I rant about this every year, and I’m not the only one. At least I don’t think I am. Every baseball season, there are 4,860 baseball games, spread out over about 180 days; on any given day, there are at least ten games on (some travel days only have a couple games, but still).

Depending on the time zone of the game being played, then, it is at least theoretically possible to watch three, maybe four baseball games a day, especially if your first game is a Cubs home game. This does not require much beyond an mlb.tv subscription, no job, and an intense desire to be awash in baseball. MLB feeds this addiction, with mlb.tv and all its related archives – a really, really cool thing if ever there was one.

It is now the postseason, and it’s the “proper” postseason, to boot. The ALCS started yesterday, and the NLCS starts today, with ALCS game two being played as well. MLB, then, is down to four teams, and a maximum of 13 more games for each of those four teams.

You would think, given this finite pool of games, that MLB would schedule the games such that anybody without a natural stake in any of the four teams involved – say, me, for instance – could watch both LCS games without any undue televisual gymnastics. After all, there’s only two games on today – how hard can it be to stagger them?

Apparently it’s really hard. Both games are on tonight at 5pm, with the Tigers on Fox and the Mets on F/X. What genius is behind this decision? If you are an MLB official, you have to be secretly thrilled that the Yankees and Red Sox are out of the playoffs, because you will hopefully draw more neutral/casual fans to the LCS’s and the World Series with “new” teams involved. So you’d think that MLB would schedule the series (serieses?) so that the maximum number of eyeballs could see each game of each series.

Sure, this would mean that one of the games might start early for us West Coasters, but what would be wrong with starting one game at 4pm ET and one at 7pm ET? That way, those of us that want to can TiVo the earlier game while we’re at work, follow it on ESPN, or listen to it, whatever, and then watch the later game as it happens, thus not missing much of the action.

But no – MLB has decided that it’s not important for fans to see both games. They do this every freakin’ year, and it’s really irritating. I’ll be watching the Mets tonight, and checking the A’s score online – this is no way to run a postseason, dammit.

As much as I dislike the Yankees, I most certainly do not wish any sort of physical harm on any of them. Unfortunately, it appears that Cory Lidle perished in a plane crash today, making the whole “will Torre stay or go and what about A-Rod” thing seem a little insignificant. It’s shades of Thurman Munson, really, and it’s too bad.