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  1. #1

    Is Television Ruining Sports?

    In my opinion the World Series has either been ruined or seriously damaged. It starts way too late in the year and the games are played at night. And the start time gets pushed back because TV wants it that way. So you have a warm/hot weather game played in the cold. Some of that can be fixed by knocking about 20-25 games off of the regular season, but don't hold your breathe for that.

    My guess is that they allowed the World Series game to start on Monday because Fox wanted the Series over with on Thursday night at the latest. Only when the conditions for the players resembled sitting in a refrigerator and having ice water shot into your face did they suspended the game. It is scheduled to restart at 8:30 or so.

    Why do these games not start at 7? Or why not in the daytime.

    College football games should be played on Saturday in the early afternoon. Games seem to be on almost every night of the week. My S.O. went to the University of Southern California and we have season tickets. The remaining games start at 3:30, 5, 4, 5 and 1:30. We had one away game on a Thursday night.

    It just seems to me that the priorities should be the players and the fans.
    Apparently it is the advertisers.

    SoCal

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Jul 2008
    Location
    Rent free in tarheels’ heads
    I guess this is obvious but without advertisers there would be no televised sports. Most of us then would get to see nothing. I'll take whacky game times and advertising over the alternative... reading the game results in the next day's newspaper.

  3. #3

    Well

    You had advertisers when the World Series was played in early October and college football on Saturday afternoon.

    For the pro sports you would just have less money but the players would still be very well played. A shorter regular season and a World Series in early October would, in my opinion, make baseball much.

    You could start college football games at 12:00 in the East, 1:00 in the Central, 1:30 in the Mountain and 12:30 in the West and have plenty on television.

    I LOVE to watch Duke basketball but do not need ACC Sunday Hoops.

    I just prefer that they televised sporting events rather than turning sporting events into television shows.

    SoCal

  4. #4
    Was it teevee's fault baseball went to three divisions with wild cards? Was it teevee's fault baseball went to 162 games in when was it, 1962?

    "the priorities should be the players and the fans"... aren't the fans mostly the ones watching teevee in the first place and implicitly "demanding" with their eyeballs that baseball games be shown at certain times?

    And why are you complaining about this if you're on the west coast?

  5. #5
    Join Date
    Feb 2007
    Location
    Raleigh, NC
    Hurleyfor3 is correct. The expansion of baseball's post-season is a result of the near-doubling of major-league teams since 1960. Can you really ask or expect 16 NL teams to compete for one World Series spot?

    Or we could go back to the 1950s, when the U.S. population was a fraction of what it is now, integration was still an ongoing process, and non-American-born players were rare. 16 teams, none in the South. That's not going to work.

    You can blame the sponsors for the inordinately long commercial breaks. Games on the East Coast can't start any earlier in the evening without starting them before people on the West Coast generally get home from work. Do you want a 4 P.M. West Coast start?

    Baseball wasn't designed to be played in Boston, Philly, New York, or Chicago in late October. How to solve this? You could dramatically shorten the regular season and start the post-season in mid-September. Or you could follow the lead of the NFL and schedule the WS in a neutral, warm-weather locale. I suspect neither is likely and there are compelling reasons why that is the case.

    Maybe global warming will solve the problem.

    College football on Tuesday? Fully agree. No reason for it, IMO. A visiting team in an intersectional game has their entire academic week thrown out of wack. Then again, basketball teams do it all the time. Then again2, basketball teams play twice a week.

    But the fan base has spoken with its pocketbook and the pocketbook says we love college football on week nights. When nobody shows up for and nobody watches a USC game on Thursday, then things will change. But don't hold your breath.

  6. #6
    Quote Originally Posted by jimsumner View Post
    When nobody shows up for and nobody watches a USC game on Thursday, then things will change. But don't hold your breath.
    To be fair, given the general attitude of SoCal fans, a couple of years in the Pac10 basement might take care of that problem. Not that I am holding my breath for that.

  7. #7
    Join Date
    Feb 2007
    Location
    Lompoc, West Carolina
    I guess I show age when I think back to the time when Friday night was reserved for HS football and Saturday for college football. Likewise, HS basketball was done on Tuesday night/Friday night, whereas college basketball was on a Wednesday/Saturday rotation. This way there was not a conflict on where to be and when.

    I miss daytime World Series, when we had to sneak to see or hear, while we were in school. The added danger of it all made it seem more exciting.

  8. #8
    Quote Originally Posted by SoCalDukeFan View Post
    Why do these games not start at 7? Or why not in the daytime?
    Having just returend from the West Coast I do now understand why these games don't start at 7:00 (I'm assuming you meant 7:00, EST). *:00 might work, though that would still be before many folks out west gothome from work.

    However, having some Saturday and Sunday day games makes sense to me. With the WS games not starting until 8:30 my 9 year old, who is a huge baseball fan, couldnot see any of them to completion. Baseball's strategy here may be penny-wise and poung-foolish. they may be selling off their future fan base for present gains.

  9. #9
    Join Date
    Feb 2007
    Location
    Los Angeles
    Quote Originally Posted by SoCalDukeFan View Post
    In my opinion the World Series has either been ruined or seriously damaged. It starts way too late in the year and the games are played at night. And the start time gets pushed back because TV wants it that way. So you have a warm/hot weather game played in the cold. Some of that can be fixed by knocking about 20-25 games off of the regular season, but don't hold your breathe for that.

    My guess is that they allowed the World Series game to start on Monday because Fox wanted the Series over with on Thursday night at the latest. Only when the conditions for the players resembled sitting in a refrigerator and having ice water shot into your face did they suspended the game. It is scheduled to restart at 8:30 or so.

    Why do these games not start at 7? Or why not in the daytime.

    College football games should be played on Saturday in the early afternoon. Games seem to be on almost every night of the week. My S.O. went to the University of Southern California and we have season tickets. The remaining games start at 3:30, 5, 4, 5 and 1:30. We had one away game on a Thursday night.

    It just seems to me that the priorities should be the players and the fans.
    Apparently it is the advertisers.

    SoCal
    First, the fact that your S.O. went to USC is reason enough to end the relationship. Almost as bad as UNC, really.

    Second, of course the USC games start earlier in the day! They're on the west coast. Even so, at least one recent USC game that I remember was played at 7:30 this year. I don't really watch the USC games, although I have tickets to one of them...

  10. #10
    Join Date
    Dec 2007
    Location
    Charlottesville, VA
    I, too, mourn the passing of the days when World Series games were primarily played in the afternoon. There was something so wonderful and timeless about tight games in the late innings when the sun was low and sending long shadows across the outfield. True, even as early as the Pudge Fisk Home Run Game, they were occasionally played at night, but even those seemed special occasions because they were the rarity and not the norm. And it would be great if in a World Series the owners of, say, the Dodgers, could say to Fox (what a horrible network anyway), "No, we're NOT going to start our game at a ridiculous 5:45 P.M. just for your convenience on the east coast. Our fans and season ticket holders have been faithfully coming all year long and we're not going to treat them in this shabby a fashion."

    Thursday night (much less Tuesday and Friday night) college football is awful. I used to work at a university that had an ESPN Thursday night game, and parking for games was also, not surprisingly, in the areas used by university employees working there. For that afternoon we were ordered if at all possible to quit work and go away (from spots we paid for) to clear parking spaces for the football crowd. In effect the school decided not to be a school but a venue of tv entertainment for a day. An abomination.

    But then I mourned the beginning of night games at Wrigley Field, and the dictation by television that the ACC Tournament Championship be on Sunday afternoon instead of Saturday night when we all know it really should be. The Duke-Carolina bball games should be played on Saturday night. The ACC never should have expanded to a dozen, just for TV money. The World Series should be played by day (and people can then sneak out to watch - that's NOT an abomination).

    I realize I sound like a bitter old man, and that things are not going to change, but there it is (by the way, in spite of this cranky old geezer rant, I am absolutely not voting for John McCain next week. It's time for a change).

  11. #11
    Join Date
    Feb 2007
    Location
    Raleigh, NC
    To me the logical World Series split would be. . .

    G1 Saturday afternoon
    G2 Sunday afternoon
    Monday-Travel
    G3 Tuesday, 8 P.M. ET
    G4 Wednesday, 8 P.M. ET
    G5 Thursday, 8 P.M.
    Friday-Travel
    G6 Saturday afternoon
    G7 Sunday afternoon

    That puts 4 of a prospective 7-game series on weekend afternoons, when kids could watch the games and the weather would be moderated.

    The problem? Too many American sports fans would choose a run-of-the-mill NFL game on the two Sundays, rather than a WS game, even a game seven.

    So, MLB, goes to extremes to avoid the NFL.

    The irony? One of the reasons younger sports fans prefer the NFL over MLB, IMO, is the fact that they could never watch the World Series growing up, because the games were on too late. Closing the circle.

  12. #12
    Quote Originally Posted by jimsumner View Post
    To me the logical World Series split would be. . .

    G1 Saturday afternoon
    G2 Sunday afternoon
    Monday-Travel
    G3 Tuesday, 8 P.M. ET
    G4 Wednesday, 8 P.M. ET
    G5 Thursday, 8 P.M.
    Friday-Travel
    G6 Saturday afternoon
    G7 Sunday afternoon

    That puts 4 of a prospective 7-game series on weekend afternoons, when kids could watch the games and the weather would be moderated.

    The problem? Too many American sports fans would choose a run-of-the-mill NFL game on the two Sundays, rather than a WS game, even a game seven.

    So, MLB, goes to extremes to avoid the NFL.

    The irony? One of the reasons younger sports fans prefer the NFL over MLB, IMO, is the fact that they could never watch the World Series growing up, because the games were on too late. Closing the circle.
    When I was in Jr Hi and Hi School we often had the games piped into the rooms over the PS system (in the class rooms requested by the teachers.) In college and law school the games were a reason to cut a class. The games were always on somwhere. The World Series was THE major sporting event of the era. Football grew later.

  13. #13
    Join Date
    Mar 2008
    Location
    raleigh
    can't really say TV is RUINING sports....let's see. ummmmm reading about it in the newspaper delivered to your house hours after the game is over...

    or..


    15 cameras in high def so good you can read the play list on the quarterback's wrist ,re-plays, slo-mo, on-screen graphics, commentators, stats and history all in REAL-TIME pumped up with rock music....PLUS being able to PAUSE the game with dvr and completely skip the commercials if you want...



    hmmm...cake or death, cake or death, cake or death.

    can't quite decide..

  14. #14
    Join Date
    Feb 2007
    Location
    Skinker-DeBaliviere, Saint Louis
    This whole argument sounds like people think it's 1970. If you think TV is responsible for some sort of postlapsarian state of sports, the accurate verbal aspect would be perfect, not imperfect.

    A movie is not about what it's about; it's about how it's about it.
    ---Roger Ebert


    Some questions cannot be answered
    Who’s gonna bury who
    We need a love like Johnny, Johnny and June
    ---Over the Rhine

  15. #15
    Quote Originally Posted by jimsumner View Post
    One of the reasons younger sports fans prefer the NFL over MLB, IMO, is the fact that they could never watch the World Series growing up, because the games were on too late.
    Or maybe kids are just getting smarter these days.

    On a slightly more serious note, I think there's a ton of truth to the idea that TV is ruining baseball - or, more accurately, not so much the rise of TV as the decline of radio. Makes a really good radio sport, and it is fun to play, but as something to watch on TV... I'd rather just change the channel to Seinfeld reruns.

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