Play ball

Major League Baseball owners approved television contracts today. The bad news is, the World Series will remain exclusively on Fox through 2013.

The good news is Fox will no longer have exclusive rights to the ALCS and NLCS. They’ll start sharing those series with TBS under the same system they used to have with NBC. Fox will have the ALCS next year, TBS gets the NLCS. Then the following year they’ll switch.

I don’t know if TBS will be any good or not, but at least it will be nice to have an alternative to Fox.

The ESPN article doesn’t make any mention of the Divisional Series. Right now ESPN gets some of those. I believe that’s part of a separate deal that’s still continuing.

My post-season pledge

Good afternoon and welcome to post-season baseball. Before we get started, I'm making a pledge right now not to whine (at least not here) about the Fox coverage or the late start of the games like I do every year.

If you want my thoughts on those issues, here are the old links:

• Damn delays
• Post season baseball
• Celebrity sightings
• Play-byplay, Fox style
• MLB's Late-Late Show

Baseball banter

Time for another rant against Fox and their coverage of Major League Baseball (all of the birthday business kept me from blogging about this yesterday).

While watching the All-Star Game Tuesday night, Fox played one of their “Sounds of the Game,” which I think was supposed to be Bronson Arroyo saying something to Brad Penny in the dugout. Maybe it’s just me, but it sounded like complete inaudible gibberish and a total waste of my time. Not to mention, you couldn’t tell exactly where the two talking players were in the shot shown on the screen. The whole thing made no sense!

At that point I decided to see how bad the delay was with the radio. Sure, the radio was a few seconds ahead of the TV, but not so much that I couldn’t enjoy the game this way. So with the exception of the tribute to Roberto Clemente, I watched the rest of the game on “mute” while listening to the coverage on ESPN Radio.

Why does Fox insist on tormenting baseball fans with all of their needless gimmicks?

I’ll step down from my soapbox now.