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The Phillies Playoff Schedule is Very Dumb
Published:
MLB put this out before the Phils clinched on Sunday:
2 p.m. on Tuesday, 2 p.m. on Wednesday, and 2 p.m. on Thursday, if the series goes to three games.
This will never not be stupid, the way that MLB schedules playoff games.
2 p.m. on a weekday? Do they think that fans are sitting at home on their butts with nothing else to do? Are they aware that people work for a living? That baseball fans have spouses and kids and family dinners and afterschool activities and daycare pickups?
I’d love to lobotomize Major League Baseball schedule makers one of these days, not for torture, but to genuinely determine what’s going through their minds. You play 162 regular season games and come all this way, just to schedule playoff games in the middle of the afternoon on a Tuesday and Wednesday. For who? For what? You could very easily just have two games at 7 p.m. and two games at 10 p.m. These games don’t need their own windows because no baseball fan is sitting there from 2 p.m. to 1 a.m. in the first place. Not even the sickest of sickos is doing that.
Playoff baseball is the best baseball, by far. It will never make sense to me that we come this far every season only for MLB to bury their product in a crap time slot on a weekday instead of using prime time windows exclusively.
Here’s Luke on the schedule:
This is now the third time in five years that the Phillies will travel to Atlanta, the NL East winner. The Phillies have taken Game 1 both times. Things will look a little different this time, however. Zack Wheeler will not be able to pitch early in this series. If anything, he’s probably an insurance policy for Game 3, or he could pitch on short rest, due to him having to throw Game 162. We’ll know more about the pitching plan soon. I guess you can’t really call it Red October, because the first two games of the series are in September.
Happy Red September!
Kevin has been writing about Philadelphia sports since 2009. He spent seven years in the CBS 3 sports department and started with the Union during the team's 2010 inaugural season. He went to the academic powerhouses of Boyertown High School and West Virginia University. email - k.kinkead@sportradar.com