Sports Biblio Digest, 10.23.16: The Late, Late Baseball Playoffs Show
News, Views and Reviews About Sports Books, History and Culture
Also In This Issue: Protesting Chief Wahoo; The Death of Sonny Liston; Wayne Gretzky, Hockey Historian; Remembering Dennis Byrd
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This is Digest issue No. 59, published Oct. 23, 2016. The Digest is a companion to the Sports Biblio website, which is updated every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
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To what I’m sure will come as a great amusement to my readers on the West Coast of the U.S., the baseball playoffs are becoming almost too late for me to watch.
And I’m a night owl.
The late finishing times—sometimes after midnight here on the East Coast—and the four-hour-plus length of some of the baseball playoffs games this fall that have me heading off to bed more weary than usual.
At the risk of sounding like one of those “get off my lawn” types who’ve groused about the baseball playoffs schedule for decades, these games start too damn late in the day, er night.
The complaint has long been that baseball is squandering its chance to connect with younger generations of fans by playing most postseason games, and the entire World Series at night.
This presumes that kids today go to bed at the same time when I was a kid, which even in high school was no later than 10 o’clock. Mom was strict for good reason—I have always hated getting up early. To this day, I have never admitted to her my passion for the transistor radio, which I snuck under my pillow like contraband, tuning in to late games out on “The Coast.”
I’ll posit here that baseball is actually wearing out one of its most enduring demographics: Those of us 50 and older who occasionally nod off at the two-hour mark since first pitch, otherwise known as the top of the fourth inning!
For Norman Chad, a master at kvetching about sports on television in general, the duration of the games is the problem: “A baseball game should not last longer than a Bruce Springsteen concert.”
The World Series begins on Tuesday in Cleveland, and no matter how many games are played, every single one of them will start shortly after 8 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time.
It’s been 45 years since Major League Baseball first ordered up night games at the World Series, and it was a memorable and important event in 1971, as Bruce Markusen argued in his 2009 book, “The Team That Changed Baseball.”
Prime-time ratings, and the advertising dollars that they’re chasing, are far too valuable to turn off the lights and let the natural light of day take hold. Young adults I know who watch baseball tend to stay up very late in front of the television, often switching to other shows after the game. They don’t wake up to the test pattern, as I did, but reruns of “Law and Order.”
But think about it this way: The Indians last won the World Series in 1948, only 13 years after the first night MLB game was played in the regular season (a few months before my parents were born). The Chicago Cubs, making their first World Series appearance since 1945, were the last team to play any night games. Lights were finally installed at Wrigley Field in 1988, the year the last day World Series game was played.
A World Series between these two teams would represent all kinds of throwback glory for those of us in the codger set. Would it be too much to play day games on the weekends? At Wrigley?
No, and not just for the ratings the night brings. Playing on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, the World Series also would get slaughtered against the television juggernauts of college and pro football. I know what I’d watch, but most of us who feel this way aren’t getting any younger.
So I offer up a compromise to the lords of Fox Television, who have done a terrific job thus far. John Smoltz’ insights in the booth have been excellent, and the studio banter between Alex Rodriguez (who is also very good) and Pete Rose (who is not) has been entertaining.
What they bring to baseball on television—which has never been as good as baseball on the radio, ever—is compelling conversation, a wondrous and rare thing in an era of super-mediated, over-analyzed viewer experience.
Don’t ruin a good thing by waiting to start games in prime-time. Due to the marathon length of these games, they will certainly end there, and probably beyond, after the late-night show monologues.
Would it hurt to throw out the first pitch at, say, a little after 7 p.m.? Is an hour earlier too soon? Even for me, with my intermittent nocturnal napping, maybe not, but at least I might wake up in the morning a little more refreshed. And a lot less feeling like a vampire.
A Few Good Baseball Reads
The Toronto Blue Jays didn’t have much of a chance against the Cleveland Indians in the American League Championship Series, and an attempt by a Canadian indigenous activist to ban the Indians’ jerseys with the Chief Wahoo logo went about as well as Jays’ batters stepping at the plate to face Cleveland closer Andrew Miller, the ALCS MVP;
Not long after the Indians clinched, Hardball Talk blogger Craig Calcaterra restated his long-held objections to Chief Wahoo, which hasn’t been the Indians’ primary logo since 2014. Like far too many in sports media, Calcaterra is a self-appointed cultural gatekeeper who tries to lecture and shame readers who disagree with him. An ardent Atlanta Braves fan, he hasn’t commented much about that nickname (they’re my favorite team too), which continues more than three decades after the quiet phasing out of Chief Noc-A-Homa. Others are going in for mock/shock value, including ESPN’s Bomani Jones, who appeared on the “Mike & Mike” program this summer wearing a “Caucasians” shirt first drawn up in 2006 by Cleveland graphic designer Brian Kirby, whose company is reaping the benefits;
Baseball writer Rob Neyer, now scribbling at Complex, a young adult lifestyle and pop culture magazine (how many can there possibly be?), presents the Oral History of Baseball, as seen on the “Seinfeld” show. Derek Jeter is the shortstop, of course, but I won’t spoil the rest of Neyer’s specially-composed team around the theme;
At ESPN.com, Buster Olney details Major League Baseball’s plans to include an international draft in the next Collective Bargaining Agreement, in large part to clean up corrupt practices, including smuggling, that have grown with players arriving from Cuba and the Caribbean in particular. At Baseball America, Ben Badler questions MLB’s motives and argues that the powers-that-be demonstrate little understanding of how players in the Latin world are developed, scouted and signed;
The annual MLB Ballpark Experience Rankings have been compiled at Stadium Journey, and Cleveland’s Progressive Field, the venue for the World Series opener, is high on the list.
Sports Book News and Reviews
Wayne Gretzky’s newly published history of hockey figures to be a keeper. CBC has more on what’s behind “99: Stories of the Game;”
The William Hill Sports Book Awards 2016 shortlist was announced in London this week, with many of the usual suspects in contention;
Cait Murphy’s newly released “A History of American Sports in 100 Items” is getting some good critical praise, and not just from collectibles buffs;
Another new book getting good reviews from all over is Shaun Assael’s “The Murder of Sonny Liston,” including Dave Hannigan in the Irish Times. Excerpt here at The Undefeated.
Passings
Drew Sharp, 56, grew up in Detroit, graduated from the University of Michigan and worked at only one place, The Detroit Free Press, where he was a sports beat writer and later a sports columnist. The cause of his death early Friday, according to an autopsy by Oakland County (Mich.) coroner, was hypertensive cardiovascular disease.
The New York Jets will honor the late Dennis Byrd before today’s game with the Baltimore Ravens, including the unveiling of a special helmet detail. Byrd, 50, who learned to walk again after a paralyzing neck injury while playing for the Jets in 1992, was killed last week in a car accident in Oklahoma. Scheduled to be present at the tribute is Scott Mersereau, a fellow Jets defensive lineman who was part of the pass rush on Chiefs quarterback Dave Krieg when Byrd was injured. “Rise and Walk,” Byrd’s memoir of his recovery, has been an inspiration to a number of similarly injured football players, most recently Eric LeGrand of Rutgers.
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