For better or worse, NFL RedZone has revolutionized the way many sports fans consume game broadcasts. 670 The Score afternoon host Matt Spiegel believes that might have been in mind as MLB made some rule changes.
MLB will offer MLB.tv subscribers a service called MLB Big Inning, which will mimic NFL RedZone. A host will take viewers from game to game, highlighting the closest games from 9:00-11:30 PM ET Monday through Saturday and 3:00-5:30 PM ET on Sundays.
Spiegel argued that Major League Baseball’s new rules will make game lengths more universal, thus creating more games available to be shown on the service.
“The ghost runner ruler, which I dig. I’m a proponent of. One of the reasons I like it is it’s forced, immediate, reliable strategy…immediately, the game is in jeopardy,” Spiegel said. “Right away, if you see that there’s a close game in the ninth inning, you want to tune in, and if it’s in the 10th or 11th, you know that there’s a ghost runner and there’s action immediately. You’re not just sitting around waiting.
“And now, we get the rule change component building it. If the pitch clock is not just cutting 32 minutes off the game length and giving you the shortest game lengths in spring training, so far, since 1985… it’s also making it uniform. Unless something really weird happens, the game is between two hours and twenty minutes and two hours and fifty minutes, pretty reliably. So if you’ve got a bunch of games starting at the same time, you might have — as a realistic viewing option — MLB Big Inning with multiple games in the eighth inning, ninth inning, and extras all at the same time…that could become more of an option for people.”
Spiegel concluded having six or seven games each night in the final stages of the contest shown on MLB Big Inning “could be advantageous for the sport and marketing your players nationally”.
