Rare whiff by ESPN ombud

She has been terrific, but her East Coast bias column missed the point.
She makes a couple of good points about ratings and the network's cult of personalities, but she misses the main issue: Bristol, Conn., is exactly halfway between Boston and New York, two hours away from each. Clearly, ESPN is the "home" network for the Mets, Red Sox and Yankees, and even if "Baseball Tonight" is not forced to focus on those teams, as Karl Ravech says, it does.
And that does not even begin to address ESPN.com, whose home page will link to stories about even minor injuries for Red Sox utility players and middle relievers but ignores much bigger stories from teams outside of the Northwest, even winning teams.
Here is her column link:
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/columns/story?columnist=schreiber_leanne&id=3534299

 

She's been a little better than Solomon, who as I recall spent most of his very infrequent columns justifying and rationalizing everything the WWL did, but I've never seen even the slightest bit of evidence she has any authority to actually do anything about anything.

 

This morning, I saw on the ticker ESPN had updates of "Yankee Pitchers in the Minor Leagues Sunday", then showed what Phil Hughes and Carl Pavano did in their starts Sunday. I don't remember ever seeing a Francisco Liriano in Rochester watch on the ticker, and honestly, he is more relevant to his team than Hughes, who has like 5 starts in the bigs ever, or Pavano, who last pitched in like 2005.

 

No to nitpick, but if she had authority she wouldn't be independent, and therefore wouldn't be a reliable ombudsman.

 

Huh?

 

Until this, she's been dead-nuts-on, virtually every time out.

It's a shame it's in the network's best fiscal interests to largely ignore her findings.

And so it goes.

 

She's obviously never lived on the Left Coast because that column is so wrong. To ESPN, the rest of the baseball world outside of Boston and New York does not exist, and in college football the Pac-10 and, to a far lesser extent, the Mountain West might as well be in Afghanistan for all the coverage they gets on the highlight shows, probably because ESPN isn't the Pac-10's primary network.

 

Hey, if the Yankees and Red Sox and Mets and Cubs get the best ratings, great. But what I despise is that, when the World Series rolls around and the Rockies or Astros or White Sox or Angels are playing, we have to hear from the TV folks how bad the ratings are.

Hey, TV: You chose to keep these teams off the air so that casual viewers would not find out about them. October is payback.

 

ABC is though, and ESPN does now have it's own Pac-10 schedule, which includes USC at Oregon State, Oregon at USC, UCLA at Arizona State and one of Arizona State-Arizona or Cal-Washington.

 

That's really been an underreported story, hasn't it? The Pac-10's Fox deal basically made the conference second-tier in terms of covverage and promotion.

 

East coast gets favorable coverage because of deadlines, and also because nearly half the country lives in the east and if combine that with central, that's 4 out of every 5 Americans.

Eastern ... 47.0
Central ... 32.9
Mountain . 5.4
Pacific ... 14.1
Alaska and Hawaii combine for .6 percent of the population.

With that in mind, why wouldn't a network focus on things in east and central?

 

Well, if the west coast didn't start it's games at 10 p.m. Really. sportscenter goes o the air at 11 p.m. This is all deadline driven. An East Coast game is in every paper in the country.