Before MLB allowed TV money to become the tail that wagged its dog, one of life’s great simple pleasures was weekend baseball.
And before TV executives decided that we prefer our baseball telecasts smothered in verbal and visual detritus — as if we demanded to know the titles and speeds of the past nine pitches and be given three seconds to read them — the stress of watching weekend baseball was limited to tie games two outs, two on in the eighth.
This past weekend began with an invitation from MLB to get lost then stay there.
Despite “Bottom Line” Bud Selig’s bogus claim that “Interleague baseball is a gift to our fans,” Friday’s Yanks-Mets, starring the two teams from the nation’s No. 1 TV market, was sold exclusively to the streaming network Apple TV+, thus it belonged to a crew that specializes in dreadful off-point additives and other forms of ill-advised distractions.
