Major League Baseball held its Futures Game on Saturday, pitting the top prospects in the American League against the top prospects in the National League. The Futures Game makes you excited for the future in a way that other events can’t; even if you’re a Reds fan, or a Royals fan, or a Cubs fan, watching a couple of your best prospects take the field against the best the rest of the league has to offer can convince you that maybe your guys are on the upswing.
The game brings hope to the downtrodden. It brings light to the darkness of obscure minor league systems. It makes baseball’s future come alive.
Or it would, if anyone could fucking watch it.
This year, not only was the Futures Game on a Saturday, not traditionally a day when you expect people to stay home and watch baseball on TV, and not only was it on at 7PM Eastern, traditionally a time when people who were happy to stay home and watch baseball on TV on a Saturday night would have already been watching different baseball games (such as the national Yankees-Red Sox game airing on Fox, or the regional Giants-Brewers game on Fox, both at the same time), but it was on Peacock, which is at best a massive inconvenience when it comes to actually watching a baseball game, and at worst an impediment that stops you cold.
Boy, was that a run-on sentence. Good thing none of my English teachers remember me or they’d all be having a fit right now!
The purpose of the Futures Game — the literal entire purpose — is to showcase the future of the game to get fans excited about it. You can’t do that if fans don’t watch it. This is elementary school logic. It honestly could not be simpler or more obvious, and Major League Baseball still got it completely wrong.
Now, this isn’t completely surprising. MLB has been overshadowing the Futures Game for years, usually scheduling it on the Sunday before the All-Star Game when there are other games on. But they at least did not have it up against a national game; in fact, it was an easier fix then, since they could just move the Futures Game to be that week’s Sunday Night Baseball game, let ESPN promote the shit out of it, and get tons of eyeballs and tons of hype for free.
Instead, they went the other way: they moved the game to a worse day, with a worse time slot, on a streaming service that’s much, much worse than ESPN. All because I guess they got some money for it?
The other option, by the way, would have been to have the game played yesterday, when none of the major sports have a single thing going on. Yes, the ESPYs happened, but you can schedule the game before that and grab people who tune in early, then replay it right after the ESPYs, and grab people who stick around late.
Instead, the game was on Peacock on Saturday. When no one watched it.
Now, I don’t want to be unfair. I don’t want to just give one side of this issue without considering what the league might have been thinking. Here are some possibilities of reasons they might have put the Futures Game on Peacock on a Saturday at 7PM Eastern against a national game:
“I’m a big dumb idiot and Peacock paid us money to have this game so we gave it to them and then I’m gonna use that money to become richer and who cares if this defeats the purpose of holding the game because I’m getting more money!!!!”
other
Never say I don’t present both sides here.
If only there were some way to pithily sum up just how bad of a decision this was. If only someone who was not only interested in baseball, but perhaps professionally dedicated to it, perhaps a team employee of some kind, had said something about the broadcast. Perhaps if someone like that not-so-subtly implied that this was a terrible decision, something might change?
Eh, probably not.