Postseason baseball, as it is presently constituted, does absolutely nothing to create new fans for the game that was, once upon a time, our national pastime.
This isn’t an original thought, but when most games don’t conclude until sometime between 11 p.m. and midnight, it’s difficult to imagine there are many pre-teens tuned in, especially on a weeknight.
Agnes Yeager was the principal at Belvedere Elementary School in Annandale when I was a student there some years back. Miss Yeager was a no-nonsense type — I seem to recall she was ex-military, but that may have just been a rumor — who roamed the halls with a demeanor that was all business. When she stared at you, you stopped whatever you were doing, frozen in place.
Yet, for all of that toughness, Miss Yeager had a real soft spot for baseball. I mean, here we were in Northern Virginia — American League territory at the time — with a local team for whom the turning point of the season was frequently the anthem on opening day. The Senators of that era had no shot at the flag during the Yankee dynasty years, but every October, Miss Yeager put the network radio play-by-play of the World Series on the school’s sound system for us all to hear.
My house was a 10-minute walk from the school, and I was very much into the game at that age. I remember so vividly listening to the early innings of the 1959 and 1960 World Series at my desk, and then rushing home to watch the rest of the game in blazing black-and-white on the old RCA console.
I don’t recall any of my teachers being put off by this interruption in the afternoon lesson plan. Keep in mind, teaching elementary school in those days was pretty much an all-female occupation, yet this baseball play-by-play — providing a soothing soundtrack to that day’s geography lesson or writing exercise — never seemed to interrupt their focus. Was every other school doing the same thing? I thought so at the time, but maybe not.
When larger and larger broadcast rights fees arrived, baseball let television call the shots, and the younger fan stopped being a priority. Night games went from being a novelty to being the norm, and school kids went from being able to watch the last pitch, to watching the first couple of innings and having to ask their parents the next morning who won.
Major League Baseball has paid scant lip service to the prospect of moving more postseason games to daylight, but it all comes down to money: Daytime isn’t prime time, and they’ll avoid a smaller payout at any cost.
The game never acknowledged the Agnes Yeagers of the world who were helping to sell baseball to the nation’s youth on her own time. Its blind spot in creating new fans has already skewed its demographic appeal, with more damage to follow.
Phil Wood is a contributor to Nats Xtra on MASN. Contact him at [email protected].
