Max got to cuddle with me on the couch through the summer, teeth brushed and jammies on, to watch the Orioles and the Nats and my beloved Yankees. We made rhymes out of the players' names ('Jason Giambi, runs like a zombie!' 'Derek Jeter, the Red Sox beater!') and only in the later innings moved on to the finer points of balls, strikes and why managers are allowed to kick dirt at the umpire, but you get in trouble for that in tee-ball.

So just as the season gets really exciting, how do I tell him that he has to stop watching?

Sorry, son. For much of the Championship Series, and all of the World Series, it's first pitches around 8:15 (and sometimes even later) - and bedtimes without baseball - for all of us.

Add to that all the commercials they pack into these games, and it's a wonder that anyone east of Cleveland is still around when the game's over. And each year the TV ratings shrink, and the executives scratch their heads and wonder why. Maybe people just don't want to watch St. Louis, they ponder.

No, guys. They just don't want to watch St. Louis at 1 in the morning.

So why can't they just move the games up an hour or so? The problem isn't just that TV execs all live on the West Coast, where games end early. The problem is simple - and infuriating.

It's about money, of course. And about the division of power between the networks and local stations.

Here's the deal: The networks, like Fox, get most of the money from commercials in prime time. But they don't own the hour from 7 to 8 p.m. That's owned by the local affiliates.

The affiliates load that hour with things like 'Seinfeld' and 'The Simpsons' reruns and keep most of the revenue from the commercials. If the network started the game at 7 p.m. (and make no mistake, Major League Baseball will go along with anything the networks want), the local affiliates would lose out on all that 'Simpsons' money. (D'oh!)

You're probably asking, couldn't the network give some of that money back to the locals? The answer is yes. Also, monkeys could learn the cha-cha.

But the networks say that's not the only reason. Everybody would lose money on an earlier start, one of the old gang at Fox told me, because fewer people are available to watch TV at 7:30 Eastern. (When they say 'people,' of course, they mean young male people whose beer and car preferences can be swayed by advertisers. Families don't really count.) The networks say that an earlier start would further alienate West Coast viewers. But I can't imagine that gaining back all the viewers they've lost in the good old hardball towns - Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, New York, Boston, Washington - isn't worth the effort.

I think of my father and how momentous these days were to him. He lived and died with the Series - agonizing whenever Mickey Mantle struck out with men on base, euphoric when he would knock one out; he watched, stunned, as people walked past not listening to the game ('Where could they be going that's so important?' he'd ask).

And I think of Max, who year in and year out will miss out on great World Series memories. Unless we can persuade some guys in suits to think a little differently about the awesome responsibility of running the network that carries the World Series. Not to persuade them to make less money - hey, I'm a producer, not an idiot - but to persuade them to make it in a different way.

Because squeezing every penny out of the World Series may be squeezing the life out of it, too.