I would like to publicly state that anything I do wrong today (and probably tomorrow too) will be blamed on the Turner Broadcasting System.

Last night my home town baseball team, the Boston Red Sox, played a game that started at 8:30pm. Assuming that the average game runs about three hours, in order for me to go to sleep at a decent enough time to get myself at least seven hours of sleep, I would have to stop watching approximately half way through the game.

During the regular season, most East coast teams start their games at either 7:00 or 7:30pm. Both teams in last nights game, and by extension the overwhelming majority of their fans, are on the East coast. Why then was the start time for the game set at 8:30? It’s disgusting enough that the games start so late that no school age child could ever dream of watching the entire game, but no adult who wishes to be productive at work the next day could stay up for the whole thing either.

I’m not even complaining about the four hours the game actually lasted. That isn’t TBS’ fault (although those commercial breaks between innings sure seemed longer than regular season breaks, didn’t they? I should watch with a stop watch next time to see how long they actually are), but it’s also irrelevant. Anyone on the East coast who works a 9-5 job would still be sleep deprived if the game had been three hours long.

It’s all about money though. If they run two games in one day without overlapping them, then they can sell 18 innings worth of ad space instead of having to split 9 innings of ad space between two Turner networks. The actual people who would like to watch the entire game are not even considered in the advertising equation.

I stayed up for the entire game last night. The final out was made at about 12:30am this morning and I can honestly say that as soon as the game ended I was in bed with the lights off, and I was dead asleep before the Red Sox left the field. My alarm clock then went off at 5:00am. TBS could care less.