Major League Baseball & Tommy Lasorda, along with Fox and ESPN, are trying desperately to convince you that this year’s MLB playoffs are worth watching. Hence a new set of advertisements, which are mildly amusing at best, trying to convince fans of teams who didn’t make the playoffs (read: Red Sox Nation) that they should tune in anyways.
So, being the slave to advertising that I am, I tried to convince myself to listen to this afternoon’s Twins/A’s game. Didn’t happen. I made a cursory check down the AM dial and didn’t find it on. Went back to the iPod instead. Tonight, I actually sat down to the TV to watch the Yankees/Tigers game, which was pretty well played through the three innings I made it through. But I just found it uninteresting and switched over to Law & Order on NBC instead.
Unlike the NFL, where playoff games are interesting no matter who is in the playoffs, baseball playoffs are only truly worth watching when there’s an interesting subplot or interesting characters. Sure, the Yankees are in it, but does anyone outside of Michigan give a rats about the Tigers? Or the A’s outside of the Bay Area? Or the Twins outside of Minneapolis-St. Paul? There’s no national draw to bring viewers to the TV for these games. There are no matchups to look forward too, save perhaps Mets vs. Yankees in the World Series (which would almost assuredly go the Bombers way in no more than 5 games). As much as non-Red Sox fans might disagree, when the Red Sox (and Yankees) are not in the playoffs, no one outside of the core fan bases in America care about the MLB playoffs.
Baseball, more than perhaps any other sport, relies on the soap opera side of it’s sport. There’s no great human interest stories or underdog scrappy teams to root for. There is no bitter rivalry to renew. It’s just baseball, and while the quality of play may be good, the ratings for this postseason are likely to be dissapointing for Fox and ESPN. Perhaps in the next TV deal, they can implement a BCS-style playoff format, where voters can determine which teams make the postseason. Then Fox and ESPN could assure themselves of Must-See-TV with a good old fashioned Yankees/Red Sox 7 game tilt.
0 Comments until now.