Shadows on TV

One of the things that bug me happened yesterday. It's obviously a very minor quibble in light of what is happening in New Orleans. (How is it possible that CNN can be showing people stuck on rooftops and highway overpasses for days? Why can't help get to places that CNN can? How is it possible that the FEMA director didn't know about people stuck at the Superdome after they had been stuck there for four days? Why wasn't there some organized way for people without cars to evacuate? It's painful to see, I can't imagine what it would be like to be there.) Nonetheless, it bugs me.

I was watching the first couple innings of the A's-Yankees game on ESPN last night. ESPN's Sunday Night Baseball game always starts at 8 p.m. Eastern, 5 p.m. Pacific. This obviously is done for ratings reasons, so that the game is in prime time in the East and at least ends up in prime time in the West. For as long as I have been watching televised baseball, this has been the schedule that the networks have tried to use for playoff games. ESPN just plagarized it when they started showing baseball on Sunday nights.

The inevitable result of this scheduling is that, when the game is on the West Coast, the first several innings are played at dusk, which creates The Shadows. Professional baseball games normally start at either 1 p.m. or 7 p.m. These start times create no Shadow Issues. One p.m. games start and end in daylight. Seven p.m. games start and end in darkness under the lights. Five p.m. games, however, have Shadows. Specifically, because the sun is going down during a 5 p.m. game, the stands behind the plate cast shadows on the field. For several innings, what you get is a situation where the plate is in A Shadow and the mound is in the sun. As the game progresses, The Shadow covers more of the field, so that the plate and the mound are in The Shadow, but the outfield is not. Eventually, the whole field is in darkness.

What happens during these 5 p.m. games is that the commentators inevitably blather incessantly about the effect of The Shadow on the players. Most commonly, the commentators talk about how difficult it is for the batter to pick up the ball, and the spin on the ball, when the pitcher throws in the light and the batter is in The Shadow. I mean, some of them will literally talk about this after every pitch. As the game progresses, the commentators will talk about how the outfielders have a hard time seeing the ball as the hitter hits it in The Shadow and it then flies into the sun.

Here is my problem with The Shadow Issues: THEY ARE COMPLETELY TV-CREATED. There would be no Shadow Issues if TV didn't demand that games start at a time when they can be in prime time on both the East and West Coasts. The TV commentators thus spend untoward amounts of time and energy telling us TV viewers what a bad effect TV's demands are having on the actual game. If it's so bad for the game, then stop having 5 p.m. games. If it's not so bad that the extra money that is made can justify it, then shut up about it. We don't need TV commenting on TV when what we want to do is watch baseball.

This kind of echo chamber of TV commentary happens a lot in sports and it is totally annoying every single time it happens.

When NBC still had the NBA's TV contract, the commentators often would tell us about how brilliant coaches were to sit their starters at the end of one quarter and the beginning of the next. The brilliance of this maneuver, according to the commentators, lay in the fact that the starters were able to get much more rest than the amount of game time that they missed. NBC even started running graphics comparing the actual amount of time that the starters were resting against the amount of game time that they missed. (In many games, this graphic was accompanied by a shot of Michael Jordan wiping his face with a towel and drinking Gatorade, so the implied message was something like, "Don't worry, viewers who don't really care about the game, but only want to see Michael Jordan, he won't be out of the game much longer. He just needs a little rest. See, we even have him on a clock.")

What was never explained was that the coaches knew that there would be a massive block of commercials during the quarter, so that they knew that their starters would get a whole bunch of rest while we were watching Michael Jordan shill for underwear. In fact, in all televised NBA games, there are mandatory TV timeouts at certain points in quarters. Coaches obviously know this and can plan for them to get their players extended breaks without missing a lot of game time. The commentators never mention this stuff, but instead behave like the coaches are geniuses of Einsteinian capacity.

There are other examples of this kind of BS. Because there are so many games during the first couple of rounds of the NCAA basketball tournament, some of them have to start at 9 a.m. local time in order for them to be available to show on TV. Do we ever hear this from commentators? No. Are the commentators ever honest enough to say, "Well, we've dragged Southwestern Eastern Oregon here to Charlotte to get slaughtered by North Carolina in front of a North Carolina crowd and have made it harder for them by scheduling this game at 9 a.m. three time zones away from their homes?" No. What they say is, "This unusual starting time may be difficult for the players to adjust to, but at least it's the same for both teams." The PGA this year ended Monday morning because CBS and the PGA decided not to move up the Sunday tee times in order to maximize TV ratings and then got caught with their pants down when there were two weather delays. Did we hear from the CBS crew that this problem was mainly CBS's fault? Ha, ha, ha.

Don't get me wrong. I love TV sports. I also love the fact that damn near every game is on now, where, when I was a kid, there was basically one baseball game dependably on every week (NBC's Game of The Week on Saturday at about noon). It just drives me nuts, though, that we have to hear about all of the competitive issues that TV coverage causes without anyone ever fessing up that TV caused them. If they aren't bad enough to make TV stop causing them, then just stop bugging us about them.