Baseballhead:
I'm Ready for My Closeup, Mr. Selig

Michael Cox

Here we are again, ready to begin that festival of pixels called Baseballhead, where we believe in the power of tiny classified ads.

Those of you wringing your hands over the impending no-holds-barred battle between Major League Baseball and ESPN can stand down. Just nanoseconds prior to the beginning of jury selection, an accord has been reached that will keep baseball on ESPN.

Of course, humongous great piles of cash were involved.

And also of course, football is just as entrenched on Sunday nights as it has been for the past two seasons, only now with the full go-ahead of Bud Selig.

Don't let this fool you into thinking it's a bad deal for MLB, however. To compensate for the loss of Sundays during the pennant drive, the boys in Bristol will roll out Friday Night Baseball. While it means that family harmony will be strained in the home teams' cities by an 8 pm start time, and that no East Coast games will be featured, it's a third night of games on ESPN each week until September, and the fifth on basic cable when you add the FX and Fox Sports Net games.

The gist is that MLB gets more cash ($133M per year for the next six years, as opposed to $39M per for three) and more exposure. In return, ESPN gets desperately needed programming -- and how desperately they need it. With cable networks all around stealing summer sports like NASCAR and tennis, there were three choices:

• Repeat X-Games highlights constantly, as MTV does with The Real World;
• Start up a new wrestling federation;
• Toss some serious dough at MLB.

And while the first two options are admittedly much cheaper, they don't exactly bring the big-league prestige that ESPN has tried to cultivate. Also, I hear Peter Gammons begged.

In any case, there is really one loser in all this: Fox, whose regular-season Game of the Week loses a little more cachet now that you can choose to watch either your own home team or a nationally-televised game on a daily basis. In fact, this may spell the end of the "big deal" Game of the Week, as it is expected that the next network TV contract will be for playoff games only, like the one NBC currently has.

Eventually, as the Division Series ratings decline, the networks will cover only the Championship Series, and then only the World Series. Ratings patterns will be used to determine an exact single World Series game to bid on, and finally, one day CBS will proudly present a much-ballyhooed hour-long special consisting of the best three innings of the pivotal game, narrated by James Earl Jones and featuring songs by Celine Dion.

ESPN2 will carry every other playoff game.

Ironically, the networks will still pay MLB $5 billion a year for the privilege, until its ratings decrease below those of the WNBA.

Item: The talk of DH Rafael Palmeiro's surprise Golden Glove win still won't die down, mostly courtesy of Palmeiro himself.

When asked whether he was proud of his award, which he won despite appearing in only 28 games all year, he said in effect, "hell, yeah." In fact, he said, "The way I look at it, maybe they think I set a standard at the position that they feel no one else came up to this year."

And doesn't he feel guilty that although he sat on the bench during 80% of his team's defensive innings, he received the game's top defensive award? "I know there have been some years when I thought I should have won and didn't. Maybe this kind of evens it out."

Now there's a man with either his tongue so deep in his cheek that surgeons can't find it, or with a Gold Glove incentive bonus in his contract.

Any guesses which?

Item: Finally, the former major league umpires' union will soon appeal the vote that dissolved their leadership and supported the formation of a new leadership. According to the National Labor Relations Board, the only acceptable grounds for appeal would be fraud or misconduct relating to the balloting.

There has not yet been any information on just what the appeal will consist of, but don't be surprised if there isn't some sort of clause in the umps' agreement which states that any union head must be in possession of a prostate the size of a pomegranate.

about the author

Rumor has it Michael Cox is up for a Golden Mouse, despite using a trackball nearly exclusively since early 1998. Instead of bursting his bubble, offer hope of a "Golden Michael" award to mc@strikethree.com.