California series will be played on New York time

Here we go again.

The World Series is underway, featuring two teams from California, and yet, once more, the scheduling of the entire series is geared to please the Only People Who Really Matter: the East Coast television audience.

Telecasts of every game in the series will start at 5 or 5:30 p.m. in the West -- because that’s 8 or 8:30 p.m. in the East. Prime time on the East Coast, drive time on the West Coast.

That’s the way it’s been ever since baseball shifted its annual showcase event from the daytime (when God and Abner Doubleday meant for baseball to be played) to prime time (where mammon and Madison Avenue decided it would be more profitable).

Never mind that most hometown fans of the Anaheim Angels and San Francisco Giants will either be at work or driving home when the games start. Never mind that California is the largest state in the union and that the teams are based in two of the country’s five largest television markets (Los Angeles is No. 2, San Francisco is No. 5).

Never mind, even, that this year’s World Series is being televised on Fox, itself based in Los Angeles.

None of that matters. What matters -- all that matters -- is that the all-important East Coast audience (and especially the New York audience) be able to see these games at a time convenient to them.

Fox’s stance on the matter

Fox insists this is not the case. (Of course, to get the official Fox explanation, I had to call the sports division’s New York office if I wanted clearance to talk to the president of Fox Sports, who’s here in Los Angeles.) The timing of the series is intended “to maximize the audience nationally,” Fox New York says, just as all the networks try to maximize the audience nationally for all championship sports events. “Not too many people would be available to watch or willing to watch if it started at 8 in Los Angeles -- 10 o’clock in the Midwest and 11 o’clock in the East,” Fox says.

True. And both Fox and major league baseball were justifiably hammered two weeks ago, when the first National League playoff game between the St. Louis Cardinals and Arizona Diamondbacks started at 8:06 p.m. in Phoenix, which was 10:06 in St. Louis.

But if the World Series started at 6:30 in Los Angeles, that would be 7:30 Mountain Time and 8:30 in the Midwest. Fans in three of the four time zones -- and seven of the 10 most populous U.S. cities -- would get the games in prime time.

Not in New York and on the rest of the East Coast, though. They wouldn’t get the games until 9:30, which means fans there would probably have to stay up past midnight to see games through to the end. That’s certainly not ideal. But for a World Series involving two West Coast teams, it seems preferable to -- fairer than -- depriving many West Coast fans of the first several innings of each game.

Unfortunately, in any “Who loses/gets inconvenienced/deprived” battle between East and West, the mind-set is such that even when the decision-makers are in Los Angeles, the winner is always foreordained: New York, New York -- so pretty and nice, they named it twice.

Fox notwithstanding, the people who make most of the important news-media decisions in this country (like those who run major league baseball) live and work in New York. The people who run CBS, NBC and ABC -- not to mention the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Associated Press, Time, Newsweek and virtually every other major national magazine and book publishing company -- are based in New York.

They lunch together and party together and summer together and do business together. They read New York newspapers and listen to New York all-news radio stations and watch New York television stations.

That’s why New York sports teams that win championships are lionized in the national media, and books about them come pouring out faster than you can say George Steinbrenner. That’s why, when Pat Riley was leading the Los Angeles Lakers to all those NBA championships, he was often derided in the New York-based media as a lucky pretty boy, but when he took over the New York Knicks, he suddenly became a coaching genius.

No seeing past the Hudson

The myopia of the New York-based media extends far beyond sports. It helps explain why New York mayors, governors and senators -- Hillary Clinton, Rudy Giuliani, Mario Cuomo, Nelson Rockefeller -- are seen as almost automatic contenders for the White House, while mayors, governors and senators elsewhere are most often seen as, well, mayors, governors and senators.

Although New York is the epicenter of the media myopia, as indeed it is of everything that matters in life, the media echo chamber actually extends north from Washington, D.C., through New York, to Boston, thus encompassing the most powerful people in the country (the politicians who make war, make laws and collect taxes) and the smartest people in the country (those in and around Harvard, MIT and the other campuses in the city that likes to think of itself as “the Athens of America”).

Thus, the sniper in the suburbs of Washington, like New York’s “Son of Sam” before him, has received far more national media attention than such Southern California serial killers as “the Angel of Death,” “the Hillside Strangler or “the Skid Row Slasher.”

But it’s New York itself that dominates the media’s consciousness. Last Tuesday’s New York Times, even in the national edition available in Anaheim and San Francisco, among many other cities, featured a Page 1 story on the New York teams that were not in the World Series.

Indeed, the story lamented the disaster that seems to have befallen all of New York’s professional sports teams -- “the city’s sense of sporting desolation,” as the story put it -- even though one of the teams mentioned (the basketball Knicks) have yet to start their season, two others (hockey’s Rangers and Islanders) have barely started, and two more (football’s Jets and Giants) are less than a third of the way into their season.

Next thing you know, while the Angels and Giants are battling in the World Series, Time will have a cover story, CBS will do an hourlong program and Random House will announce plans for a new book -- all on the failure of the Yankees and Mets to make the World Series and how this is a national tragedy of Shakespearean proportions.

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David Shaw can be reached at david.shaw@latimes.com.