The 2008 Rangers TV schedule has been released. No huge surprises about it, although I have a few things to say.
It appears that more of the games are being shown on Fox Sports Southwest than before. The schedule shows 110 of them there. 48 are on “free TV” on KDFI-27, and two are on Fox 4 (home opener & July 13th). That totals 160 games. Up until a couple of years ago it was pretty much guaranteed there’d be 162 games televised. The last few years it seems it’s 160. Does anyone know (for real) why there are two that aren’t? Is this a tradeoff for the two we get televised during spring training? It seems with all the money (there’s that word again) going around baseball and TV, they’d do all of them. You would THINK they’d jump at the chance to sell more commercial time. I don’t understand that.
Anyway, the other two could be broadcast, as this schedule doesn’t list any national games. There’s always a few games that get rescheduled for ESPN Game of the Week, or Fox Saturday afternoon baseball or something like that. So this probably isn’t set in stone. Also, there’s no HD schedule yet. It doesn’t affect me personally, as I haven’t been able to afford to buy one of those yet – hopefully soon.
Another interesting thing is this new “FSN Plus” channel, which will be showing the 50 “free TV” games on an alternate cable channel. Read this from the press release about the schedule:
FSN Southwest will distribute the 50 over-the-air games broadcast in Dallas Fort Worth in the team’s outer markets on FSN Plus, a second channel available to participating cable systems. Games on FSN Southwest will be shown in Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana and parts of New Mexico and on FSN Plus affiliates in markets where there are programming conflicts.
I have DirecTV here, and see them all anyway, but I’m a little unclear as to the purpose of this. If I subscribe to a system that has access to “FSN Plus”, I’d be able to get the free TV broadcasts anyway. While I don’t think this is bad, it just is a bit of an eyebrow raiser – I don’t get it. Can someone who does please explain it to me?
The Rangers site has a press release about the schedule, as well as a downloadable PDF TV schedule of each game and which channel it is scheduled to be on.
I’ve started updating my 2008 schedule with this. I haven’t posted it yet, because I’m doing something new in 2008, and it’s incredibly tedious to set up – it takes me about an hour or so to do one month. But it will pay off as the season gets started. I hope to be finished some time early this coming week with that.
“I have DirecTV here, and see them all anyway, but I’m a little unclear as to the purpose of this. If I subscribe to a system that has access to “FSN Plus”, I’d be able to get the free TV broadcasts anyway. While I don’t think this is bad, it just is a bit of an eyebrow raiser – I don’t get it. Can someone who does please explain it to me?”
In DFW, you will see no difference for the Rangers. FSNSW, my27, and FOX4 will continue to air games. Displaced Astros games will air on FSN+.
Outside of DFW, all my27/FOX4 games will air on FSN+ while areas that prefer the Astros/FSN Houston will get the displaced FSNSW Rangers games on FSN+.
It seems like FSN Southwest is making a plan to deliver all 160 Rangers game to the entire Rangers/Astros territory.
FSN Florida has something similar with the 150-game Marlins TV package. The Marlins normally air on FSN Florida, but if the Rays are on FSN at the same time, then the Marlins are shown on sister-network Sun Sports. The Rays have their own over-the-air television network based out of WXPX-TV in Tampa, so FSN doesn’t distribute those games statewide.
If you live in West Texas like I do, the games on KDFI are purchased as a package deal by the cable company, and therefore we can watch every Ranger game in the season, including those on KDFI on a local community broadcast channel. This is probably FSN’s way of earning a little cash by purchasing extended rights.
I now live in Lubbck and i can only get about half of the Rangers telivised games here. We get the ones scheduled on FSN Southwest/ cable ch.20 but those on my 27 we don’t get. Last year we got them on my lubbock tv/cable6 or on cable 9. Both cahannels are owned and ran by the local Fox network channel 34/cable 10. I guess they don’t want to air any of the Rangers games unless maybe they haven’t been approached about having them aired. Please help all of us diehard Rangers fans out if you can and see if something can be done here for more televised games. Shoot we don’t even get half the radio covered games either cause there is no so called Home of the Rangers Radio station here. We need one like 1080 in the metroplex. KFYO 790am might be a good possibility if someone could check into it. Thanks for listening to our Cries from Lubbock. GO RANGERS!
Phil Hogan