BY JOSH ABEL

In print | October 2, 2008

Yankees fans may think that they’re disappointed with the 2008 season. After watching their team reach the postseason every year since 1995, they saw the Yanks fall behind early in 2008 and finish six games out of the Wild Card and eight out of the AL East’s top slot. But it’s the FOX network that’s truly shedding tears this October. October baseball in the Bronx is such an easy story to promote: Show some daunting images of Yankee Stadium, pay homage to Ruth, DiMaggio and Mantle and replay a few Derek Jeter playoff highlights. People will watch – not only the Yankees’ loyal fan base, but also casual sports viewers, because they’ve been taught that Yankees = baseball. And Red Sox vs. Yankees? Too easy. FOX doesn’t even have to dig deep into the archive for video of Aaron Boone’s pennant-winner, David Ortiz’ heroics and Pedro Martinez’ assault of the old, bald and spherical Don Zimmer to garner interest. These were great moments. They were a lot of fun to watch and definitely did the sport good. The 2003 and 2004 American League Championships Series between the Yankees and Red Sox were phenomenally dramatic fights between two deep, balanced teams.

But there will be no Yanks-Sox this October, because there will be no Yankees at all. And so now FOX and ESPN and all the flapping heads are reeling. In the wake of those great ALCSs, these media outlets commenced to turn Major League Baseball, and the playoffs in particular, into Yanks-Sox. They relegated the rest of the sport to second billing. In some sense, it’s understandable because it’s just so easy. As long as they put Red Sox vs. Yankees front and center, they can just recycle all the old storylines from a few years ago, and all of that rehashed hype will bring viewers. So Yanks-Sox always gets national billing on FOX Saturday Baseball and ESPN Sunday Night Baseball. Series after series we are told of the tremendous magnitude of the matchup. With this AL East rivalry so prominent, the rest of the sport and its other great stories are underexposed. That’s what’s so beautiful about the Tampa Bay Rays. The team that blew up this readymade AL East storyline and won the division has been the definition of an afterthought. Certainly, they’ve earned their spot on the back page of the sports section with too many losing seasons. But all along, they’ve been stockpiling #1 draft picks and it was very clear that some sort of explosion would soon be coming from Tampa Bay. This story was unable to break through Yankees and Red Sox, however, and received very little preseason play.

This is excusable, because the Rays had not yet earned top billing on the field – they were all potential. What’s inexcusable is that as the Rays embarked on their 97-win season and took control of the division, the shoddy coverage persisted. Over the course of the season, ESPN Sunday Night Baseball, which picks the game it will show only a few weeks in advance, did not once elect to show the Rays. And as the Rays put the finishing touches on their worst-to-first 2008 season and clinched the highly competitive AL East, the baseball world’s focus turned to the sendoff to Yankee Stadium, hyping up the last few weeks of games there. (The Yankees are moving across the street into an almost exact replica of the soon-to-demolished venue – it’s not like they’re leaving New York.) The story of the Rays, who were winning the division with a payroll 1/5 that of the Yankees and less than 1/3 that of the Red Sox, still could not take center stage.

It’s as if it were predetermined that the Yankee Stadium sendoff would be the new thread of the 2008 season in general and Yanks-Sox in particular. But when the Rays arrived and created a real story, “analysts” on Baseball Tonight and SportsCenter could not turn the ship around to cover it because they had spent years reducing the game down to the two traditional powerhouses. The Red Sox vs. Yankees rivalry was something very special at its peak and continues to be a great subplot to a Major League season. But all these mainstream sports outlets were so overcome by the excitement of those series and the enthusiasm they generated that they have tried make that subplot the centerpiece of MLB in the years since. They spent so much time and hype convincing people that Yanks-Sox was the truly interesting story in baseball that they were handcuffed when the Rays emerged.

Coverage of a team they had never talked about or hyped up would not hold viewers’ attention. So the Rays remained off the front page, though they took over first place. FOX and ESPN, by grabbing after the immediate viewers and pandering to the craze over the one great rivalry, hurt themselves in the long run by flattening the sport to this one dimension, so that coverage of other compelling stories can no longer sell like the top-notch sports stories they truly are. There may be a great series between AL East rivals this October, but not the ones we were told to care about, so viewer interest will suffer.

Josh is a sophomore. He can be reached at jabel1@swarthmore.edu

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