Money, the root of all decision making....

My unindicted co-conspirator wants to know why Major League Baseball has scheduled both of today's Championship Series playoff games at the same time.

The answer, as is becoming depressingly common, is that the television people want it this way. FOX Sports, which owns all broadcast rights to the MLB playoffs, thinks it can make more money by ensuring that every game is in prime time, except for Saturday (when nothing else is really going on, sportswise, except for college football. What surprises me is that whatever game is broadcast on the cable-only channel FX will apparently have better ratings in prime time than a regular FOX broadcast during the afternoon hours. FOX is also hedging its bets, because the playoff schedule shows that they're willing to have an afternoon, weekday playoff game if they have to, next week. But today's games are guaranteed to happen (barring rain), whereas Game Six of the ALCS and Game Seven of the NLCS, both scheduled for next Wednesday, are "if necessary" affairs. Presumably, if the ALCS goes to Game Six but the NLCS is already over by next Wednesday, then that game -- currently scheduled for 4:18 pm ET -- would be moved to prime time.

The way TV dominates sports is nothing new, but it can still be an annoying factor. Case in point: I was listening to a Buffalo sports-talk radio show this afternoon, and I learned that the Bills' game against the Washington Redskins, to be played on the 19th (a week from this Sunday) has been moved from 1:00 to 4:15, probably because FOX Sports -- which carries NFL games in which an NFC team visits an AFC team -- thinks it's a better looking matchup now, based on both teams' early success this season. Not that big a deal, really, except that the Bills draw on a very wide area for their ticket holders, and for people coming from more than 100 miles away to attend the game, a sudden shift of game time less than two weeks prior to the event is no small thing.