In defense of World Series games reguarly finishing around midnight on the East Coast

New York Magazine

"Look: I’m tired, you’re tired, we’re all tired," says Will Leitch. "These games are regularly going past midnight — only two of the five have finished the same day they started so far — and it’s certainly keeping everyone who stays up until the last out groggy the next morning (on the East Coast, anyway). My 9-year-old baseball-obsessed son hasn’t gotten to watch a whole game yet, and he’s plenty irritated at me about it. This also makes him like every 9-year-old baseball-obsessed kid over the last 50 years. As pointed out by baseball writer Joe Sheehan in his newsletter, nearly every World Series game since 1971 has ended between 11 p.m. ET and midnight … and yet baseball has somehow survived. Complaints about the lateness of have been around just as long. One reason they’re so ever-present? Many of the loudest voices, in the media and in the larger populace, live in the Eastern Time Zone. If you live in California—and, you know, a lot of people do, as it turns out — the games are done in time for a late dinner. The World Series has been starting at 8 p.m. ET (or later) for as long as most of us watching it have been alive. The only difference now is that we can hear people grousing about it more. Sure, I’d love afternoon World Series games too. But they’ve been televising these things for seven decades now. If it made sense to play the games at 3 p.m., it would have happened by now. And then I’m sure we’d all complain about not being able to get off work in time to watch."