Once again, I implore MLB to treat playoff games like the primetime events they are

On October 8, Jose Ramirez—perennial All-Star and MVP vote-getter who will probably warrant consideration on the Hall of Fame ballot when he retires—smacked a two-run home run in the Wild Card series for the Cleveland Guardians against the Tampa Bay Rays. It was the difference maker in a 2-1 win that put the Guardians in the driver’s seat to win the series, and one of those great moments that makes postseason baseball its own animal.

There was, of course, one not-so-tiny problem: that moment, and the game, were buried. Yes, it was carried nationally. But October 7 was a Friday, and the game began at noon. Cleveland couldn’t even sell out the building and didn’t even get to 90% capacity. There are other factors at play for why they weren’t able to sell the stadium out, sure, but a league scheduling weekday playoff games is simply laughable.

Everyone who has ever turned on a TV in the middle of the day knows that there is a huge gap in the quality of offerings. Daytime TV is where weird stuff goes, where reruns go, where cheesy soap operas keep trucking along. In Primetime, viewership skyrockets and the quality and popularity of shows do, too.

This is for very good reason: way more people can watch primetime television. That’s because most people work during the week—the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that more than four out of five employed individuals worked on weekdays while only one out of three worked on weekends. Additionally, the American Community Survey found that three out of four individuals worked a daytime shift with a start time between 6 a.m. and 10 a.m.

What does this mean? It means that if you want the most people available to view your game on TV or to go to a game, it means that you schedule your games either on evenings or on weekends. This is not rocket science!

By the time the 2020 pandemic hit, MLB was pulling in over $10 billion in yearly revenue. Its playoff games were hot commodities. In recent years, for instance, most ALCS and NLCS games average between 4 and 6 million viewers with total series viewership pulling anywhere from 20 to 30 million total viewers. That’s a lot of eyeballs even though many of those games are during random weekday time slots! People like playoff baseball!

Frustratingly, MLB is the only sports league that does this. Its other main competitors in the professional sports landscape don’t do so; MLB is alone in airing its most impactful games in the worst timeslots imaginable.

I suspect that MLB’s prime reason for putting games during the day is so that games do not overlap with one another. The NFL spreads its playoff games across Saturday and Sunday so that they don’t overlap with each other. But baseball is not football, and ultimately their more direct sports competitors—the NBA and NHL, who both use similar multi-game playoff series formats to MLB—are perfectly fine with airing multiple playoff games during the same time, as you can see.

MLB could fix this at any point in time, as it’s not like the players or the MLBPA are much affected by when the game is played. But that would imply that Robert Manfred and the league has the best interests of the game in mind, something that this past year’s needlessly tumultuous labor negotiations suggest that does not seem to be the case. So buckle up for more random day playoff games, I guess. Playoff baseball is great; I just wish that the league would realize that sooner rather than later.