Sports Media Watch<\/a>, NFL game windows averaged 20.5 million viewers through the first three weeks of the season, up 10% from last year.<\/p>\nThe NFL also knows how to market itself better than any company in existence. On the flip side, Major League Baseball is absolutely horrific at marketing itself.<\/p>\n
So, allow me to help MLB with a marketing issue. The final day of the regular season needs to be pushed to Monday in order to get away from going head-to-head with the NFL.<\/p>\n
Baseball is smart in having every game on the final day of the season begin at 3 p.m, ET. The sport should keep that concept. Move the final day of the regular season to Monday, having every game begin at 4 p.m. ET, leading into\u00a0Monday Night Football, to create a mega sports day.<\/p>\n
The shortsighted take against this change is that people have to work on Mondays.<\/p>\n
First off, it\u2019s much easier to compete with someone\u2019s job than the NFL. Secondly, in this day and age of streaming, everybody can watch games on their phones, computer, tablets, etc. Being at work isn\u2019t the hindrance it once was.<\/p>\n
Get a bunch of games on that Monday on as many national outlets as possible.<\/p>\n
Using this year as a guide, here\u2019s how the final day of the season would look next season if I was in charge of baseball\u2019s TV situation.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Mets vs. Marlins would air on Fox.<\/p>\n
Reds. Vs. Brewers would air on NBC.<\/p>\n
Rays vs. Blue Jays would air on ESPN.<\/p>\n
Orioles vs. Yankees would air on MLB Network.<\/p>\n
Those were the games that had the most on the line this past Sunday. Think about the juice and buzz baseball would\u2019ve had if those four games aired Monday at 4 p.m. with all them being available across the networks, leading into a\u00a0Monday Night Football\u00a0doubleheader.<\/p>\n
Instead, baseball played these games at the worst possible time on Sunday\u2014right in the middle of the NFL day. To make matters worse, the games began during the “Witching Hour,” as Mike Francesa coined the 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. window, when the 1 p.m. games go haywire.<\/p>\n
I can assure you that most people who were watching the ending of Chargers-Giants or Eagles-Bucs weren\u2019t thinking about baseball\u2019s final day of the season at 3 p.m. on Sunday.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Move the finale to late Monday afternoon, leave Tuesday open in case you have to play some tie-breaker games and begin the playoffs on Wednesday. Play the best-of-3 wild card on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Give teams Saturday and Sunday off. Begin the Division Series on Monday. It\u2019s a no-brainer.<\/p>\n
More on Sports Illustrated<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This is not news, but the NFL runs sports, runs the country and runs most of our lives.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":178241,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[435],"tags":[49,48,462,82],"class_list":["post-178240","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-mlb","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178240","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=178240"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178240\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/178241"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=178240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=178240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=178240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}