Phil Sheridan: Baseball scheduling is hurting the sport

DENVER - Our good friends up in Canada have one thing over the men who preside over Major League Baseball and its television schedule.

They know the difference between hockey and baseball season.

"We play about 12 games up there a year," Phillies pinch-hitter Matt Stairs said of his days as a high school baseball player in New Brunswick. "And that's in the middle of the summer. By the time it snows, we're two months into hockey season."

Stairs and his pals, like most of us, are talking about sports. MLB and TBS and Fox are talking about programming. No sane person could defend playing Game 3 here tonight at 7:37 Mountain Time in baseball terms. But when it comes to selling programming to the highest bidder, MLB and pretty much every other sports entity are prepared to play their games at 3 a.m. on Christmas Day at the bottom of the ocean - as long as the check clears.

This is an old argument, but one still worth making. The Phillies, the defending champions, played two games in the middle of the work and school day. Now they are scheduled to play one with temperatures in the 30s and a wind chill some 10 degrees below that.

"That's too uncomfortable for the people in the stands," Stairs said. Most of those people bought their tickets before they knew the game's start time.

And just in case you thought all of that was ridiculous, MLB and its television partner announced that Game 4 would be played here even later on Sunday. It will start after 10 p.m. Eastern, which means you get to choose between watching the most important game of a season you've been following since April or getting a decent night's sleep on a work night.

Let's hope the region's surgeons aren't baseball fans.

Worse still, as Phillies fans discovered during Game 5 of the World Series last year, the powers that be often are so determined to get games in, they lose the ability to think rationally. The Phillies and Rays played too long through absurd and miserable conditions before that game finally was postponed by commissioner Bud Selig.

There was plenty of outcry about that game at the time. Here we are a year later, about to walk into the same kind of mess.

The commissioner is the easy and popular target here, but the owners who employ him bear equal responsibility. They agree to the TV contracts and accept the revenue, even if it means compromising the integrity of the game in their stewardship.

It really is that serious an issue. Teams don't travel to Wisconsin and Montana for spring training, after all. They go to Florida and Arizona, so players can prepare for the season in the conditions the game is meant to be played in. And if there are some rough nights early in the season, especially in the Northeast in early April, there is plenty of time for makeup dates.

These are the most important games of the year. Some of them will be played in Philadelphia and Boston and New York and Denver - that's unavoidable. MLB can't control the weather. But a schedule that keeps pushing the games later - in the evenings and now into early November - is a different issue. MLB can control that.

Unfortunately, MLB does control it. This is what we get: day games on weekdays in Philadelphia and night games when it will be as many as 20 degrees colder than the afternoon in Denver.

"Every year, the postseason gets pushed back more and more," Phillies reliever Brad Lidge said. "This year, they said it was because of the World Baseball Classic. Next year, it's like the same schedule. Sooner or later here, they're going to have to move everything down to Florida or something like that. I think they need to be careful how far back they push things."

Baseball is simply a different game in cold weather and precipitation.

"If it's a day where . . . it's not conducive for either team to be playing baseball," Rockies manager Jim Tracy said, "it's going to jeopardize our fans from the standpoint of being treated to the type of baseball that has been played thus far in the first games of the series in Philadelphia."

Not to mention the 162 regular-season games that got these teams to the playoffs.

If reason were a factor, Game 3 would be played this afternoon, to maximize the chances for acceptable weather. Game 4 would have a similar start time. But the only reasoning is the competition from college football today and the NFL tomorrow.

Baseball knows it will lose against football in the ratings. Somehow, MLB doesn't seem to grasp that its popularity eroded precisely because it does things like start playoff games at 10 p.m. on a Sunday.

In hockey weather.