If you're a Brewers, Twins, Dbacks, or Astros fan, things probably seem a little dire at the moment. You're losing. You're homeless. You're looking back at all of the missteps of the past five months and are constructing a now-lost reality in which you've already clinched something as opposed to having let it almost slip away entirely. At times like these, it helps to have something to rally around. If I'm you, I rally around the notion that outside of your own front offices, nobody in baseball who wears a suit and tie to work every day wants you to win.
Why? Because it occurs to me that things are shaping up for Fox and TBS to have a nearly perfect postseason from their point of view.
If you put a gun to my head and made me guess what's going to happen between now and the end of the season, I'd say we're going to end up with a playoff slate of the Rays, Red Sox, White Sox, Angels, Mets, Phillies, Cubs, and Dodgers. In order, the nation's top four media markets are New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Philadelphia, which house six of the eight putative playoff teams. Boston is seventh, but Red Sox Nation is obviously not contained solely in Boston. I'd guess The Nation roughly translates to a New York or, at the very least, an L.A. or Chicago sized "market."
That leaves Tampa/St. Pete, the nation's 13th largest media market, as the pipsqueak among the home markets of the playoff teams. Of course, you have to give a bump in Rays-appeal as well, given that they are a rags-to-riches story that will no doubt draw interest outside of their immediate home market (not to mention providing Fox with a ready-made storyline with which we will be bludgeoned until the Rays' are eliminated).
I'm not a big fan of teams playing the "nobody believes in us" card, but I'm OK with the "nobody wants us to win" card. If you're in Milwaukee, Phoenix, Houston, or Minneapolis/St. Paul right now, that may be all you have.
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You're even more correct than you think, Shyster. Most of the other mega-markets in the US - Houston, Dallas, Atlanta - would rather watch a college football postgame show than playoff baseball. As a native Texan who now lives in Georgia, I'm not proud of that ... but it is what it is, and I'm sure that the honchos at MLB are aware of it. Luckily for them, NYC, Boston, Chicago, Philly, and LA are both big and baseball-lovin'.
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