Holiday Baseball

If I were running baseball …

The baseball season spans, what I consider to be, four major holidays. Memorial Day, Independence Day, and Labor Day. The fourth? Opening Day. A non-baseball fan could argue it being a holiday, but for my purposes, you don’t need to worry about that argument.

First, and this should be how it already is if it weren’t for tv (which is the case for most things), all teams should open on the same day. A single Opening Day. Not an Opening Night followed by two Opening Days.

My proposal is that every game, all 15, on each of these holidays should be on some sort of national tv. ESPN and MLB Network will show quite a few games, but not all, and I don’t expect them to show all of them. Other channels should jump in on this new tradition. Broadcast or cable, whatever. On most of these holidays they are showing a marathon of whatever they find around on the floor. I don’t care what the channel usually shows. Food Network? Sure. SOAPNet? Perfect. Some would make sense: Nick, MTV.

I know your question, ‘why would a non-sports channel want to produce a baseball game?’ They don’t. All these games are already on somewhere. MLB Net shows a local feed for most of their games already. If you wanted to be real ambitions, you could alternate the feeds for the national audience to get a taste of each team’s announcers. For the local fans, the game would still be on their regional sports net as usual.

I mentioned Nick and MTV has channels that would make sense because I could see them producing it themselves and bringing their own style to it. I bet Nick could even convince Fox to let them dig up Scooter. In these instances, it will be even more important for the local nets to still broadcast the game. It would be great for their target audiences, but not the real fans.

This could make baseball a big deal on each of these holidays. It’s supposedly the ‘national past time’ (and is for me, but sadly, not for everyone), it should act like it on occasion. Instead of tweaking (ruining) the all-star game and having November World Series games that take all night.