I enjoyed the 3-game wild card series & am looking forward to the division series. 4 playoff games is a great day of baseball. There are a few things I think MLB and its broadcast partners should change to make the series more fan friendly. Here are my ideas.
1.
Wild Card and Division Series scheduling- On days
there are 4 games, schedule should be in 2 time slots. 4:30pm ET and 8:30pm ET.
The staggered starts they have are confusing. MLB does not need to schedule games at 1pm et
on weekday afternoons. They are also overlapping games. Better solution is to have each league series
start at the same time (i.e., 2 NL games start at 4:30 et, 2 AL games start at
8:30 et). The network partners have 2 outlets (Fox and FS1 for the NL and TBS and
TNT for the NL). They can use both outlets for the games. This should be the
case for both the wild card round and division series round. This scheduling
would be much better, and it can give fans something of a March Madness feel.
Baseball has a lot of time to kill in its broadcasts and gives a chance to go
between games. Also, live look ins on the other game will be great for the networks
during dead time.
2.
Announcers. The networks pay millions to
broadcast the games and there is no escaping it. Fans can complain all they
want, but the games will be on networks that will use their announcers. This is
challenging because no other sport connects the local announcers with fans like
baseball. However, something the networks can do is to bring in one announcer
from each team from the game they are broadcasting. So, for example, on the
Braves-Phillies series, Fox has Joe Davis and John Smoltz doing the game. For
the first 5 innings, they would have the Braves announcer join them for the broadcast,
and for the last 4 innings, the Phillies announcer joins them. They alternate
which innings for each game. No other sport connects with the local fans like
baseball. To have a connection with the team in the postseason would be greatly
beneficial for the broadcast. This practice should go from the beginning of the
post season through the World Series.
