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Baseball Primer Newsblog— The Best News Links from the Baseball Newsstand
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
For those looking for the game (well…I guess it’s time to load in another disturbing Man with a Camera eppy)...
The 2012 Major League Baseball season kicks off in Japan Wednesday morning with the Seattle Mariners taking on the Oakland Athletics. Yet, for some inexplicable reason MLB has decided not to broadcast either of the two games on ESPN or on MLB Network. Mariners fans are in luck as Root Sports will be broadcasting the games live while MLB TV will air both games on a three hour tape delay. As for the A’s local station Comcast Sportsnet Bay Area, the game isn’t going to be shown live or tape delayed.
A’s fans aren’t happy with that decision by Comcast not to show the game. David Koppett the Senior Executive Producer/Live Events for Comcast wrote in response to A’s fans dissatisfaction in regards to not being able to watch the game. He responded with “we did give this a great deal of thought, and there were extensive discussions about it with the A’s and MLB. For contractual reasons (and, honestly, financial and logistical reasons too,) adding these two games would have required trading them for two others on our 144-game regular season schedule. Given that the games will be played at 2 am and 3 am PDT, and that Sharks and Kings conflicts would prevent us from re-airing them in prime time when most viewers could watch, we couldn’t justify losing two games played at friendlier times of day later in the season.
MLB Network will be airing the games at 6 am on Wednesday and Thursday, so you will have an opportunity to see them.
...MLB clearly struck out by not broadcasting the game live and there’s no justifiable excuse for why it is not.
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MLB.tv definitely has the games live.
I get the Ichiro thing, but why not send Texas or Anaheim along with them?
Usually going for third is the right play, but in this case it looks like he gave them an opportunity for an out on an infield single.
I hadn't heard that story. I like it.
And Sogard grounds weakly to second before i can finish typing a sentence.
If I were on the A's I'd be pretty annoyed at basically playing 83 road games this year.
And wow, I don't think I've seen BABIP listed on a TV stats package before.
Er, no. EI starts on the "real" Opening Day, April 5th.
adding these two games would have required trading them for two others on our 144-game regular season schedule
Why?
My mistake. Just another reason that MLB.tv is the superior product.
Carp should have been able to play that without running into the wall, I thought. Looked like he misread it.
And I know how people love reading about other people's fantasy teams.
And you're both wrong about Reddick.
No reason for MLBNetwork not to be showing this game, that's insane.
The Mariners broadcast is strikingly stat-progressive. The announcers do a nice job of not making it a big deal.
Baseball!!
I'm rooting for this one to go 18 innings.
Nice play by Sogard. Allen looked awkward as hell though.
Great play by Ryan!
Japanese fans buy MLB merchandise, watch tons of MLB games, why not play two games in Japan if you can?
edit: Now I'm not, even though I was up until 20 minutes ago. Weird. At least I get to see the end.
...in the 12th inning, obviously.
And I could see Cespedes matching or outperforming Ackley. then the Ms have complete zeroes offensively in Figgins, Ryan, and Saunders.
101 Cespedes
97 Smith
92 Crisp
91 Suzuki
88 Weeks
85 Allen
84 Pennington
84 Reddick
82 Sogard
vs
111 Ackley
110 Montero
102 Carp
95 Smoak
87 Ichiro
77 Saunders
77 Figgins
76 Olivo
75 Ryan
American sports leagues playing games abroad is only going to happen more often, not less, and I think people should embrace it. Instead too many Americans are childish about it. It's not your sport and anybody who would rather not see baseball grow in different countries needs to get a clue.
I'm very much looking forward to baseball in Holland in 2014. The Dutch love baseball and it would be a great boost to the sport in Europe, which is very much MLB's next frontier.
They're both bad, but I think it's at least a close call.
That said, I miss having baseball with my breakfast.
Ichiro with four hits and my fantasy closer finishes it off.
Now, MLB Network has no excuse. They've put the game on a delay, which is better than nothing. However, in place of the live game, they showed a replay of an exhibition game. Surely if someone were going to get up at 3am to watch that, they'd get up to watch a real game. If I'm MLB Network, I block off 4 hours - show the game live and then starting 4 hours later, throughout the day. Or at least until it's aired at a reasonable hour for each US timezone.
I have no clue why they wouldn't do this.
MLB.TV picture was pretty much TV quality for me. However, I was unable to actually access the video for the first 8 innings of the game, and once I finally did, I had to switch from IExplorer to Firefox in order to be able to access full screen view. Those things may just be the result of me being computer illiterate though.
The biggest problem with Australia is the lack of a quality stadium. The stadium where the 2000 Olympic baseball competition was held isn't big enough, though it is now being redeveloped to seat 25,000. That would make it a strong candidate to host some future games, though I think it would be behind Korea and Taiwan in Australasian pecking order. But the reason it's being redeveloped is to host the Australian Football League's new western Sydney team, which means you'd have to send them on a big road trip to ensure a good playing surface for baseball as their season has just started.
In other words, it's more complicated than other Asian venues or Holland.
I can think of a couple million reasons, colored green, that games overseas makes sense.
To be fair, that's true of pretty much any Seattle-Oakland game this season.
I kid!
I suppose you mean you don't see any benefit to you to holding these games in Japan. There is the point Flynn makes and also the international promotion of the game, which I think would be something everyone can get behind. The more cultures that get hooked on baseball the more great players we get to watch. Win-win!
There was a rumor that the Red Sox were trying to line something up in Australia for 2012 that obviously never got anywhere. I don't know enough about the stadiums over there but how big would it have to be? I'd rather see a game in front of 15 or 20,000 sold out seats than 35,000 people in a 60,000 seat stadium. Of course, MLB would probably disagree.
And I'm with Flynn. A couple games a year to start the season is hardly some horrible hardship and has the potential to generate a whole bunch of money. Plus, it's fun to wake up and watch baseball.
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