Suck It Baseball

Swing and a miss

Last week before the vice presidential debate my good friend lifetime Eagles fan, season ticket holder and Curly R reader/lurker Wilbert Montgomery started pinging me with instant messages about playoffs and how awsum it was that Philadelphia was in the hunt for a championship, we join the conversation in the middle of a discussion about veep debate drinking games:

Wilbert Montgomery: Drink everytime Wilbert Montgomery says "yall mind if we switch to the Philadelphia game?"
Me: the Eagles are playing tonight too?
WM: the Phils
the playoffs
baseball
Me: Baseball? Playoffs in October? No comprende
Playoffs are in January
WM: you would if the Nats were in
Me: barely, and likley in the form of a post on CR about how I care more about the quality of my toilet paper than the quality of my baseball team


And so it went. Now the validation is in: playoff baseball cannot even put a dent into the TV ratings for week five regular season football.

Phillies vs. Brewers, NLDS game 4, Phillies lead two games to one, Sunday 1pm, scheduled directly and absurdly against both the Green Bay Packers game against the Atlanta Falcons and the Philadelphia Eagles game against the Washington Redskins.

Milwaukee market baseball TV: 12.7 rating
Milwaukee market football TV: 28.7 rating

Philadelphia market baseball TV: 13.2 rating
Philadelphia market football TV: 22.7 rating

Mind you there were 80 thousand Eagles fans not eligible to watch the Phillies game on TV, they were with me at Eagles Stadium.

There are a couple of other good examples in Richard Sandomir's piece and there are some mitigating factors, such as baseball foolishly being broadcast only on cable channel TBS while football is available over the air. The point though remains valid, baseball is football's bitch. I wonder if that was going through the minds of Philadelphians as they pelted the Redskins buses with eggs after the Eagles' loss to Washington on Sunday.


Thanks for the memories baseball, now get in the back of the bus.



Pat Burrell of the Philadelphia Phillies striking out from here via here.