The Rangers lost this game to Oakland. It’s now their fifth loss in a row, and are now 4 games behind Oakland for escaping the basement in the AL West. Looks kinda bleak, doesn’t it?
The sad part is that TV didn’t even care. This game wasn’t broadcast in the Metroplex. I don’t understand that. There’s 162 games in the season. If we were one of these teams with crappy TV coverage like the Montreal Expos used to have where only a handful of games were on a season, I’d understand it. But not the Rangers. We either have 162 or close to it every year. I believe this was the only scheduled non TV game of the season. So what’s the deal with this one? Why was this date so special that it didn’t get on TV. We broadcast 161 other games (plus the 2 or 3 from Spring), so why not this last one? Doesn’t make any sense to me to schedule 161 of the 162 games. Someone please explain that to me.
Oh yeah, the game itself. After my post of earlier today, I’m not in the mood to write about game particulars.
The story as I understand it about why there was no TV coverage of this game:
1. The game was originally scheduled to be one of the Fox Saturday afternoon games, so the start time was set accordingly.
2. Fox later decided (a few weeks ago?) not to show the game, preferring to give us Yankees @ Red Sox (for the millionth time, it seems). Probably thought they would get better ratings in whatever markets they originally planned to show the Rangers @ A’s game, save the cost of doing the broadcast, etc.
3. Fox’s contract with MLB gives them exclusive TV rights in that time slot (no other MLB games can be televised during that time, at least not a planned start-end of the game).
4. The A’s could have moved the game time when they were notified by Fox that they wouldn’t televise the game, but the A’s refused to do so. Probably didn’t want to risk inconveniencing the hundreds and hundreds of fans who actually attended the game.
Between the A’s organization and the Orioles organization (remember the double-header a few weeks ago that couldn’t start before 5 PM on a getaway day, the one where the Rangers scored 30 runs in a single game?), the Rangers owe a couple of payback “non-favors”.
Josh Lewin was probably happy about it because I thought I heard him doing the play-by-play of the Yankees @ Red Sox game when I briefly channel-surfed through it. Didn’t listen to the radio broadcast today, but if they had let Tom Grieve take Victor’s place and let Victor play golf the entire day, they would have had 2 or 3 happy broadcasters. Would have made Eric Nadel’s job a bit harder, though (Tom’s not the prototypical play-by-play radio announcer that you would want flying solo for 2-3 innings).
– Mike