For some reason, Major League Baseball thinks it’s a good idea to start World Series games that feature teams in the Eastern Standard Time and Central Standard Time zones after 8:00 p.m. — including home games for the East Coast team.
With the brutal pace of play that playoff baseball faces, it’s a bad idea. While it’s great that the World Series was competitive this year (and the Houston Astros lost), the league needs to rethink its start times. The games went on too late this year, regardless of what anyone on the West Coast thinks.
Many of these games were more than 3 hours, 40 minutes long. When the first pitch of these games is around 8:10 p.m., that means they typically ended just before midnight (if not later). For children, people who have to work in the morning, and people who like to get a decent night of sleep, it’s not workable.
All of these games are national games. Understandably, the league wants to maximize its television ratings by having something that people in all four time zones in the continental U.S. can watch. However, when the two teams playing are in two of the more eastern time zones in the country, the league should focus on the fan bases of those two teams.
While 47.6% of the country lives in the Eastern time zone, 29.1% lives in the Central time zone. That’s more than three-quarters of the country in two time zones. That said, the league shouldn’t worry if the games are on too early for people in Washington, Oregon, and California. A 5:10 p.m. start time is still early for a baseball game, but Braves and Astros fans typically don’t live in those areas. If a 7:10 p.m. start time on the East Coast is too early for West Coasters because that’s 4:10 p.m. in Los Angeles, that’s too bad. At least the average person will be awake by the time the game ends on the West Coast.
Meanwhile, if a game were to start at 7:10 on the East Coast, it could end before 11:00 p.m. — even with the awful pace of play. And in Texas, as well as parts of the deep south such as Alabama and Mississippi that have Braves fans, the game could end before 10:00 p.m.
If there were a West Coast team in the World Series this year, then it would make sense to compromise and have something that’s at least somewhat watchable for both parts of the country. However, that wasn’t the case this year.
Critics often say that baseball is a dying sport and that it’s not popular with young people anymore. It’s hard for a sport to gain popularity when children can’t see the final out of their favorite team winning the World Series. How many schoolchildren were able to stay up and watch these games to the end? Very few, most likely — all to appease the western half of the U.S., which has fewer people.
The next time there is a World Series with two teams that are in either the eastern or central parts of the country, the MLB should try to avoid this problem. Sometimes, it’s unavoidable, but it was avoidable this year. And MLB didn’t make the World Series watchable enough for millions of fans.
Tom Joyce (@TomJoyceSports) is a political reporter for the New Boston Post in Massachusetts. He is also a freelance writer who has been published in USA Today, the Boston Globe, Newsday, ESPN, the Detroit Free Press, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Federalist, and a number of other outlets.
