Batter up
It's about time I got back to this thing. I'd been sidetracked by working on Junior Bird questions, which I'm hoping some people will actually use after a couple of schools had to bail on us for a variety of reasons. Of course now that hurdle is out of the way, it's on to the big stuff for regionals. I guess it'll be more time at the computer being moderately productive. Time to get motivated.

While we're at it, it's time for me to get really excited again about baseball now the playoffs have come around. I'd been mildly interested at best down the stretch, and it didn't help that I've proven to be a real fraud in fantasy baseball finishing dead last in two money leagues and finishing one spot of the money for the third year in a row in another league. I think I just don't have the same attention span I used to have to keep up with this stuff all year long. And honestly, being inundated with baseball stuff all day at work actually makes me less interested in following everything to the exact detail every night when I get home. I may be online all the time, but I just can't dive into box scores with great regularity like I used to. Odd to say that toning down the geek factor is actually detrimental to me.

Back to the real games at hand, everyone can blame the Yankees for everything that's wrong with the game (and the world, see my 9/11 rants that connects all of this together). The one thing they probably had a slight hand in causing is that ridiculous 11 p.m. ET start for the Diamondbacks-Cardinals game. But it had to be because Fox wanted the Yankees in prime time and the other two games scheduled that day were on the West Coast, precluding a 1 p.m. ET start. While all of the games and series this time around all look interesting, it also magnifies an interesting problem of scheduling because all of the games feature a team from the Pacific or Mountain time zone against one from an Eastern or Central one. Thus there will be instances where West Coast viewers will be watching games starting at 10 a.m. and East Coast viewers having to watch the aforementioned 11 p.m. starts. That's just the way it goes, especially with TV, which drives the economics of the game, whether people like it or not.

Speaking of TV coverage, ABC Family is not some low-carriage digital cable channel. Almost as many people get that channel as they do ESPN. Let's stop treating it as such when it comes to them showing Division Series games. They're showing the games because of some arrangements that took place when Fox bought the entire postseason package, and even after ABC bought the Family Channel portion, the baseball went along with it. It does get confusing when they slap the ESPN logos on there, but that's because local affiliates in towns with teams in the playoffs are carrying the games as well (which is a nice touch, in my opinion). And it's funny to see lots of ads for 7th Heaven reruns and some really awful Charlotte Church knockoff. I'll have more baseball rants later -- I will be at the Giants-Braves game tomorrow (as will a good percentage of Turner employees).