Fans Will Endure More Regionalization
Major league baseball and its two network accomplices have turned our National Pastime into a Regional Pastime, and they should be ashamed - even if it’s just for a year.
Consider, for example, the Mariners-Yankees playoff, which Seattle won Sunday night in the third extra-inning game of their five-game series.
It ranks among baseball’s greatest playoffs, along with the Mets-Astros and Red Sox-Angels in 1986 and Astros-Phillies in 1980. Yet less than half the country watched on TV - until Game 5, when it was the only series left.
That’s because ABC and NBC regionalized the playoffs as part of their Baseball Network deal with the major leagues. And although TBN will be dismantled after the season, and although baseball has promised that every game will be on national TV next year, that historic series is lost forever to half the country.
“I’d have felt terrible,” said former NBC director Harry Coyle, who invented the way baseball is covered on TV. But Coyle has a satellite dish at his place in Marshalltown, Iowa, so he had access to most of the games, some from Canadian TV.
“This is silly, especially when you get a game that’s 10-0 in the third inning. I’m against the regionalization in postseason completely,” he said. “Why can’t we go back to the old way where everybody sees everything?”
The answer to that question, Harry, is: We can. Baseball intends to do just that. The question you should have asked is: Why did we regionalize the playoffs in the first place? It never made any sense.
To the broadcast networks, the only part of the baseball season that makes money is postseason. So, why limit your inventory by regionalizing? That question was never answered satisfactorily.
And it’s not like regionalization has driven up playoff ratings. For it’s regionalized broadcasts Friday and Saturday nights, ABC earned overnight ratings of 12.4 and 10.2. For it’s national broadcast of the Yankees-Mariners Sunday, ABC got a 13.4 Nielsen overnight.
“You talk about regionalization,” Coyle said. “I’m just getting over the shock of what’s happened to baseball overall. It certainly isn’t what I left.”
Now, viewers must endure another round of regionalized playoffs, with 43 percent of the country getting the A.L. series and 57 percent the N.L. for the first two games on ABC.
Out with Brent
Did you get the feeling Sunday night a couple of times that Brent Musburger really wanted to stop talking, he just couldn’t? And somebody, please, tell him a lot of fans outside of Seattle know Ken Griffey Jr. and Edgar Martinez.
His commentary became particularly painful Sunday night when he misdiagnosed a Tony Fernandez double as a home run, then tried to apologize for a whole inning.
Bless his heart, Musburger just isn’t a very good baseball announcer. He’s a studio host, perhaps the best. He should be doing Wide World of Sports for ABC, not baseball.