If you’ve been watching the Fox Sports Southwest telecasts of the Rangers games this year, you might have noticed, with some frustration, that they’ve missed the opening pitches of not one, but two games--and not just any games, but Opening Day and Yu Darvish’s very highly anticipated MLB debut.
Well, it appears that they will do all they can to remedy the situation moving forward.
As Barry Horn of the Dallas Morning News explains, the reason for the missteps was that, as the first pitches were being thrown, the network was in the middle of a commercial break from which they couldn’t cut away.
And so a format change for the telecasts has been ordered. No longer will there be breaks at the start of games during which FSSW cedes control of the telecast to cable operators.
FSSW will script the open of games more carefully. And should a game start unexpectedly it will have the capability to kill whatever commercial is playing and return immediately to the game.
It’s nice to see the network address the issue, despite the fact that the ratings didn’t seem to reflect the gaffe at all, at least on Monday; Yu’s MLB debut drew record ratings, and beat out Dancing With The Stars in DFW Ratings.
