Note: The following is about 90% sarcasm.
Everything is coming up Blue Jays! Troy Tulowitzki! David Price! Jose Bautista, Edwin Encarnacion and Josh Donaldson! Look out, Yankees, because here comes MLB’s lone Canadian team (RIP Expos)! The Rogers Centre hasn’t been hopping this much since it was Skydome.
Well, with the exception of that one WBC game.
Anyway, as good as it is looking for the Boys Up North, there is one major hurdle that they will have to pass through. It’s not the Yankees. It’s not the various other Wild Card competitors. No, it’s something far more insidious.
It’s…The Anti-Toronto Conspiracy.
What is the Anti-Toronto Conspiracy? Let me explain.
It was my final year of college, and one of my final projects was wide-open, it just had to have something to do with media or journalism or something. I decided to look at whether it was really true that ESPN overdid the big East Coast teams like the Yankees and Red Sox. I compiled a listing of the most appearances by teams on Sunday Night Baseball (the lone ESPN baseball game that is on with absolutely zero competition from other games or from local broadcasts of the game) from 2007-2011.
What I found was basically that the Blue Jays, despite having a fairly good record over that timespan (about 15th out of the 30 teams), did not appear on Sunday Night Baseball even once.
The reason?
Because they are in Canada.
That means most of their fans that would be tuning in are in Canada.
And guess what? Nielsen Ratings don’t include Canada. And guess what? All those ads and viewership that FOX and TBS pay MLB for the rights to the postseason for are heavily based on Nielsen Ratings.
The Nielsen Ratings that don’t cover Canada. Sure, there could be five million people in Canada watching a hypothetical Blue Jays World Series this October, but for the purposes of the Advertising-Broadcasting-Industrial Complex, those five million people don’t exist.
So, what am I getting at here?
What I’m getting at is that it is not in the best interests of the money men of baseball and especially its broadcasting partners to have the Blue Jays make the playoffs. It’d be a disaster. Ratings would be down- the two World Series that the Blue Jays were in were the lowest-rated of the pre-Internet era. The “IS BASEBALL DYING?” hivemind, not caring for the context and the fact that those games would probably be the most watched baseball games in Canadian history, would be out in full force. The odds of an international incident embarrassing baseball in some way would be much higher.
And that, my friends, is why you can expect to see an Anti-Toronto conspiracy. Maybe it’ll come soon. Maybe it won’t be until late in the season or during a Wild Card game or the Division Series. But it’s coming. There will be a blown call here, an unusual ejection there, or an unusual case of fan interference that cannot be overturned due to some unforeseen loophole in the replay rules.
So prepare yourself now, Blue Jays fans. Because money talks, and your money doesn’t matter to FOX or TBS.
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LINKS!
Paul Blest on the 2001 Indians comeback game against the Mariners
Rick Paulas on Bat-Doctoring in slow-pitch Softball, because nothing is sacred
Brian Costa and Geoff Foster would like to note that there’s barely any fighting in baseball fights
Behind the Scenes of Dave Dombrowski’s firing, by Lynn Henning
On former Hiroshima Carp player Kaz Yamamoto and what the team meant to Hiroshima in the years after the atomic bombing
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