Saturday, October 01, 2005

Are Pigs Flying? FSN Ohio Does Extra Indians Show

OMW has long complained about penny-pinching local sports TV network Fox Sports Net Ohio. The local operation has no studio, and produces little local programming outside of actual game coverage. And we've heard that they declined to air a recent crucial Indians game for fear of A) getting clobbered by football coverage and B) since they didn't have time to make any money off of it.

But hold onto your hats, ladies and gentlemen. FSN Ohio will air a one-hour Indians special Sunday night at 7 PM - no matter if the Indians squeak into the playoffs or if they go home empty. "Indians 2005: A Look Ahead" will air highlights from the just completed regular season, interviews with players and Tribe GM Mark Shapiro, and a roundtable with various sports journalists. We're told this information appears in the Columbus Dispatch today, but we'll be darned if we can find it online. And since the paper's website charges for non-subscribers, we wouldn't be able to read it anyway.

About that non-aired game a couple of weeks ago - according to the Plain Dealer's Roger Brown, the Sunday afternoon Indians game a week later nabbed an 8.4 rating, airing directly against the Browns/Colts tilt on CBS/WOIO 19. Of course, that game got a rating three times higher than FSN Ohio's baseball telecast, but the Indians/Royals rating was still rather respectable. And we suspect they'd have done much better the week before, when the Browns game with the Packers did not start until 4 PM...

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